p.18 #1 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
With and without correction for purple/green shifts.
The difference is very slight.
How important this is is a very personal matter as anything in making images.
Both images are at base SPP Standard with my custom tone-curve / color adjustments in Lightroom as posted earlier.
Herb
p.18 #4 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
Last weekend I did a short comparison between my Leica M9 and my new DP2M. You will find the complete test report and a description of the test conditions in my blog on wild-places.com
p.18 #8 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
Bobu wrote:
What would you suggest to "tune for naturalness" (on the first image, not the crops)?
Saturation, contrast, some colors, ....?
Boris
Hello Boris,
Thanks for posting the images of your review here. Your blog post was very informative and very well written.
As regarding the DP2M images I am in the learning process as well.
Regarding sharpening I settled for -1.2 in SPP. Then in Lightroom I sharpen 5 to 10 - 0,5 - 25 - 50.
And for web posting I do no further sharpening which is important I have noticed.
This gives me the most natural rendition of very fine detail right to infinity and still showing advantage over Bayer sensors.
I also try to get the colors I like. That means as natural as possible with a slight boost across the complete spectrum. During the last days I posted here some Lightroom presets for SPP tiffs that have a Standard color setting.
If you have any question I am glad to share to get these Merill's to provide optimized files.
p.18 #10 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
Bobu wrote:
Last weekend I did a short comparison between my Leica M9 and my new DP2M. You will find the complete test report and a description of the test conditions in my blog on wild-places.com
This is the first time I have ever seen "Best Aperture" determined scientifically rather than visually. Ingenious.
p.18 #13 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
Hulyss Bowman wrote:
mmmm, you bring out some more question, Herb. I should look at this problem in the sky, as you say. I seen that the neutral mode "wrong" a bit the WB. Do you try custom WB when shooting outside ?? It should help.
Hulyss, all shots seen here have been white balanced and exposed for the fourth grey patch from the left.
This is 50% grey.
I do not custom WB for landscape as this is almost useless in practice. Therefore I never shoot jpg. I do my WB behind the computer on the raw file.
p.18 #16 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
corposant wrote:
This is the first time I have ever seen "Best Aperture" determined scientifically rather than visually. Ingenious.
I also use that as indication for detail when I do infinity sharpness test but the problem for M9 is I am not sure I am in best focus with particular lens as there is no LV. My 50lux calibrated well after service, but I still found it past infinity.
So, Babu, how is your 50lux and M9 setting, were you able to focus bracket to confirm focus?
As for corner sharpness of M9, I am very curious to know that is it from lens itself or FF sensor corner issue due to angle of ray. I believe if you shoot them in raw and apply smart sharpening, the M9 will looks better at least will benefit more from sharpening as Sigma is really pretty good as is, very impressive!
p.18 #18 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
Mescalamba wrote:
NR from SPP tends to do this. Also responsible for greens looking like brown mush sometimes.
DP2M in theory is near perfect, in practice some better RAW developer would be nice..
That look is due to the pretty severe default sharpening when set to 0 in SPP imo. Even though he tested a few different techniques, he ended up going with this for the comparison according to his blog:
"For the following comparsions I’ve used the following settings for my DP2M images: SPP sharpness=0 and LR sharpness=10/0.7/100 and for my Leica M9 images: LR sharpness=50/0.7/100."
-2 is off and 0 is way overboard and will show that strange lithographic type effect, particularly when combined with even further sharpening as in this case. I'm really not sure why he went with such an extreme over-sharpening routine but it definitely results in an unnatural look. I have been using -1 in SPP which is already pretty strong and requires no additional sharpening. I'm sure I will end up using less than that even with files that I plan to do further PP on.
p.18 #19 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
One can think of SPP as being a free copy of Topaz Adjust or Lucis Art lol
Between the very high micro contrast, sharpening and X3 fill light, you can easily over do it and get that very synthetic, illustrated hyper reality look those software are known for.
p.18 #20 · Sigma DP2 Merrill: Have any of you tried it?
Tariq Gibran wrote:
That look is due to the pretty severe default sharpening when set to 0 in SPP imo. Even though he tested a few different techniques, he ended up going with this for the comparison according to his blog:
"For the following comparsions I’ve used the following settings for my DP2M images: SPP sharpness=0 and LR sharpness=10/0.7/100 and for my Leica M9 images: LR sharpness=50/0.7/100."
-2 is off and 0 is way overboard and will show that strange lithographic type effect, particularly when combined with even further sharpening as in this case. I'm really not sure why he went with such an extreme over-sharpening routine but it definitely results in an unnatural look. I have been using -1 in SPP which is already pretty strong and requires no additional sharpening. I'm sure I will end up using less than that even with files that I plan to do further PP on. ...Show more →
Tariq, please do the comparison with the settings I suggested:
1. SPP=0, LR LR=10/0.7/100
vs.
2. SPP=-2, LR=25/0.7/100
Do you really see a big difference between these two alternatives?
I agree, that the 100% crops can look a bit strange with these settings, but the whole image looks good and not oversharped in my opinion.
