Sony · Camera
Sony α7 IV
Colour notes and matched recipes for this body.
- Sensor
- Full frame
- Resolution
- 33 MP
- Crop factor
- 1×
- Base ISO
- 100 / 800
- Mount
- Sony E
- RAW format
- .arw
- Released
- 2021
Editing notes
Sony's colour science changed materially with this generation — skin tones no longer skew as green as the α7 III, and the dual-gain sensor means ISO 800 is genuinely cleaner than ISO 640. Files respond well to warming; the default rendering runs slightly cool.
Looks that suit these files: Golden hour, teal shadows, Portra-ish 400.
The files it writes
The Sony α7 IV records RAW as .arw. Offers uncompressed, lossless compressed and lossy compressed ARW. Lossless compressed is the one to use — meaningfully smaller than uncompressed and bit-for-bit identical on decode.
What a .arw file actually contains — compression, bit depth, embedded previews and which software reads it.
Deconstruct a Sony α7 IV edit
Open a photograph and its .xmp sidecar in the Studio to watch the edit replayed stage by stage — then publish the recipe here, next to the notes above.