What is color science and why is it so important to your camera?

It’s one of the most important aspects of your camera – yet it’s the one most shrouded in mystery. So what exactly is color science and why exactly does it matter?

The most straightforward answer is also the most pertinent: it is the way that your camera sees, interprets and renders color. In many ways, it is akin to the film stock on which your camera shoots, dictating the way it understands and reproduces hues and tones.

Which means, unless you’re a black-and-white photographer, it might be the single most important aspect of your camera (although color science also extends to the monochrome palette).

Accurate color is easy to take for granted, but inaccurate color is an agonizing thing to live with. It’s the reason why Sony cameras, for all their technical wizardry, are often criticized for the way they handle colors – particularly when it comes to skintones.

What is often charitably called “color grading” is in many cases color fixing or color rescuing – but there’s only so much you can do to recover bad color science. The key is to invest wisely in good color science from the start.

Okay, so what is good color science?

There are many brands that possess good color science, but many would agree that the gold standard is set by Hasselblad cameras. And when you look at the technical side, it’s easy to see why.

If colors are the ingredients of color science, then Hasselblad’s 100MP medium format image sensors – used in cameras like the new Hasselblad X2D II 100C – are the organic, raw food, GMO-free, créme de la créme of ingredients. While known for their greater resolution, this might be the least interesting of their party tricks.

These sensors capture over 281 trillion colors – that’s 281 thousand billion. That creates the richest possible tapestry of tonality, and the most accurate and authentic hues imaginable. There is no guesstimation or in-betweening or close-enough here; the 16-bit color depth that is recorded and rendered is second to none.

Of course, ingredients are only part of the equation. So if colors are the raw ingredients, then Hasselblad’s Natural Color Solution is the gourmet chef that creates Michelin-Star results with them.

A true Color Solution

A camera’s color science is more than just what the image sensor sees or the palette that’s available to it; it’s what it chooses to do and prioritize with those (literally) hundreds of trillions of variables.

Back to our kitchen analogy – presented with a countertop of eggs, butter, flour and milk – any chef can make pancakes, but the one who makes a soufflé will be the one who stands out. And Hasselblad Natural Color Solution (HNCS) is the recipe for that soufflé.

Rather than narrowband solutions from other brands, many of which require users to choose and define their own presets, HNCS is a universal profile that maximizes the 16-bit color depth and 15+ stops of dynamic range of the 100MP image sensors to capture true-to-life color and tonality that matches that of the human eye.

Other systems’ color calibration is often compromised with oversaturation and contrast, but that is only half the story. The traditional solution for color accuracy is to apply color profiles based on the subject being photographed – but of course, this relies on presuppositions about the subject and its surroundings, from skintone and setting to tone and time of day.

Each profile must sacrifice the fidelity of some colors to achieve accuracy in others. Which is why applying a profile for portraiture, for example, so often produces poor results. It’s important to note that this is not exclusive to digital imaging; dating all the way back to the advent of color film, and Kodak’s notorious Shirley Cards, authentic skintone rendition (particularly of non-caucasian skin) has always been an issue.

Forget film simulations

More than just a color profile, Hasselblad Natural Color Solution is a universal color management system. Developed and refined by the company’s engineers for 25 years, rather than offering profile-dependent color, it delivers true-to-life colors by default.

A large part of this process is down to the relationship between light, tone and contrast. This is why the 15 stops of dynamic range and base sensitivity of ISO64 in Hasselblad sensors – which has been improved to 15.30 stops and ISO50 in the X2D II 100C – are such crucial parts of the equation. Every Hasselblad camera is carefully calibrated at the pixel level for consistent high-standard light-sensing.

Because the human eye naturally enhances existing detail and contrast, it is important not just to replicate strict color values – or, as other systems do, to crudely boost saturation and contrast. Here is where the true magic (or should that be science) of HNSC comes into play: to replicate the perception of the eye by optimizing the subtleties of tonal transition.

This is married with an independently developed lookup table, Hasselblad Film Curve, to provide adaptive color processing that is malleable to any illumination. This integrative process painstakingly transforms color data and remaps the values not only for true-to-life color, but also for tone and contrast that create shape, dimension and form.

The X2D II 100C actually takes this a step further with the introduction of HNSC HDR – a high dynamic range improvement of Hasselblad's Natural Color Solution, revealing even more details with natural tones. Where traditional HDR simply brightens the shadows and compresses the highlights, which effectively dulls image contrast by reducing the tonal qualities, Hasselblad's HNSC HDR actually extends the color gamut to P3.

This is the industry standard for HDR, supported by modern displays and smartphone screens, offering dramatically wider color and tonality than sRGB – covering around 26% more of the visible spectrum. Complementing this, Hasselblad's new imaging system boosts brightness by 75% over older models to 1,400 nits – revealing the full capability and nuance of the sensor, preventing the loss of nuanced highlight detail.

A workflow that works with you

While the result is a consistent, film-like image quality straight out of camera, Hasselblad’s color science also takes post-production needs into consideration. Where this is an afterthought for most other brands, where editing is more akin to taking a bulldozer to the intractable color suppositions of picture profiles, here it is a harmonious process factored in at the point of capture.

Hasselblad’s image processing software, Phocus, processes the camera’s 3FR RAW files in a workspace with minimal data loss. It also offers an even wider gamut for ultra-high-end requirements, such as archival work for museums and reproduction houses, in the form of the Hasselblad L*RGB color space. Not only does this make it possible to work with challenging lighting and saturation, it also offers a color calibration too to achieve optimal precision.

So, what is color science? For most systems, it’s either a suite of profiles or a one-size-fits-all preset. For Hasselblad, it’s the culmination of a quarter-century of research into adaptive color behavior and reproducing the human eye’s perception of tonality.

And why does color science matter? Because you shouldn’t have to fix what your camera sees. Post production should be a luxury – not a necessity. And for the highest standard of work, where accuracy and authenticity truly counts, there’s one system above all that you can count on. .

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