Playing with first "pro" glass

[davidedric]

I decided to treat myself (with permission!) to one of Panasonic's premium lenses, specifically the 12-35 f2.8. Just taken delivery and I have to say I am very impressed. Here's an example of why (modest processing in Lightroom).

First picture of a camelia in flower in my garden - fair enough it should look good.




But then, when I made a 1:1 crop, I was taken aback by the detail, contrast, clarity, colour etc.





Dave

[IzzieK]

You did very well in the overview and the crop...congratulations on your new acquisition...

[Mike Buckley]

Enjoy your new lens...and Margalita's permission to buy it. If I were in that situation, I don't know which I would enjoy more -- the lens or my wife's permission to get it.

[Shadowman]

Nice captures.

[mikesan]

Not wishing to rain on your parade, but it looks to me like the red channel has been blown out on many of the petals. I have attempted to improve it a bit using ACR. I am sure you could get a better result by reducing exposure.

[davidedric]

Thanks, Mike.

Yes, you are quite right - careless , though to be fair I was just surprised to have a usable image at 1:1, rather than trying to produce the best image I could.

It's kind of interesting that the problem is still just visible on the histogram of the bigger image, but much less noticeable because of the different relative amounts of red.

I use Lightroom rather than ACR directly, but my method of correction would be to just use the Whites slider, which is really what it is there for.

Dave

[Manfred M]

Having "fast glass" really opens things up (especially one's wallet).

I had debated getting one last year but what put me off was that for the same magnification, I would lose the equivalent of 2-stops of DoF; i.e. f/2.8 @ 60mm focal length would give me the same depth of field as my FF at f/5.6 @ 120mm (this builds in the 2x crop factor impact).

As someone who bought fast glass primarily for shallow DoF work, this really wasn't something I was interested in losing. The alternative is going to one of the excellent lenses that Voigtlander puts out, (f/1 and faster), but these are expensive, manual focus primes, so just not something I could justify.

Anyhow, enjoy your new lens. It will certainly help in controlling noise in lower light shooting.

[rpcrowe]

Congratulations on your new lens... The time that high quality lenses really come into their own is when you are pushing the envelop such as shooting in lower light levels wide open and or when you are hoping or needing to make some larger prints.

At the risk of annoying everyone who is shooting with expensive, top-line glass (I shoot with top-end lenses myself); if you are shooting in bright conditions and using f/8 with your camera on a tripod and you are not doing anything more than posting your images on the Internet, emailing the images or getting them printed in small sizes at your local discount store - THERE WILL PROBABLY NOT BE A GREAT NOTICEABLE IQ DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TOP LINE and KIT LENSES...

However if you are shooting high school gymnastics in a badly lit auditorium or gymnasium and need to shoot wide open and have your A/F spot-on; the difference between a PRO and a KIT lens might be night and day!

[DanK]

Congratulations on your new lens... The time that high quality lenses really come into their own is when you are pushing the envelop such as shooting in lower light levels wide open and or when you are hoping or needing to make some larger prints.

At the risk of annoying everyone who is shooting with expensive, top-line glass (I shoot with top-end lenses myself); if you are shooting in bright conditions and using f/8 with your camera on a tripod and you are not doing anything more than posting your images on the Internet, emailing the images or getting them printed in small sizes at your local discount store - THERE WILL PROBABLY NOT BE A GREAT NOTICEABLE IQ DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TOP LINE and KIT LENSES...

However if you are shooting high school gymnastics in a badly lit auditorium or gymnasium and need to shoot wide open and have your A/F spot-on; the difference between a PRO and a KIT lens might be night and day!

I mostly agree. There are other circumstances where the difference is noticeable, e.g., in some cases, at the extremes of the zoom range, or in corners, but under optimal conditions, middling glass can give excellent results, and the differences tend to get attenuated when displaying at the low resolution of a computer screen. (And yes, I use mostly pro-level glass too.)

In terms of exposure: blown reds are a real problem, at least for me, in flower photography. In fact, I sometimes find a loss of detail in the reds even when the histogram doesn't show red-channel clipping. In this case, the histogram is pretty extreme:



ACR and LR are identical processing engines, just with different interfaces, so the choice doesn't matter. I think the more important issue is that it is often very hard, if not impossible, to get detail back into reds when they are clipped. A few miserable experiences led me to leave my camera set to show the histogram for the color channels, and I try to keep the reds in flower shots well below 255.

Another thing that helps a little is to do all of the contrast adjustments in a luminance-only layer, or in LAB space, to avoid oversaturating the reds.

In any case, back to the original topic: enjoy the lens! I haven't regretted any of the purchases I have made of high-quality lenses.