M11 Banding issues in the corners

[MartinV]

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Hi all,

 

I am facing a weird issue. When shooting tilted downwards or upwards the sensor in my M11 creates shadows/underexposed areas in the corners. These shadow areas are not natural and vary between smooth and quite hard falloff. At times it can look like vignette but I am sure it is not.

 

after some test shots and on closer inspection on the rear screen these same areas show some heavy banding as well….

 

i have sent a support ticket to Leica customer care but was wondering if anyone has noticed similar behaviour?

 

the issue seems worse indoors and with uneven light.

 

Best regards

Martin

[MartinV]

Added some quick test shots that hopefully illustrate the behaviour. For reference, the lighting in this office is very even and the camera adds weird vignette/undersposed areas close to the edges. 
 

these are straight from the camera and resized to fit this post.

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[Photoworks]

Vignetting is usually the lens character rather then the camera.
What is the lens that you are using?

Some camera correct a little the vignetting if they are  6bit coded and correction is turned on. 
I have seen in a few cases the M11 not applying the correction in auto, but It can be selected in post.

I don't see banding! 
That is usually cause by Lighting with florescent and LED bulbs.
In some cameras if you bush the shadow drastically some lines appear. In my opinion the image has been overly processed or underexposed too much.

[Tailwagger]

1 hour ago, Photoworks said:

I don't see banding! 
That is usually cause by Lighting with florescent and LED bulbs.

Nor do I, but if it is there it's almost certainly related to the lighting.

1 hour ago, Photoworks said:

What is the lens that you are using?

And what metering mode?

In both cases, the results are what I would have expected. 

[MartinV]

1 hour ago, Photoworks said:

Vignetting is usually the lens character rather then the camera.
What is the lens that you are using?

Some camera correct a little the vignetting if they are  6bit coded and correction is turned on. 
I have seen in a few cases the M11 not applying the correction in auto, but It can be selected in post.

I don't see banding! 
That is usually cause by Lighting with florescent and LED bulbs.
In some cameras if you bush the shadow drastically some lines appear. In my opinion the image has been overly processed or underexposed too much.

Thank you very much for your feedback! 
 

i agree that banding probably is not an issue. It was only in the camera preview but not once I reviewed the pictures on a bigger screen. The title of this post is hence a bit misleading now….not sure how i can change that…(?)

 

To answer your question, the pictures were taken with the Summilux 35 FLE and its the same behaviour no matter how much i stop down although maybe its slightly less prononcounced then. When I use the 21 SE it is slightly worse then with the 35 actually. When using 50mm it is better but not gone and when using the 90mm APO I cannot make the sensor behave this way so far…. So seems an bigger issue with wide angles.

 

please note that these darker areas are not consistent with camera movement and sometimes won’t stay around the corners either. 
 

the pictures above are not processed by me other then the rescaling…I do believe though that the camera is doing some weird processing/exposure adjustments that are the cause of this. 
 

in short, when I am in live view it is not difficult at all to play around with the angles to reproduce this issue. And although it is less pronounced when properly exposing the picture I cannot recal having these issues with any other M camera so far. They will “see” what I see and not create artificial shadow where there is none. 

[Photoworks]

the Summilux 35 FLE does have light fall off from the center wide open, and so does the 21 SE

I don't see anything off from this images you have added.

I would suggest trying to reproduce the issue on an even light surface. Wall, sky...

I think you just getting more light sources into the middle of the frame and the light meeter is adjusting for it.

[jaapv]

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Do you have lens recognition switched on so the camera can apply its lens correction ?

 

I also notice that one photograph was taken during daytime and the other in the evening. The light from the windows influences the exposure, which in turn when (relatively) underexposing, can enhance vignetting.

[hdmesa]

16 minutes ago, jaapv said:

...The light from the windows influences the exposure, which in turn when (relatively) underexposing, can enhance vignetting.

This. You're seeing the differences in vignetting between different exposures. A brighter exposure will always make the vignetting seem less prominent and a darker exposure makes it more prominent.

[dsm21]

Are you only seeing the banding when using live view and not in the final photograph? 
 

[adan]

Leica's own charts of normal vignetting with these lenses - fall-off from center (left) to corners (right). Each halving of the brightness percent equals 1 additional stop of underexposure. With the 21, 35 and 50 wide-open, the corners of the picture are (perfectly normally) undexposed by over 2 stops compared to the center

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As already mentioned, overall exposure and other factors can affect how obvious this may be.

Additionally, the human eye/brain is very good at "compensating" as it moves around looking at bright things or dark things (or we would not be able to see at night or into dark corners!)

A photograph does not - it is an "objective" record of actual relative brightnesses. Until edited by the photographer.

Lighting that "looks even" to the eye and brain often is rarely actually even - for example the ceiling in that room is not lit directly at all, only by weaker diffuse reflected light from the furniture, or the dark carpet, and computer gear on the desks.

Edited May 3, 2022 by adan

[hdmesa]

Completely unrelated except the same post title fits, so makes sense to file this here for search purposes:

M11 JPEGs (60mp, have not tested 36 and 18) that use the High Contrast Monochrome film style with lenses that have heavy vignetting show horrible banding in the corners from JPEG compression. At first I just thought it was a display issue with the rear LCD, but the JPEGs on my computer show the same thing, making that setting essentially useless with my 28 Lux wide open if I want to use the JPEGs. I'm guessing Leica's JPEG compression is set too high for the gradients to render smoothly when the shot has a plain background like a blue sky. Editing both B&W film styles in camera to reduce contrast from the default zero to "-1" seems to give better results.

[Greenmarine]

Agree, DNG files don't show any "banding" (actually a step-wize grey tone gradient in plain backgrounds). it's only in the JPG's (and the rear LCD display uses the embedded JPG's)

[panchalpratik]

I noticed the exact same issue with my M11 which I just bought new from the local Leica store. Using my 50 Summilux ASPH, when I shoot the sky with a deep blue gradient, the rear screen shows significant banding, which thankfully does not show up on the DNG files. This does make the previews look bad. Is there a good fix for this problem? Can someone raise this as a firmware issue to be fixed on the next update? 

Glad I'm not the only one with this issue. 

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[sometimesmaybe]

4 hours ago, panchalpratik said:

I noticed the exact same issue with my M11 which I just bought new from the local Leica store. Using my 50 Summilux ASPH, when I shoot the sky with a deep blue gradient, the rear screen shows significant banding, which thankfully does not show up on the DNG files. This does make the previews look bad. Is there a good fix for this problem? Can someone raise this as a firmware issue to be fixed on the next update? 

Glad I'm not the only one with this issue. 

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i wonder if this is just an exposure issue? does it still happen if you use fixed SS and ISO and WB

just a thought

[jaapv]

It looks like a processing limitation in the processing of the jpg that the camera uses for the LCD Iike a low bit depth.

 
if that is the case the basic reason is possibly a lack of processing power which may make this problem incurable. 

Edit: one can simulate this effect by converting the file to 8 bits in ACR and enhancing contrast. The resulting jpg will show similar posterizing

[LocalHero1953]

Anything with a large area of similar tone with little detail, like sky, will show banding simply because the screen and the image processed lack the ability to display very fine gradations of tone. It's there all the time, but you only notice it in shots like this. Load a raw file into a good image processor and it should disappear.

Advice: don't chimp photos of nothing but sky!

 

Edi: if the banding is exactly horizontal across the screen, then I agree with Jaap, it is likely to be a limitation of processing in-camera. My advice still stands!

Edited September 8, 2023 by LocalHero1953

[jaapv]

I just found this explanation:

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/posterization.htm

 

There  is this simple visualization (just made it up   )

Imagine that  you have a colour gradient which  you must represent  by diluting ink  into a row of glasses of water, in  a series of different concentrations.

Put eight  glasses in a row, add one drop of pigment to the first, two to the second, four drops to the third, etc.
You  will see significant colour differences between adjacent glasses.

Now take sixteen  glasses and do the same.  Adjacent glasses  will look nearly the same.

[panchalpratik]

6 hours ago, sometimesmaybe said:

i wonder if this is just an exposure issue? does it still happen if you use fixed SS and ISO and WB

just a thought

Great question. It happens across all different modes, settings, SD cards, lenses, etc. I am leaning toward the explanation that there's too much Jpeg compression for the preview the camera generates. Interestingly, I've noticed it the most with deep blue sky or similar situations where you expect a prominent gradient. 

[panchalpratik]

5 hours ago, jaapv said:

I just found this explanation:

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/posterization.htm

 

There  is this simple visualization (just made it up   )

Imagine that  you have a colour gradient which  you must represent  by diluting ink  into a row of glasses of water, in  a series of different concentrations.

Put eight  glasses in a row, add one drop of pigment to the first, two to the second, four drops to the third, etc.
You  will see significant colour differences between adjacent glasses.

Now take sixteen  glasses and do the same.  Adjacent glasses  will look nearly the same.

All good discussion points. I happened to see this when I clicked a subject against a deep blue sky. Coincidentally, my iPhone (from the M10 era) and X100V renders it much better! So do almost all other cameras I tried since discovering this issue. Sure, it's a cosmetic issue since it's not baked into the DNGs but it's a bummer that a Leica M can't compete with a cheap smartphone for generating a preview!

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[hdmesa]

2 hours ago, panchalpratik said:

All good discussion points. I happened to see this when I clicked a subject against a deep blue sky. Coincidentally, my iPhone (from the M10 era) and X100V renders it much better! So do almost all other cameras I tried since discovering this issue. Sure, it's a cosmetic issue since it's not baked into the DNGs but it's a bummer that a Leica M can't compete with a cheap smartphone for generating a preview!

Processing power of an iPhone is exponentially better (CPU + GPU + Neural Engine + RAM). Quality of the screens are not even close, either.

X100V is displaying a 24mp file, which downsizes more efficiently without banding than does a 60mp file.

That said, I don't think it's a processing power limitation, I think it's about thermal efficiency. I'd rather see banding than have the M11 get really hot to the touch like the X100V sometimes does.