Nikon Z5II and Capture One Pro White Balance Values

Ever since I had gotten the Z5II earlier this year, I had realized that when using Capture One Pro to process the Z5II raw files, while the colors look similar to other EXPEED 7 camera files, the default white balance values for the Z5II are quite different from them, including those from Zf, which is said to share to same sensor with the Z5II.

Specifically speaking, the tint slider is usually defaulted to a very negative value (usually -6 or so).

For example, when shooting in Kelvin mode, files from most other cameras usually have the tint at around 0 (usually 0.1), whereas files from the Z5II start at around -6.

While I can understand that the RAW processing algorithm is different between the manufacturer and third party software makers, resulting in different interpretation of the RAW data, this makes it difficult to balance white balance across images shot on different cameras.

An adjustment setting copied from a file shot using a Zf, when applied to a file shot on a Z5II, will result in an overly magenta tint (since the “neutral” white balance for Z5II starts off at a highly negative value whereas the “neutral” white balance for the Zf starts off near 0)

So while the colors of the files, when shot at identical Kelvin settings in camera, look similar when initially opened in Capture One Pro, the RAW processing algorithm of Capture One uses a stronger green tint to calculate the RGB values of the Z5II files.

It seems that LR had an issue with this too, and from what I managed to gather from forum discussions, this was fixed in a later version. However the white balance values of Z5II files are still skewed in Capture One, making synchronization of settings across different cameras difficult at times.

Browsing through the internet I could not find much information on this issue, so I thought that putting this out here might spur more discussion and perhaps investigation into this issue.