White balance and Colour
Those who like to use a camera’s automatic white balance will be pleased to hear that the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 performs very well in this mode. Images taken in bright sunshine look excellent. Shady images look a little green/blue, but switching to the shade white balance setting does a good job, adding a little yellow/orange to the image to counter this.
Similarly, the AWB setting worked well under both fluorescent and tungsten light, producing a fairly neutral result, but leaving just a hint of the colour of the ambient light.
The colours themselves are particularly well rendered straight from the JPEG files produced by the camera, with a pleasing level of saturation and contrast while still looking natural. As you would expect, there is a range of preset colour settings that can be individually adjusted to your personal taste. Of these, I found the dynamic and vivid settings great for producing punchy images that are brilliant for holiday snaps. Greens and blues in particular seem to be darker and more saturated in these modes, making it great for images with lots of green grass and blue sky.
One very useful feature of the colour settings is the multi-film mode. This allows you to take a single image, but have three different film colour styles applied to it, creating three different-looking images. This mode will prove very useful if you like to quickly upload images online or print them. It allows the effects to be previewed in-camera and thereby saves time editing in a different style later.
