Colour difference between Canon and Nikon

Hi - Have a possibly techy question which I hope someone can help with.

Recently I was diving with my Canon 10D. My buddy had a Nikon (D100 I think) and we were shooting close focus wide angle. Both cameras shooting RAW. Same white balance, same aperture and speed. As far as I know same colour settings too (Canon was on Adobe RGB, not sure what Nikon was on). Not exactly the same lens but both around 12mm. Same subjects and backgrounds.

Nikon background blues came out nice rich deep blue, Canon backgrounds came out greenish blue. We tried using flash and natural light, same result. Nikon blue was closer to reality than the Canon greeny blue. I tried all combinations of shutter and aperture, results didn't change. Also it wasn't just the preview screen on the camera because the greenish blue persisted after download to laptop in both RAW and jpeg formats (jpeg converted with Canon digital photo professional and photoshop CS)

Any clue anyone what's going on here? I want my blues blue.

I was judging the Cayman Digital Jam competition last week and the other two judges (Cathy Church and Geri Murphy) were laughing at my geekiness because I was able to tell cameras just from the images on the screen. That deep rich D100 blue is very characteristic. I find the Fuji S2 is usually the overly green one and I find the Canon's generally produce smoother blues than the Nikons, though not as saturated.

Obvisously you can darken blues by speeding up your shutter speed - or choosing a more downward camera angle. And you can inscrease saturation in ACR. I would imagine that either of you could pretty closely match your images to each others - or whatever your taste in ACR.

But as I said first - the cameras definitely do have certain characteristics when not processed out in ACR.

Alex

Here is one of my D100 deep saturated blue shots:

This result doesn't surprise me too much and I'd expect different cameras and lenses to require different white balance settings even when shooting the same scene. With careful adjustment I'd think you could get the results close though.

Would the iso affect this or were they the same also?

Thanks all for the responses, and yes thankyou Alex for the deep blue example shot, just what's eluding me

Sorry what's ACR?

ISO - good point, didn't check that. I'll have to go visit the local swimming pool and try it out.

I tried changing the white balance on the raw in photoshop, didn't give me good results but then I'm a total newbie with photoshop so maybe i have to play a little more. But think I'll muck around with that too in the pool and see what happens.

Failing that prob looks like ACR or photoshop post processing. Bit annoying but compensated a little by the 10D doing a better job at sunbursts than the D100 (also tested side by side)

Will revert when I have more to report.

Thanks again

Hi!

Sorry what's ACR?

Adobe Camera Raw, the RAW converter plug-in that coems with PhotoShop CS (Version 2.4 is now available).

Helge ;-)=)

Oh right, thanks, yes I have that. It's pretty good. I've got this installed along with the canon digital photo profesisonal - read an article about how different raw converters perform, apparently the canon one works best overall for canon cameras, espeically on sunbursts. I think I see that ACR works well but canon software just has the edge on quality for this...