On sharpening and some other issues with the M8

[KM-25]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Great advice, I just bought the software and am waiting for an email.

 

Meanwhile this is my problem, note that this is a very small version of the problem photo. and a 100% crop which shows the problem. When I print this out in A3, the photo gets a magenta hue in all the highlights.

 

thanks again for all the fine advice.

 

I feel your pain.

 

I shoot a lot of outdoor related stock, I am having a heck of a time with this, even with a low contrast 50 year old collapsable Summicron. For all other uses, the M8 shines, but this would definitely be what I consider to be it's Achilles heel.

 

A good buddy of mine who is well connected says there is a new raw converter coming out that might address this and a few other issues. He vowed to give me more details in a week or so.

[Julius Bjornsson]

That is indeed good news. Please post when you get this software and let us know. My only consolation now is that the sun does not shine to often up here where I live, he he, but when it does it is really bright and what surprised me was how strong this magenta came out on my printouts. I have just been through the photos I took and compared this to the ones I took with the 28 mm Elmarit Asp. with IR cut filter on, and that appears to be much better, although not absent. The 50 Cron I used is a at least 10 year old version, very very sharp and contrasty, but I did not have any filter on it. I have to try this again with the UV/IR filter on the 50, next when the sun shines. But a raw converter to fix this would indeed be great.

 

JKB

[Dan States]

Are you using the Capture 1 LE included with your camera? I had the same problems with fringing when using Photoshop as my Raw processor, but when I finally made friends with Capture one the problem went away.

 

By the way, I've found that turning off BOTH sharpening AND noise reduction in Capture 1 leads to an extremely sharp and natural print. Frankly I think noise reduction is only needed when you USE sharpening....

 

Best wishes

Dan

[Julius Bjornsson]

I just tried Capture One LE which I got with my camera and if anything the effect got worse. Maybe I need some specialized settings, and if so please tell me what I should do.

 

JKB

[jaapv]

In "process" turn off all sharpening, noise reduction etc.

[gmaurizio]

Julius, we have a bunch of Nikons (D2whatever) and your comment regarding the capture sharpness of the D2X has an easy explanation. The D2X was designed to be a tad soft in capture, specially in raw format. The reason was that it was conceived as primarily a magazine camera, for 11x17 inches double spreads, to be converted to CMYK and sharpened to an output screen of 170 lines. Many people complain when seeing 100% pixels of the D2X, but that was the design criteria. The D2H was designed (with its 4MP) to be much sharper to allow for resizing to 9x12 and make the cover of Sports Illustrated without pain, therefore its much better ISO performance.

What is the design point of the M8? Hard to tell, but it keeps the tradition of PJ that made the Leica name famous (HCB). So it is VERY SHARP in capture, barely needing any kind of post processing. For our magazine editorial work, we actually reduce its sharpening to then post process with PS3 to make sure we get the edges we want to pop up nicely. But I would not worry about its sharpness, since we replaced a Hasselblad Imacon back with an M8, half the money, four times the speed, and sixteen times the convenience. Try using a MF back in the street!!!

For landscapes in plain daylight, I would not remove the Polarizing filter, specially if there is water involved... Instead of the very expensive Leica one, go to LEICAGOODIEs and get the 77mm filter adapter, buy any good 77mm C-Pol and your problems with CA will be almost solved.

[Jamie Roberts]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I feel your pain.

 

I shoot a lot of outdoor related stock, I am having a heck of a time with this, even with a low contrast 50 year old collapsable Summicron. For all other uses, the M8 shines, but this would definitely be what I consider to be it's Achilles heel.

 

A good buddy of mine who is well connected says there is a new raw converter coming out that might address this and a few other issues. He vowed to give me more details in a week or so.

 

Yes, except my Canons with fast L glass are worse on these artifacts than the M8 You just need to deal with them in post (though a raw converter plug-in or control would be nice too).

[Jamie Roberts]

Great advice, I just bought the software and am waiting for an email.

 

Meanwhile this is my problem, note that this is a very small version of the problem photo. and a 100% crop which shows the problem. When I print this out in A3, the photo gets a magenta hue in all the highlights.

 

thanks again for all the fine advice.

 

Julius,

 

You won't be sorry. I spent 2 minutes with your shot and the action completely got rid of the magenta. Use the manual action for fine highlights and lots of bright magentas (the purple action is pretty tuned, I think, for Nikon and Canon CA / "birefringance").

[Julius Bjornsson]

Julius,

 

You won't be sorry. I spent 2 minutes with your shot and the action completely got rid of the magenta. Use the manual action for fine highlights and lots of bright magentas (the purple action is pretty tuned, I think, for Nikon and Canon CA / "birefringance").

 

Hi there again, I just got the action and tried it on the problem reflection and as far as i can see, there is a very small effect if anything at all. I am sure I am doing something wrong, could you please tell me what. Here are two 100% samples from the problem photo and as you can se the effect is almost nonexistent. First before then after. I even did the automatic fringe reduction four times.

 

After I get this sorted out, I am going to quit pixel peeping and continue enjoying this lovely camera and get on with making pictures.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

[M6J]

I have just recently switched to a M8, and to make a long story short, I absolutely love it. I come from using a Nikon D2X now since it came out and my feeling is that I have taken a jump in image quality.

....

My completely subjective evaluation is just like my former photos have had a film removed from them...

JKB

 

Julius,

I can say I am much surprised to hear this. I never felt a jump in image quality going from D2X to M8. Small differences, yes, but a "film removed" from my photos? Are you sure your D2X was/is working fine?

BTW, your "after" picture is much improved from the "before" one. (What could you expect when the water highlights are all burned out anyway?)

May I ask the lens and diaphragm that gave this shot please?

[Julius Bjornsson]

First the "film removed" issue. this is just my subjective feeling, but anyway the raw files are much sharper directly out of the camera than I am used to, and I do not need any capture sharpening. I do not think my D2X was unusually unsharp, as the files responded very well to PhotoKit Sharpener and other methods. I think someone said earlier on in this thread that this is how it was supposed to be.

 

The lens used was a 50mm summicron, the next to newest version and I agree this is a very very difficult situation, blown highlights etc. But I tried underexposing and that of course gave me a black picture when I had the highlights fixed. The problem here is of course that 9 stops are not nearly enough to capture the differences in this scene and yes the after picture was better, but still had a lot of CA in it. But knowing what to expect I am going to be more careful. This just surprised me a bit. What I would like to see is the same scene with the same lens taken with a film camera, in order to determine whether this is solely a lens phenomenon or the sensor in the M8, or both. I tried a similar scene yesterday with the same lens, reflections of water but this time with the IR filter on, and I have the feeling that the CA was better, although not absent. But conditions were of course not the same. I will do a more controlled test of this next time the sun shines here (heavy overcast and rain now every day-very sad).

 

But thanks for your comments.

[Julius Bjornsson]

Sorry forgot about the aperture, I think it was 5,6 or 8, but am not entirely sure. (How I would love it if the Camera recorded this in the exif info. But all this of course demands a more controlled test. Will let you guys know how that goes.

[M6J]

CA is usually worse with open diaphragms. In your next test you should try 2 series, one with f/2.8 and one with f/5.6 or 8.

If I hadn't read your answer I would dare to say that your photo was shot at f2 or 2.8.

Was it shot as a "jpg" or a raw? Did you put a IR cut filter on the lens?

[Julius Bjornsson]

I am certain that this was not higher that 5,6. DNG format, no IF cut filter. I will thest this thoroughly nex time I have an opportunity i.e. weather that is similar.

[Jamie Roberts]

Ok, here's the before and after.

 

First, your shots have a ProPhoto profile attached to them, which is making the colours all shift terribly (and the gamma is different) on the Web.

 

Convert to sRGB before you post...)

 

Ok, here's your original shot:

 

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

 

This is an easy one to fix, since the magenta is in the CA on not really on anywhere else.

 

Next, use the MANUAL action. Run it, and zoom in (ALT-CLICK on the eye dropper) to select the magenta. Shift-click to add colours to the CA correction, click to subtract.

 

Click continue.

 

The action will load a correction layer on top of your shot.

 

Use the eraser tool on the correction layer to simply erase anything you think has been over-corrected. In this case, I restored the land about 20% with the eraser, though I didn't really need to.

 

 

There. 1 minute in PS and it's pretty much all gone Load them into PS and put them on different layers and you'll see how much!

 

I might actually mess more with this for a print, but you get the idea. You need to play with the fuzziness selector.

 

This thing really does work, though.

[pklein]

I'm following this thread with great interest. I started out using Capture One with sharpening set at 35, threshold 3 and noise reduction at 0. This created TIFFs that did not need any sharpening to print at letter size. I would only further sharpen reduced images for the Web.

 

However, noise in shadows and dark midtones was fairly prominent in ISO 640 available-light pictures. I don't care for the noise reduction in C-One. Turn it on, and even the lowest setting tends to smear detail visibly.

 

Based on this thread and some earlier ones, I've fooled with settings in both C-One and Picture Window Pro (PWP). M8 files look a lot cleaner at 100% and 200% if I don't use any sharpening or noise reduction in C-One. I can then sharpen a little in PWP, about 1 pixel wide at 12-25%--just enough to give me a smidge better edge contrast.

 

I also found that if I set the threshold to about 9-12, the underlying noise and artifacting we see at 100% and 200% is reduced drastically. PWP settings are not directly comparable to Photoshop, but you get the ballpark idea.

 

But. . . which program I use to sharpen doesn''t make much difference in a letter-sized print in at ISO 160 in good light. When we get to the 100% level of detail, we are in effect manipulating the individual brush strokes in an Impressionist painting or the individual dots in a halftone reproduction. Stuff that is below the threshold of vision when we view a print at proper viewing distance. It contributes to the overall impresson of sharpness and detail, but it's the sum of the pixel-level details that count, not the exact look of the pixels themselves. The anti-alias filters of other cameras smooth some of this stuff out, so many of us didn't see it before.

 

What we see at 100% and 200% is not what we see in the print. It is how our print drivers and eyes aggregate and interpret that extremely fine detail that matters, not how it looks when you blow it up. I've found that looking at stuff on the screen at 50% (1:2) is a pretty good gauge of what we'll see at moderate print size.

 

For lower-light pictures at higher ISO, I think the "sharpen last" workflow matters a lot more. I think I am going to start using the no-sharpening/no noise reduction method in C-One, and do all my sharpening in PWP. I'm only now realizing how much my minimal C-One sharpening accentuated the shadow noise. It also made it more difficult for Neat Image to clean. I think very subtle sharpening in the image editor with a few points of threshold, perhaps preceded by very light noise reduction in Neat Image, beats the similar features in C-One.

 

For good light pictures at moderate sizes, which program to sharpen in is probably a toss-up. If we can use C-One for most or all of the workflow and get a print-ready file with miminum bother, why not?

 

For pictures with lots of specular highlights, I'd also keep sharpening and noise reduction out of C-One, as they tend to amplify the purple edges.

 

One thing is for sure, the best way to process Camera X is not necessarily the same as Camera Y or scanned film. All this RAW stuff is like the darkroom alchemy of the film days. You can, in effect re-invent your film, developer, agitation and enlarger with each shot. This is both a blessing and a curse. I like to find a good method and stick to it. RAW workflows tempt one to tweak things to death, forgetting that the initial objective was to take pictures. Then they upgrade WonderPixels v. 3.0.0 to 3.0.1, and the universe changes. Again.

 

That's my two cents. Comments and alternative thoughts welcome.

 

--Peter

[Julius Bjornsson]

Thanks jamie for explaining how to use the manual part of the action. Will give that a try right away. Also thank you for the tips on prophoto and the sRGB conversion. I knew that but completely forgot before converting for the web. I needed that reminder. The ProPhoto color profile comes out of PSCS3. Will remember to convert next time.

 

 

Also thank you Peter for a nice and thought provoking discussion. I ny view we are in the danger here of getting to deep into pixel peeping, but anyway these are nice things to know.

 

Thanks averyone.

 

JKB