Ricoh GR review – White balance and colour
Image: This image uses the GR’s ND filter so that a long exposure can be made. The vignette, black & white, square crop and 35mm modes were also used
There were no real surprises when using the Ricoh GR in AWB or any of the preset white-balance settings. The camera produces pleasing colours, and set to daylight white balance managed to reproduce the colour of bluebells to a reasonably accurate degree.
There are a variety of colour modes available in the camera, but just two defaults in the standard image settings: vivid and standard. There are two additional custom settings that allow the user to set vividness, contrast and sharpness, and a further option sets the degree of vignetting in an image. No doubt inspired by the craze for vintage-style imagery, a weak, medium or strong vignetting effect can be applied to JPEGs.
Having the in-camera ability to add a vignette to an image is an interesting development; usually, as photographers, we try to remove such edge shading. Thankfully, raw images remain unaffected by any of the colour adjustments, so users can experiment with the in-camera vignetting effects to their heart’s content, knowing that it will be applied only to JPEGs and not the DNG raw files.
As mentioned in Build and handling, a button on the side of the camera allows quick access to nine other image effects, including three different black & white modes, cross process, bleach bypass, retro and high key. Combing these image effects with the vignetting effects, and the option to shoot square images in-camera, means that the GR can produce the sort of creative images we are used to seeing from mobile phone apps like Instagram. The advantage of the Ricoh GR over a camera phone is obvious – this creativity does not come at the expense of image quality.
Perhaps the main difference between using these effects in the Ricoh GR and similar options on other cameras is that the Effects button on the side of the GR makes it very quick to switch between modes, and to see how a single image will look with a different effect applied. Thankfully, the effects are not as garish or as strong as they are in some other cameras.
One thing to note, however, is that when shooting in a crop mode such as 4:3 or 1:1 ratio, the crop is also applied to raw images.
