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 p.523 #4 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
Thanks Joe! One thing I like about the M9 (coming from Canon) is that the files in LR are often pretty close to how I would like them (other than WB), whether it's with Leica, Zeiss or CV lenses. Some files though, I do tweak a lot, such as the last tree set, simply because it was an extremely high contrast composition and wanted to bring it back more to how I felt it should look. As I've admitted previously, my sharpening approach is not sophisticated, primarily because I'm trying to avoid any work in PS, if at all possible. In LR I leave sharpening at the default 25/1/25 without any additional export sharpening. For the most part I find this is good for full-rez files, just to regain a bit of edge. For the web images I post here, I size them with Photo Mechanic because it's an app I already knew well and was comfortable with prior to LR. Unfortunately with it, sharpening is only on or off, there is not control over intensity. It's fine for many images, if a bit on the crispy side, at times. But for high detail scenes, such as tree branches and foliage, it can be too much, usually with the wider lenses such as 28 or 21mm. For the last tree set, sharpening was off for the 28 Cron and 21 Lux images, but on for the 50 Lux. I find images shot wide open, at least with the Luxes, tend to take that app's sharpening pretty well, because they're kind of creamy sharp to being with, rather than razor sharp. Not sure this helps any...
Very nice set from Japan, as always. Love the depth and the dark figures in the first two. The light from the vending machines has a nice, enticing glow to it.
Edward - I'd suggest running some wide open focus tests at farther distances, such as 3, 5, 10 metres as well as infinity, to see how it goes. My experience with my ZM50 Planar was that close focus accuracy was excellent, but slowly degraded the farther the subject was. At infinity the lens only focuses to about 100-200 metres and needs to be stopped down past f/4 for good sharpness. It could be I have a mis-calibrated copy, but some have stated this is due to the slightly different flange distance used by Zeiss compared to Leica.
Regarding DNGs, my understanding is that the compressed DNGs are lossy compressed, and possibly even 8 bit with a bit of added info to them (as strange as this sounds, it's what I recall Leica stating). I think it was explained in one of Michael Reichmann's (very long) interview videos with Leica back when the M9 was released. In any case, I've read a few posts about this, I think in the Leica forum, and the general consensus seems to be that you'd be hard pressed to see a difference between the two. In any case, I opted to stick with uncompressed, with the thinking of 'why discard image information?' I believe with the new M, the compressed DNG is finally losslessly compressed, so will likely switch to that.
May I introduce my aunt's barn...
M9 & 28 Cron
I stop by for a visit at least once a year (it's a 10 hour drive from home). And each visit, I spend a fair amount of time shooting it over and over, day after day. Interestingly, even though the compositions eventually are fairly similar, the lighting often is not, or the season. And every once in a while I find a new angle I hadn't previously photographed. In any case, it will be the subject of upcoming images, primarily detail shots, as I'm fascinated by its slow decay. Based on the partially legible cornerstone, it was built in the late 1890s...
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I totally agree with you, the Monochrom is seductive.. and wait till you look at the files side by side with the M9, it will be hard to resist 
