A great deal of effort has been expended on the search for perfect colour from the D30. It is, of course, a fruitless search - the camera (digital or otherwise) has not been invented that can match the enormous colour range that exists in the real world. For me, and many others, Pekka Saarinen's LinearSharpen method has produced consistently good results. However, I have noticed that reds don't always "come out quite right". Up till now, I either let this ride or made a quick adjustment with the Hue/Saturation tool and left it at that, but I was prompted to take a further look when Jack Zucker e-mailed with a query about "blown reds" using LinearSharpen. He sent this example: Magenta Overload Examples

This is a reduced-size crop of the rose. Jack wasn't happy with the reds in the marked area, which he thought were blown compared to a non-linear conversion or Fred Miranda's Linear Pro (shown on the right). I could see immediately what he meant. I'd seen this before in my own images, but never to quite this extent. This rose was, obviously, just the right shade of colour to trigger this effect. At first glance, it looks like the blown reds, or "magenta overload" , as I christened this effect, is losing detail as well, However, converting the images to gray scale revealed that the detail was the same in both cases (with minor variations due to sharpening differences). So I decided to see, if I could come up with a solution.

Now, here comes my usual caveat. I don't have any colour calibration equipment other than Adobe Gamma and my eyes, so the customary pinch of salt, etc., etc.

I contemplated (briefly) making changes to the multiple channel mixer commands that are the heart of the LS method, but anyone who's looked at the internal workings of LinearSharpen and remembers the history of the different versions that Pekka produced will not be surprised that I quickly gave up that idea. I looked at the Hue/Saturation tool, but although it was very easy to make specific corrections, I couldn't see how it would fit neatly into a linear workflow. That just left the Channel Mixer command. After some adroit use of the eye-dropper and sliding of sliders, I came up with the following settings: