False colour from Kr

I have just acquired a Pentax Kr and, to give it a "trial run" I used a DS card that had been used in a Panasonic FZ45 camera, which gave acceptable results. I thought I'd compare the two cameras using the same SD card. The Panasonic produced the shots I'd taken but there was nothing from the Pentax, even though the pictures reviewed briefly on the LCD screen following shutter release. I figured the card might need formatting, so I followed the instructions in the User Guide which clears the card of all other images, and then tried again to take an outside shot in bright sunlight. I nserted the SD card into my computer card reader and the images appeared onscreen. Very briefly they appeared excellent but, after about half a second or less the picture darkened somewhat and the colours distorted. What had been red brickwork suddenly became blue brickwork, whereas a blue car became a brown car. There were thumbnails of the pics at the the bottom of the computer slide show, and the colouring looked normal, so I guessing my computer is reading what's on the card wrongly. It's nothing I've come up against before, does anyone have any suggestions please.

Hi Old76,

What format is the k-r saving the pictures in?

Kind regards
Charlotte

Sounds very like the issues I had with PEF files and Picasso.
The viewer in this instance was not interpreting the RAW data in the PEF correctly. The initial image is the embedded JPG. I worked around the problem by using a different viewer(IrfanView).

It sound very similar to when I used the GX20 with Paint Shop Pro. What software are you using?

I use Picasa also and I freaked when I saw this......I thought there was something wrong with my camera. Did some research and read that Picasa is just slow getting the RAW data from newer cameras interpreted and plan to have the K-r PEF updated soon.

I also used the same workaround with Irfanview. However, I took it a step further. I did some minor editing on the RAW image in Irfanview, then saved the file as a highest quality JPEG. Because I prefer the editing tools in Picasa, from there I opened the saved JPEG file in Picasa and processed to my likening. Worked perfectly with no apparent IQ degradation.

Shoot in the highest quality JPEG or use DNG RAW files, and that should help.

Don't forget that cards should be formatted in the camwera they are to be used in.

Photoshop Elements is the program I would recommend to process your images.

G'day Roland - if you like shooting RAW (and it appears you do), then move to the DNG format.

In my K-x manual, it's at Chapter 6 - 'Setting the file format', so yours may be somewhere nearby...

Thanks, everyone for your comments and advice. I'm fairly new to this digital photography lark, and this was the first time I had ever used RAW, which I only tried because camera reviews suggest it captures all the information of the photographed image. I obviously have quite a lot to learn.