Panasonic L-mount lenses raw development profiles (tested: LUMIX S PRO 16-35 F/4 on SL2-S)

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I was about to resell my newly acquired Lumix S Pro lens as, after looking at disappointing results from converting the raw files in Adobe Lightroom.

Fortunately I doubled checked in C1 and DXO and found much better optical quality (the Lightroom treatment is detrimental to all but the very center of the image). I then noticed that Lightroom doesn't show an available Adobe Lens Profile, but seems to use the "Built-in" one, which neither works well to correct geometric distortions, nor preserves resolution, and cannot be turned off (other than by hacking the DNG file using an external editor).

If you are in a similar spot (using any Panasonic L-mount lenses with Lightroom) I might share a sample image (shot at 21mm), along with the advice to perhaps avoid the combination of Panasonic lenses and Adobe Lightroom if image quality is a concern?

1. Lightroom Classic 11.4.1 - no ability to tweak lens profile

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2. Capture One 22 15.3.1.17 - Lens Distortion [correction] setting = 0

3. DXO PhotoLab 5.3.1 - all lens corrections (with matching profiles for this camera & lens combination) turned on

(suggestion: right-click to open each image in a new tab, then you can flip through them at higher resoulution, which makes the differences more apparent compared to the sequential embedded previews)

Edited July 26, 2022 by mzbe

[Planetwide]

Thanks for this. I noticed that the Pans 16-35mm performed much better on my S1r than my SL2

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1 hour ago, Planetwide said:

Thanks for this. I noticed that the Pans 16-35mm performed much better on my S1r than my SL2

Im am fine with the lens on my SL2-S with C1, and actually DXO looks quite good. Lightroom is a major disappointment ... there is a way to use DXO to pre-process and render alternative DNGs (including optical corrections) and then feed that back into a Lightroom based workflow; I am considering using this extra step to avoid having to change my habits significantly.

I just re-processed another DNG with DXO to confirm that the Lumix S PRO 16-35 in principle works fine on the SL2-S - completely happy with the results (see below). Attempts to edit the same image in Lightroom were not a lot of fun and I wasn't as happy with the result. Quick fix for me to use DXO instead specifically with this lens going forward ...

 

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Edited July 26, 2022 by mzbe