abhijeeth Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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I realized I haven't addressed the main topic, so here goes. Sorry I am joining the discussion somewhat late!
With Zeiss lenses, I've found that for me, it is a matter of taking the image from 80%/90% to 100% and consequently I don't need to spend that much time tweaking the files. I find that if I do my part correctly, then the lenses give you a very high baseline when it comes to colors and sharpness.
Whatever gets done is almost always done in LR3 and usually takes a few minutes per image.
1. I first select a camera profile I like for that image. Usually I switch between Camera Standard
or Adobe Standard profile or tweak them a bit.
2. I crop to taste, creating a virtual copies for different crops if I need to compare them together.
I love pano crops, 2:1 to 3:1 in particular and find the 21mm focal length and its FOV lends itself particularly well for this.
3. Adjusting WB. I just eyeball this and adjust to taste or my memory of the scene - whichever is stronger!
4. Gentle split toning of Shadows & Highlights, if the image needs it. [ I don't go more than 5%
saturation level in the sliders for this]
5. HSL work. If the camera profile is not a great fit to the image, then this gets some work. I use the camera
profile as the coarse control knob and the HSL sliders as a finer control knob
6. Curves: Most of the time, the adjustment I'll usually do here is dial down the "darks" by 5 points or so.
Personal preference really. I really like some punch in the 1/4 to 1/2 tones. Mostly, I leave the lowest quarter tones alone, unless I am printing.
On my 100/2 CY, except for portraits, I do this almost all the time because I am so used to (& love) the slightly contrastier rendering of the ZEs. With the 21, I rarely need to do this. Plenty of contrast to begin with. With the 50ZE, a few times yes.
If needed, sometimes I'll ease up on the highlights either in "curves" or in the highlight recovery slider. Here the situation is somewhat different . With the 50ZE, I rarely need to adjust the highlights [probably just a coincidence so far with the shots I've taken]. With the 21, I've observed that I need to be really careful.
7. Export (resize, sharpen, convert to sRGB, add copyright tags) & upload.
8. Color Gamut: On some images, coming down from ProPhoto or MelissaRGB down to sRGB is more painful than usual, in that case I'll have to play with the sRGB version to make it a tad better.
Other stuff:
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Clarity: I agree with Luka & others that copious amounts of "clarity" that works well with Canon lenses will not produce good results with Zeiss glass.
Vibrance: sometimes, a click of Vibrance [to borrow from Carsten's choice of words] helps. But I never need as much as I need with some EF glass.
Saturation: The palette from ZE glass has already some healthy levels of saturation, so I usually don't play with
this on a global scale, instead preferring to address this in the HSL section to tones that need it.
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