Voigtlander 50mm f/1 VM

[Adam Bonn]

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14 minutes ago, M Street Photographer said:

Regardless Adam, what do you think about opening a thread on this subject.
  "Does Leica intervene in the M10 / M10R RAW's? And if so, to what extent?"

Ha! Yes good idea, there's very knowledgeable people here about this sorta stuff (no not me, but I understand dcp pretty well)

I can tell you that adobe does not have separate lens profiles for different cameras, if (for example) you select the adobe profile for (say) a 35mm cron it's the same profile whether you do with this with an M8 or an M11.

Now a 35mm cron is a 35mm cron but I would GUESS that the level of corrections needed between a 60mpx BSI M11 and a APS-H M8 are very different.... here adobe does something under the hood that that's propriety and I don't know how it works.... you might recall adobe f**ked it up with the M11 and it took a revision or two for adobe to be able support their own lens profiles with the M11 🙄

Also see the post I just wrote while you were making yours!

To be honest... RE C1 I just shouldn't talk about it... I've never liked it with Leica (loved it with fuji*) so I'm a bit biased against it and not objective... plus the .icm (icc) profile solution isn't something I understand well, I could never get on profiling for C1 and I just gel better with the adobe product

 

*Re the thing with adobe and the M11, C1 had the same issue with the X-Pro2 and the fuji lenses, if you owned an X-T2 the fuji lenses were all corrected automatically, if you owned an X-Pro2 it didn't work at all.... I seem to recall as an X-Pro2 shooter that's when my love of C1 waned significantly actually 😅

Also (it's been a while) doesn't C1 have a setting in the lens tool that literally says just use whatever the OEM embedded in the RAW

[S Maclean]

20 minutes ago, Adam Bonn said:

well it is!

from here

Also here's a screen shot showing some of the tags in an M9 file (there's tags in all the Leica DNGs) - I've highlighted the baseline exposure offset

 

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

These are all instructions written by Leica for the RAW app to act upon (and let's be honest DNG is adobe's invention, Leica's choice to use and back in the day Leica used to give you a free copy of LR with their cameras - so it's a safe bet that Leica expect's adobe solution to be the RAW app product that's used)

Now how much of this info adobe choses to act on, whether they act on it the same way with CC as they did with LR3 (or whatever it was back when the M9 came out) I couldn't tell you...

But I assure you a RAW file is not some vanilla entity that starts life in your RAW app for you to shape like clay.... it arrives in your RAW app full of suggestions from the OEM, that your RAW app may/may not act upon and that you can undo/not undo and all this happens with very little visibility...

as a general rule of thumb the maker notes are suggestions and/or 'FYI' but anything tagged as EXIF is instrumental to the imaging pipeline of the RAW file, from obvious stuff like what camera was it, to the AsShotNeutral tag which means the white balance was this the ColorMatrix tags are the embedded Leica profile and well that's enough, I get carried away talking about this stuff and I'm waaaay off topic (again)!

 

 

 

 

Interesting.  Thank you!

 

[M Street Photographer]

@Adam Bonn , Thanks interesting but like you I can hardly talk about it as I lack the knowledge.
An unmodified RAW should come out of the camera. If Adobe interferes with the import, can't you turn it off?
I also heard the problem of the camera / lens profile, i.e. their combination that is not available in LR. That would speak for DXO Lab 6, which has entered many thousands of camera / lens combinations.

It almost seems to be dependent on the RAW converter used to determine who is doing what with the RAW's.

Adam, please look : 

One is with VC 50 1.0

Edited January 25, 2023 by M Street Photographer

[Adam Bonn]

17 minutes ago, M Street Photographer said:

@Adam Bonn , Thanks interesting but like you I can hardly talk about it as I lack the knowledge.
An unmodified RAW should come out of the camera. If Adobe interferes with the import, can't you turn it off?
I also heard the problem of the camera / lens profile, i.e. their combination that is not available in LR. That would speak for DXO Lab 6, which has entered many thousands of camera / lens combinations.

It almost seems to be dependent on the RAW converter used to determine who is doing what with the RAW's.

The RAW file is like a recipe, and the RAW app is like a chef. The chef can follow the recipe, modify it or ignore it.

The person using the RAW app is like an assistant chef s/he can also modify it, but s/he only has the ingredients and cooking tools that the RAW and the RAW app have given them and has to work towards the idea of what the food was always supposed to be

A RAW file might be all 1s and 0s (binary) but those 1s and 0s have to spell something out, like camera, ISO, WB, bayer filter etc etc or else the ‘chef’ will have no clue if the (say) eggs and bread are for breadcrumbing chicken for the dinner or making a bread pudding for desert.

(apologies for shitty analogies)

[Adam Bonn]

anyway back OT...

I just got this email

Quote

Your parcel (adam note: spoiler alert it's a CV 50/1) is due to be delivered on Thursday 26th January 2023

The driver will require the parcel to be signed for at the delivery address. If no-one is going to be at home and you would like to re-arrange your delivery, please select from the options below.

Sadly I won't be there until Saturday evening.... and that house has no cat, so WTF am I going to test it on? 😅

 

 

[S Maclean]

19 minutes ago, Adam Bonn said:

anyway back OT...

I just got this email

Sadly I won't be there until Saturday evening.... and that house has no cat, so WTF am I going to test it on? 😅

 

 

I got mine last week but haven’t been able to really use it yet.  Prelim test shots are great though but I can’t post pics of the family at early coffee time…. Someone will kill me.

[M Street Photographer]

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It wasn't a "real" test. The tree worker was already at work, so it had to be done quickly. The 75 Summarit was on it and then I quickly put on the VC 50 1.0 to take 2-3 more photos.

[hdmesa]

7 hours ago, Adam Bonn said:

I thought it influenced the raw as well? 

Well today I must not have fully attached my 50 lux as it took me 3 shots to notice the frame lines were wrong and the info screen said 21mm/2.8 so I can see if there's any difference in the DNGs when I get home 

The lens correction and vignetting are not baked to the DNG file on the M cameras (not sure if it writes it to the DNG or not, but LR/C1 do not apply it by default). On the SL cameras for some reason, vignette correction is baked into the DNG if you selected an M lens profile in-camera, and the correction cannot be removed in LR/C1 (data is likely not written into the DNG but is part of the DNG processing in camera). If it were merely a correction flagged as mandatory, we would still be able to turn off the correction in C1.

Edited January 25, 2023 by hdmesa

[Adam Bonn]

13 minutes ago, hdmesa said:

The lens correction and vignetting are not baked to the DNG file on the M cameras (not sure if it writes it to the DNG or not, but LR/C1 do not apply it by default). On the SL cameras for some reason, vignette correction is baked into the DNG if you selected an M lens profile in-camera, and the correction cannot be removed in LR/C1 (data is likely not written into the DNG but is part of the DNG processing in camera). If it were merely a correction flagged as mandatory, we would still be able to turn off the correction in C1.

That’s fantastic info, thank you

[M Street Photographer]

vor 4 Minuten schrieb Adam Bonn:

That’s fantastic info, thank you

Maybe we should start the thread, it seems worth finding out more.

[Adam Bonn]

2 minutes ago, M Street Photographer said:

Maybe we should start the thread, it seems worth finding out more.

there probably is one already somewhere

[Adam Bonn]

4 minutes ago, M Street Photographer said:

Maybe we should start the thread, it seems worth finding out more.

yeah a bunch

 

https://www.l-camera-forum.com/search/?q=opcodes&quick=1

 

 

[Adam Bonn]

https://www.mcguffogco.com/dngcleanermac.html

might be fun if we want to back to back test stuff

(Woooo another project in the making... I can already feel the marital strife potential building)

Edited January 25, 2023 by Adam Bonn

[Adam Bonn]

Quote

The DNG always holds uncorrected data, the out-of-camera JPG always has the correction applied by the camera firmware. The DNG also includes what is called an "opcode", a set of instructions for correction, that most raw converters such as Adobe's Lightroom and ACR automatically apply. With Adobe, there is not even a way to turn this off. But if you open the DNG in tools such as FastRawViewer, RawDigger or RPP, then you see the image stored in the DNG without correction.

 

28 minutes ago, hdmesa said:

The lens correction and vignetting are not baked to the DNG file on the M cameras (not sure if it writes it to the DNG or not, but LR/C1 do not apply it by default).

so we already have two different pieces of info...

To be fair the 1st one was from nearly 5 years ago...

and I can't stress this enough whatever adobe does or did x number of years ago might not be what it does now.....

For example the adobe profile for the M9 has (more or less) the same parts as it does for the M11, but these parts are configured to work in very different ways (long story short back in the day adobe used forward matrices to do the heavy lifting of the profile and the HSD tables to control it all, these days the forward matrices are quite anaemic for gamut compression and the HSD tables bring the colour back up) so what adobe does with opcodes and exif data today might be different to what it did yesterday and what it'll do tomorrow

[M Street Photographer]

@Adam Bonn , The question is: Are the M10 R Raw files really pure? Or does Leica already manipulate the camera? Or only the RAW converter?
This "deep cleaning" is known to me from Win computers. I have Win 10, but since I've only been trying to learn LR for a short time, my topic is C1 for now. It only becomes important to me when I leave C1. But since I don't have any new hardware, I can still work with C1 Vers. 22 for a long time.
I'm still not sure which way to go, Adobe or DXO Lab?

PS: For many years it has been an issue who intervenes in the RAW's and how extensively. The battle is between Leica, Sony and Fuji.
Since it seems to change with the camera generations, it would still make sense in my opinion to call up the topic for our M10 R.
And like I said maybe depending on RAW converters: LR, C1 DXO, which are probably the most used ones.

Edited January 25, 2023 by M Street Photographer

[Adam Bonn]

11 minutes ago, M Street Photographer said:

@Adam Bonn , The question is: Are the M10 R Raw files really pure? Or does Leica already manipulate the camera? Or only the RAW converter?
This "deep cleaning" is known to me from Win computers. I have Win 10, but since I've only been trying to learn LR for a short time, my topic is C1 for now. It only becomes important to me when I leave C1. But since I don't have any new hardware, I can still work with C1 Vers. 22 for a long time.
I'm still not sure which way to go, Adobe or DXO Lab?

PS: For many years it has been an issue who intervenes in the RAW's and how extensively. The battle is between Leica, Sony and Fuji.
Since it seems to change with the camera generations, it would still make sense in my opinion to call up the topic for our M10 R.
And like I said maybe depending on RAW converters: LR, C1 DXO, which are probably the most used ones.

I moved to mac 12 months ago, don’t regret it but I’ve so many more tools on my old win machine for all of this stuff

A lot of it will be driven by necessity, for example if a lens has a deep distortion, both the camera maker and the RAW app maker will want to make sure that the end user is happy with the results 

and we need to not confuse manipulation with assistance, it’s very important the RAW app knows what camera was used, is it a monochrome, if not what WB was used

are we not seeking to manipulate things? I don’t want my CV 50/1 to be ‘unknown lens’ in LR, it’s inconvenient for me… OMMV

For my €0.02 the biggest manipulation is always the colours, this is isn’t the thread and I’ve posted about this a lot before.. but a colour camera sees only RGB. It has a budget of each and has to make compromises (eg put more blue into red, to make red more red and less orange can mean that there’s not enough blue left to render skies nicely). We can create profiles that have compromises of our design and tastes

The RAW apps aren’t like little trolls trying to wind us up for shits and giggles, they honesty believe that their decisions will please the most number of people.. of course you or I or another might not be most people and we might be keen to see exactly what’s going on under the hood…

In a separate thread not here, there’s probably some parameters that interested parties can agree upon to test.

That dng cleaner thing seems like a reasonable idea to benchmark files, and I (and no doubt many others) know how to dump all of the exif info into a text file and extract the various jpegs and (iirc) a tiff that Leica embeds for various reasons (LCD preview, fotos app) 

Adobe publishes its DNG spec as an open source document (then ignores various parts of it in implementation 🫤) but they do list all the DNG tags and what they mean.

Adobe requires certain DNG tags for it to be a valid file, and you sometimes get a sense that Leica just puts some stuff in there to tick a box off rather than meaningful info

If you look at that EXIF screen I made some posts back… under camera calibration it says 100010001

firstly we need to express that as it would appear to LR/ACR 

100

010

001

namely 3x3 matrix of all zeros except with a diagonal of 1

But if we follow the adobe DNG spec to create these values we’d get something like (I’m making this example up but the facts are solid)

0.871 0.234 -0.341

0.217 0.962 0.013

0.115 -0.619 1.013

Which actually looks like a camera calibration matrix 😂 (it isn’t though!)

So here Leica are just putting in as little effort as possible…

…or to be 100% accurate adobe recommends the bradford method of chromatic adaptation and instead Leica are using XYZ Scaling (like geez Leica just buy a matlab licence, employ someone who knows python and do the maths)

anyway… so it’s important not to feel conned or cheated, but to understand what all the things do, why they do them and if it makes an insurmountable problem or not (spoiler alert, probably not. Turn off lens detection and profile your own camera and use a WhiBal card is probably worst case)

For me I like adobe

- I like the product

- I like how it more or leas publishes the info about (most of) the back end

- I like how it invented the DNG format and therefore should work well with cameras that shoot DNG

I dislike C1 (OMWV)

- icc is an unregulated format used across multiple applications, I mean the spec has many derivatives and many applications 

- C1 uses quite aggressive native tone curves

- having all the tools spread over like 68 (😂) tabs pisses me off

- they’re quite glacial in regards to feature requests and bug fixes for small volume OEMs

 

Anyway it’s bed time here in euroland and I think an hour later where you are?!

 

 

[M Street Photographer]

Thanks, I have to take my time to process your article. I'm in Berlin, but a night person.

[hdmesa]

1 hour ago, Adam Bonn said:

so we already have two different pieces of info...

To be fair the 1st one was from nearly 5 years ago...

and I can't stress this enough whatever adobe does or did x number of years ago might not be what it does now.....

 

The quote from 2018 was before the SL2. I have no idea how the SL handled the DNGs with regard to corrections. With the M, there is nothing baked into the DNGs – beyond that, I don't know or care what's written to the DNG with regard to lens corrections since I can either apply the manufacturer profile (would be the embedded lens data if a lens profile was selected) or manually choose a profile from C1 or LR's library. With the SL2/S, vignette correction is not simply written in as an instruction, it's recorded to the RAW file as data outside of correction instructions. Note, though, that I tested that many firmware versions ago – it would be wonderful if Leica has stopped doing that. But I have no motivation to test it since Leica now allows us to directly enter the focal length instead of using an M or R lens profile – previously a profile was required for IBIS to work.

Adobe recently started allowing "mandatory" corrections the manufacturer flags in the DNG to be turned off – but only for newer cameras. Older cameras (not sure where the break is, but for Leica it would be between M10-R and M11) cannot have their corrections turned off if flagged as mandatory.

[M Street Photographer]

@Adam Bonn,

Here we deviate too much from the topic of the VC 50 1.0.

But let me say one more thing:
I have a good understanding of technology and IT, but many years ago I became more and more of a user. Even though I'm interested in details, my photographic skills may not yet have developed far enough for deep technical knowledge and details to come into play. Developing myself photographically / artistically comes first. With my knowledge of RAW development / image processing, it is often possible to process my thoughts, feelings and recordings in such a way that I can show what I felt during the recording.
More important for me is to know my camera and lenses well, which is still an ongoing project.
Nevertheless, I am also interested in technical requirements that I would like to understand, but do not delve too deeply into.

Without this technical knowledge, a good and safe application is hardly possible.

I have already learned a lot about my M10 R and some lenses in the forum and I am happy to pass on my knowledge if it is asked. I would like to know certain properties of the camera and lenses so that I can use the equipment well and maybe use it to the limit later.

So I may not fully understand some of the things you said about Adobe, but I also don't want to dig deep to understand everything. Please consider that I use C1 and first familiarize myself with Adobe. As a former user of the M9, I was a complete novice. And today the M10 R is important to me because I no longer own the M9 either. Many Sony and Fuji years have passed between the end of the M9 and the M10 R, so I now have to reinvent myself in the Leica world.

Please understand me correctly. I really appreciate your opinion, your knowledge and the way you present your view of things, I would like to continue to benefit from this and have a lively exchange with you.

So I look forward to further discussions and views with you and other forum members about lenses, the M10 R and the views and photographs.

I am very pleased about the respectful and friendly interaction that we have here and that you also cultivate.

Edited January 26, 2023 by M Street Photographer

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[Adam Bonn]

8 hours ago, hdmesa said:

The quote from 2018 was before the SL2. I have no idea how the SL handled the DNGs with regard to corrections

 

8 hours ago, hdmesa said:

Adobe recently started allowing "mandatory" corrections the manufacturer flags in the DNG to be turned off – but only for newer cameras. Older cameras (not sure where the break is, but for Leica it would be between M10-R and M11) cannot have their corrections turned off if flagged as mandatory.

Yes this is the catch I think, how Leica/adobe/C1 did things yesterday, how they do them today and how they might do them tomorrow changes so some facts become outdated and obsolete but don’t cease to exist within the community and public domain.

7 hours ago, M Street Photographer said:

So I may not fully understand some of the things you said about Adobe, but I also don't want to dig deep to understand everything.

The vast majority of things that happen in turning light from the sky into pixels on your computer screen are quite hardcoded into the camera. The camera has a native tonality, base ISO will already have some degree of amplification baked in, cameras don’t necessarily amplify the R, G and B channels equally when ISO is increased 

There’s folks on here with phenomenal knowledge of this sort of stuff, but I’m not one of them… I find it hard to be motivated to learn stuff I cannot change.

My main area of interest is the process in which un-white-balanced data is turned into the RAW file that I can edit. My knowledge of this starts and stops with adobe really.

If we open the same DNG in LR/C1/DXO/Silkypix/Iridient/photoninja/etc we see different colours and a different look.

This interests me because not only is it worth to back to back test the RAW apps to find the one you like but also many of them offer the ability to change the colours and tones either as a preset or better still by creating your own custom profile.

Anyway…

I would imagine two DNGs one with lens correction turned on, the other off. Strip out the embedded image files. Duplicated and run though DNG Cleaner then compare the results of the (now) four DNGs with their harvested embedded image files would answer quickly what’s baked into the DNG and at what point it can be taken away. But let’s call that a very semi educated hunch at this point.