Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 review – White balance and colour
Auto white balance on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 has a tendency to carry a slight cool blue cast under cloudy or dim light, but adjusting for the conditions definitely helped the camera produce more accurate results. There is not much in the way of white balance presets compared to some other cameras we have reviewed recently. Panasonic is keeping it simple with just five options, colour temperature and four custom settings. It is also possible to bracket the white balance using three exposures in the blue/amber or magenta/green axes.
For the most part, I like the colours produced by this camera, but in the standard colour setting they lacked a little punch and were perhaps too faithful to what we see in the real world. It is straightforward to add some saturation to give the images a little more of a kick, so this is not a big issue, and those who appreciate the more natural/faithful look will be pleased with the GH4’s colours without needing to make adjustments.
Creative control, which is accessible through the camera’s exposure-mode dial, provides a good range of filter modes to add some effects to your images, such as retro, low key, sepia, dynamic monochrome, toy effect and one-point colour. Some of these creative filters are available in movie-record mode. All these effects can be tweaked to preference and work well, although I prefer to make these kinds of adjustments in dedicated editing software once I have got the images out of the camera.
