Re: Zeiss Lens Photos and Discussion (see also ZE/ZF/ZM thread)
Samuli Vahonen wrote:
Wilhelm, if you shoot at infinity stopped down to f/5.6-8, you may find slightly more sharpness from these primes (if 28-85 is as sharp as 35-70). Personally I don\'t care that much about sharpness, if I would have kept happily shooting lifeless images with very sharp Canon\'s (e.g. 70-200/2.8 MkII) or Leica lenses. I find it much more important to have good contrast, specially micro contrast. Sure sharpness is nice for pixel peeping @ 100%, but as long as there is enough sharpness other characteristics of lens will become more important.
Be sure time to learn planars, they are pretty difficult lenses to shoot. Many give up before they understand how to use them.
PS. It\'s you fault I\'m back here the burden of being 150+ pages behind in Z* thread kind of hold me reading FM and then I happened to check this thread, since I was only 20-30 pages behind in this one. Kind of almost lost hope (didn\'t get the inspiration I was hoping for - doesn\'t mean that there was something wrong of pics shown in this thread, just that I didn\'t get the \"right\" spark to fire my inspiration) but then I got to page 77, where you got 28-85 and then carstenw\'s post and I got what I needed. I have seen tens(maybe hundreds) of thousands of flat pictures, which appear just watching photos and completely miss the feeling of being there. Thanks for posting something \"not-flat\". BTW. I also liked the G90 image of lady checking her phone, even the long focal length/long shooting distance makes the feeling of being there more difficult, it still managed to render shape for he body and not just cardboard person standing in middle of DOF on shallow DOF photo.
If you use step sharpening process you need to adjust it for different kind of photos (and lenses and focusing distances etc). I have mainly two scripts I use (and alter), the supersharp version of script adds USM after final resize - that can be used very rarely, and if I use it then I must convert image to some color space, in which the gamma is 1, ANY color space with Gamma above 1.00 will cause halos, like your sharpened after resized version did. If you do your downsizing right there rarely is need for sharpening in final size - most of the sharpening after resize is useless anyway since it can only enhance edges (at web size photos), and the textures etc. small detail lost in downsizing ARE really lost and there is nothing you can do anymore at that point.
Well thank you very much for the compliment Samuli
It would be very interesting to hear what you mean with \"learn planars\" - I assume you mean shooting situations when their characters are beneficial or something like that? Distagon/Biogon/Planar and so forth tells me little - but I know it has to do with lens optical) design.
Having been here for a while now I\'ve seen your name comes up almost everytime best-practice sharpening comes up, so you must be an FM-icon on that . I will surely have a look on what you wrote when doing my next image. Thanks again.
Apr 01, 2012 at 11:44 AM
Previous versions of wfrank's message #10499114 « Zeiss Lens Photos and Discussion »
the burden of being 150+ pages behind in Z* thread kind of hold me reading FM and then I happened to check this thread, since I was only 20-30 pages behind in this one. Kind of almost lost hope (didn\'t get the inspiration I was hoping for - doesn\'t mean that there was something wrong of pics shown in this thread, just that I didn\'t get the \"right\" spark to fire my inspiration) but then I got to page 77, where you got 28-85 and then