At the river • Fuji S5 pro @ ISO100, 1 sec., 70-300mm VR Nikkor @ 112mm, f/16, Hoya Polarizer & ND8 filter
Today I tried the new Hoya ND8 filter that I bought to get long exposure times even when there's a lot of light - together with the polarizer & stopping down to f/16 I was able to get an exposure time of 1 second for the above shot, blurring the water enough to give the feeling of motion (IMHO) - and it was a sunny afternoon... good!
Well, a problem was that the beginning snowmelt washed a lot of mud into the Salzach river, turning its usual nice light green into light brown... well, mud colour. :-) But thats unavoidable.
The other problem was the ND8 filter: it disturbs the colour rendition. I already noticed this phenomenon with my old Cokin filters (and blamed the Cokin plastic filter material because the filters already do look a little bit brown instead of neutral gray), but now it happened with the Hoya filter too now, so I dug a little bit deeper.
Turns out it may be a Fuji sensor related problem: according to a german forum post (from a very knowledgeable person regarding the filters that are used in front of the actual sensors), the Fuji S5 pro does not have as much a strong cyan colored filter as other cameras, thus it lets through more red which the camera normally counters with white balance. And indeed, the auto white balance from the camera differs by 1000K (!) from a shot with the ND8 filter to a shot without the ND8 filter.
Thanks to the camera calibration control in Lightroom I was able to counter this problem quite easily: by shifting the red hue into orange +12 while at the same time reducing the red saturation by -19, and with the shadow tint set to -2 plus a little bit warming with the white balance control the colours are almost the same as from the shot that was taken without the ND8 filter (in the above photo, I have to say now that I overdid the warming a little bit). I then saved the calibration adjustment as a preset and hey presto, I can fix it with two mouseclicks in the future.
Maybe this helps some fellow S5 pro & Lightroom user out there. :-)
You're not the only one. I noticed color shift in my Nikon D40 images when using a hoya ND8 filter too! And I also feel that the contrast was also less.
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