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[1] Mushyness and noise and just not the creamy goodness that I expect from a good Leica Lens

For one thing, noise has nothing to do with the lens. The background is well outside the depth of field, so what exactly did you expect?

 

3] My question is: Should the background look the way it looks? (Thought that was pretty straight forward:confused:)

If you are asking whether such a result was to be expected, then yes, it was. ISO 160 is somewhat misleading as you have “brought out the shadows a bit” which is equivalent to increasing the effective ISO value.

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Im asking these questions about the background and such but I feel for some reason that I may not have optimum settings in Aperture 3 for the RAW conversion. Can someone tell me what the settings should be and anything else I should put into Aperture 3 to get the optimal results specific to M9? Below is a screen shot of what is the default for the RAW conversion and am not even sure how to set it to an M9 profile, if that is even possible.

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What's horrible to me in this photo are the through-PP-ed plastic, oversaturated, unnatural greens in the back, stemming from some apparent wish to lighten up shadows that are supposed to be shadows. Of course you get noise and mush then. Did you fidget with the RAW fine tuning? Put it back to the default Ap3 values and forget it. And what do you expect noise-wise if you give +1 exposure in PP + shadow lightening up, duhuh

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What's horrible to me in this photo are the through-PP-ed plastic, oversaturated, unnatural greens in the back, stemming from some apparent wish to lighten up shadows that are supposed to be shadows. Of course you get noise and mush then. Did you fidget with the RAW fine tuning? Put it back to the default Ap3 values and forget it. And what do you expect noise-wise if you give +1 exposure in PP + shadow lightening up, duhuh

 

Just so you understand, I was not trying to brighten the shadows in the background, I was trying to do that on the subject but obviously the shadow slider in Aperture 3 adjusts the shadows for the whole image and not just the foreground, duhuh.

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I don't have Aperture, but are you sure those are its defaults (post 22)?

 

I'm not used to seeing sliders pulled all the way to the right, and the sharpening slider looks high as well, considering that in my experience the M8 (and I assume the M9 also) doesn't need much if any sharpening. And were you trying to take care of a moiré problem in this image?

 

 

I think what you're seeing as a cruddy background may be due to settings you've made, rather than what the camera has done. Do you have any other pictures that show the same thing? This looks like a difficult shot to post-process.

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Im asking these questions about the background and such but I feel for some reason that I may not have optimum settings in Aperture 3 for the RAW conversion. Can someone tell me what the settings should be and anything else I should put into Aperture 3 to get the optimal results specific to M9? Below is a screen shot of what is the default for the RAW conversion and am not even sure how to set it to an M9 profile, if that is even possible.

 

I recently started playing with the Raw conversion sliders in aperture, which I use exclusively. I've noticed that depending on the photo, the raw "fine tuning" sliders do some movement on their own. On some of my noisier photos, the denoising slider definitely finds its way.

 

Of course, as it says in the apple help menu for aperture, these settings are not set in stone, you can adjust them as you will individually or set presets for your camera. The apple default for the M9 has served me well so far.

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I recently started playing with the Raw conversion sliders in aperture, which I use exclusively. I've noticed that depending on the photo, the raw "fine tuning" sliders do some movement on their own. On some of my noisier photos, the denoising slider definitely finds its way.

 

Of course, as it says in the apple help menu for aperture, these settings are not set in stone, you can adjust them as you will individually or set presets for your camera. The apple default for the M9 has served me well so far.

 

Thanks for your help. How do you set the default for M9 in Aperture? Should the sharpening be that high? Plus the position of all the other sliders?

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what seems off to me in the background is that there is way too much noise for 160 ISO .

 

Maybe somebody else has already answered to this, but you can bet an under-exposed picture over-corrected in PP will show a lot of noise at 160 ISO either. No way to avoid that.

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So many things to comment on here, but...

 

Yes, C1 will give you better colour and noise output than Aperture, IMO.

 

If the shots from C1 look "blah" then you're not processing correctly.

 

As for shadow noise, how many stops under neutral was the background? How much did you compensate for the underexposure?

 

Turn off sharpening. You don't need much of it when processing a RAW with the M9.

 

What luminance is your monitor set for? What monitor? More noise and banding is going to be seen in the shadows if you're using a laptop, or have your monitor set for something "non-print like"--and some monitors simply can't be turned down enough to look at reasonable shadow tones.

 

You could post the RAW (use yousendit.com to send it to yourself then post the link here) and we could have a look if you like...

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Thanks for your help. How do you set the default for M9 in Aperture? Should the sharpening be that high? Plus the position of all the other sliders?

 

Under the "Raw Fine Tuning" portion of the adjustments panel, if you click the little gear a pull down menu will give you the choice of apple camera default, the program then recognizes my DNG files as M9 generated.

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Bokeh is fine - it is just over processed, If exposed correctly (or closer to) in camera at capture

you would not be seeing this noise. You said you upped exposure of whole image by one stop,

then further upped the exposure on shadows with contrast adjustments. unfortunately this will

increase noise and degrade image quality at some point. The lattitude you have when adjusting

exposure in post is decreased with the higher iSO you shoot at. for example: if you shot this at

1600 ISO you would only be able to make very minimal exposure adjustment (a lot less than you have)

before the same image degradation and noise is introduced into the photo. The fact you shot this at 160 ISO

is telling of how much you adjusted this particular image.

 

If you did want the subject and BG to be exposed like this at time of capture, you should

have exposed for the BG and used more careful placement of subject in a more shaded area so he did not blow out.

 

Go out and take a picture of same background correctly exposed and you will see nicer results and the lens

presented at it's best and how it should be.

 

Hope this helps. :)

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The latest-version 50 Summicron-M (which has been "current" since about 1980) is not known for its "bokeh": - and never has been. As mjh says, it is extremely well-corrected for sharpness and high contrast in the things in focus, not for the smoothness and low contrast of the things out of focus.

 

The 50 Summicron may be the "best 50 in the world" (although after 30 years of optical development, I think a couple of contenders have surpassed it) - but that reputation is based on things other than bokeh.

 

The hard-edged circles in the trees, near the back of the subject's head, are about what to expect. So are the double-images in the grass (which are just a string of overlapping harsh blur circles strung along the length of each blade).

 

However - as previously mentioned - adding contrast or noise during post-processing will tend to remove even more "smoothness".

 

Equally, harsh light in the original scene can make it tough for even a lens with good bokeh to do its best.

 

Also - the bokeh of a lens is often dependent on the relative distances of the subject and background. In this case you have about 6 feet to the subject and maybe 20-30 feet to the background. The same lens may produce a very different bokeh quality when the subject is at 3 feet and the blurred background at 10 feet (or infinity).

 

It all depends on what the light rays are doing as they move in three dimensions: from the scene > to the lens >THROUGH the lens > to the film/sensor.

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