RED Build 15 Flesh Tone Latitude Test (under tungsten light)

In my quest to figure out just how much overexposure latitude I can get out of a RED under tungsten light, I decided to do a test with a flesh tone reference and a RED with build 15 loaded. It turned out to be almost a completely different camera.

Previously I was only able to see two stops of overexposure latitude on a Kodak 18% gray card under tungsten light. That was using build 14. This build seems to yield 3 stops of latitude before clipping flesh tone, which already has more red in it than a gray card. Also, instead of the red channel clipping and causing highlights to turn cyan until the other channels clipped, I see no indication of that at all now. The clipped highlight is very clean and holds color a lot longer than I expected.

On top of that, the DRX highlight recovery tool in Red Alert now seems to cause more problems than it solves. When I used DRX on these clips they turned green, the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to do—which is to take red channel clips that have turned cyan and use the other two unclipped color channels to rebuild detail in the clipped channel, while using the white balance meta data to blend all of that into a neutral highlight.

I don’t know what they did to keep the highlights so clean, but I’d be willing to take this camera into a real world situation now. The only thing that bugs me is that the red channel, which used to be the cleanest color channel by far, now seems very noisy. Maybe that’s a side effect of whatever was done to clean up the highlights.

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