Many readers of this blog might recall me complaining about the Panasonic G9. On one hand I love the camera; it’s well build, feels great in the hands and the image quality is excellent. On the other hand, I hate the colours it produces.
I’ve tried all sorts of solutions, but I can never get the colour looking quite right. Even just last week I wrote about using a colour calibration target to create a bespoke camera profile. That solution improved a lot of my RAW files, but I can’t correct the colours in many others I’ve now tested.
It’s difficult to explain the problem unless you see it. Somehow the relationship between the colours is off, as is the level of saturation and luminance. This isn’t something I can correct with a simple tweak of the Temp and Tint sliders or even a bespoke profile.
My latest solution to this problem is to try a different camera. Yes, I’ve bought yet another camera. This time it’s a used Olympus EM5 MKiii. I love the Micro Four Thirds format for landscapes and travel, so I decided to return to Olympus because my old EM5 gave such good results. It’s also half the size of my G9 which is why I picked the EM5 rather than the larger EM1.
Here is one of the shots from Wednesday when I first headed out with the new camera.
This was captured around 30 minutes after sunset and well into the blue hour. It’s a 5 second exposure at f/8.0 and ISO400. I was using the Leica 12-60 lens from the Panasonic G9 at 13mm. I also had a two stop ND graduated filter on the sky, allowing me to expose the foreground properly.
I did the processing in Lightroom using the “Natural” camera profile rendering which made the image look great. I absolutely love the colours that the EM5 MKiii has captured. It has a cool tone but remains looking natural and the heather is glowing.
But that isn’t the end of what I discovered using the new camera. Here’s another image that I shot earlier in the evening.
This was also shot using the EM5 MKiii but this time using the Leica 8-18 lens from the G9, set to 8mm. It a 1/15 second exposure at f/10.0 and ISO200. I also used a 3 stop reverse ND grad on the sky to control the exposure. But there are two things that I want to highlight with this image:
- There’s a sun star on the sun (this is why I stopped down to f/10.0 and not f/7.1). Nothing remarkable about that you might think, but I’ve never been able to produce one using the G9. That’s despite my using the same lens and filters as here.
- There isn’t any lens flare in this shot.
In the past, I’ve been plagued with lens flare, usually a bright orange arc towards the edge of the frame. At various points I thought that I fixed the problem by changing and removing UV filters, only to find that it’s back next time I take the camera out. There’s an example in this blog post from the same time and location last year.
But the big discovery I made on this evening, is that the flare isn’t down to my filters (which I had been blaming) or even my lens. It seems to be my G9 camera. Using the same filter on the same lens with the EM5 I didn’t get any flare. But when I switch to the G9 body with the camera in the same position, it produced flare. This must be something inside the camera body (I don’t know what), and it could also account for the trouble I have been having trying to correct the image colours.
I still have more testing and investigation to do with the EM5 but so far, I’m really enjoying the return to a small camera.
I hope you like the photos and have a great weekend.
The Lightweight Photographer 
Welcome back to the Olympus fold. I bought my first Olympus following my discovery of your channel and have never regretted it, despite your dalliance with other brands, and have stayed with them, using an EM1mkIII now. I downsized from a Canon 5DmkII and love the compact size of both the body and especially the lenses of my EM1 and of the images it produces.
Thank you. I have to admit that using the EM5 MKiii felt like getting back in touch with an old friend. I would still love to get to the bottom of my G9 problems. A friend was using his G9 at the same time and side by side the images looked completely different on his. He even tried his lens, filter and settings with my camera body but it still looked terrible.
I think it must be your camera. I love the color images produced by my G9.
I use DxO Lab to process my raw files and export a dng with lens corrections and noise reduction only to LR. Usually, back in LR AUTO with a few tweaks gets me 90% of the way to a finished image. I finish up color Images in photoshop using Dan Margulis PPW workflow. Takes me about 5 minutes to get most images ready for a print (unless any extensive local adjustments are needed).
It is incredible to me how much color can be pulled out of the files with the MMM+CB action from Dan’s PPW. I always have to dial back the initial results significantly.
Thank you for explaining your process and results. The processes doesn’t sound dissimilar but the results you describe are different to mine. When I go from PhotoLab to the LR Color profile my image looks sickly. If I don’t use PhotoLab and start in LR it still looks washed out and has an odd tint to it. I can improve it with bespoke colour profiles but they don’t always work. It feels very much a lottery.
Love that first shot Robin. Subdued evening light, rich with detail and natural colour without feeling saturated. The kind of image that makes me pause, look and feel transported.
Thanks Steve. I really love the blue hour for photography, especially when the heather is out. It’s the blue and pink and I think the EM5 has done a great job of capturing the colours.
Lovely photos, Robin.
Thank you.
Hi Robin,
These are lovely images…I’m enjoying having a read of your work…it’s been a while since I checked in!! I need to downsize so thought I’d see what camera you were currently recommending. Hope you’re well – say hi to Steve, Cath (co5)
Hi Cath, great to hear from you. It’s been a long time. I hope you are well. You must let me know what you’ve been up to since we last saw each other.
Camera wise, I guess it depends on how small you want to go and what you will use it for. My main camera is currently the Fuji XT5 and before that the XT3 and XT2. The Fuji system is great, but I prefer the Micro 43 cameras for a lot of travel and shooting whilst trekking. The G9 handles great but as I said in the article I’ve struggled with mine. The Olympus EM5 that I’ve just bought seems great but it is early days. I also can’t see it replacing the Fuji XT5.
Hi Robin, If it seems that your G9 body is playing up then it might be worth trying a “hard reset”, if you haven’t already. Rather than just performing a factory reset via the camera menu I would suggest taking out the battery for an extended period (at least 24 hours), then reset the camera and re-flash the firmware with the latest version. I don’t know how long the memory in the G9 is backed up when the battery is removed but a good sign that everything has been cleared is that the date and time need to be set when you put the battery back in.
Of course, this is a complete shot in the dark and may make no impact but it doesn’t cost anything to try it.
Thanks for the suggestion Ian. I have tried removing the camera batter for an extended period so that I had to set it up again but I haven’t combined that with a firmware upgrade. That’s probably my next step along with some more side-by-shooting with a second G9 body.