21mm Super Angulon

Phil_F_NM said:
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February 2, 2011. Leica M9.
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Great shot Phil, we've got to go out and shoot sometime.
I may be joining you soon with a Super Angulon.
 
Hey Rob-Vince. The first one I bought had that. I returned it but not for that, for the cracked hood. I always asked mayself if this could be fungus or just dust.
 
JSU said:
Phil, Very nice results with the SA & M9.
Are these in camera jpegs or DNG conversions? What is your best method for color with the SA & M9? Is your lens coded or do you use the camera's menu?
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Thanks very much for the praise.
I shoot everything in DNG and in fact, I don't think that the M9 has shot more than 3 or 4 jpegs in-camera ever. It was on factory default jpeg when I initially tested it and bought it last October.

The lens is in-camera menu-coded as a 21mm pre-ASPH Elmarit. That profile gives the least amount of red edge. The 24mm is close and the correction is actually stronger but the falloff is more clipped so I went with the gentler smoothness of the Elmarit. I wish I could try out the profile of the 18mm Leica lens. It's not in the menu.

My workflow is a bit odd since I'm a linux user.
I imported the files directly from the card over an Express32 bus adapter. It's amazingly fast but even moving a few GB of files from the M9 can take time. Using the USB cord to camera is just ridiculously slow.

I then imported into Darktable (linux project which is lightroom themed and so far just about as good IMO) and applied the monochrome then exposure/black-point tools.

Exported the file then opened in GIMP for web-sizing.

As for color, I've only used the SA on the M8 in color. Right at this very moment I'm getting a VBox VM set up running WinXP so I can use the cornerfix tool to get rid of the red edges. It looks like I'm the only Leica user that is engaged with the Darktable development team. I'm going to try to help them implement a "negative" red/cyan edge filter but it's way low on anyone's list of things to do and I'm not a developer. I know just enough to be a danger to myself and others.

Realistically, all that should need to be done to create a vignette profile that only eliminates the color cast is to shoot a white target, invert the colors and subtract any value which is black so there would be a transparent background and opposite cyan/red edges.

I've tried to eliminate the edge problem in color using Darktable and a combination of lens correction and channel mixing to eliminate the edges. Got pretty close but I had to get these out so I called it a day and I'll try to tweak the files in the future using the tools available to me soon.

Phil Forrest
 
In all the lenses I've had with separation it never affected the IQ, but of course there are never guarantees. I don't know of anyone who could fix this, but I'd assume someone who can re-cement the groups.
 
Mister E said:
In all the lenses I've had with separation it never affected the IQ, but of course there are never guarantees. I don't know of anyone who could fix this, but I'd assume someone who can re-cement the groups.
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John Van Stelten at FocalPoint Lens re-cemented the rear group on my S.A. to cure some separation. He did a great job.

::Ari
 
@mister E
thx for answering....had never lenses with separation before...
my experience with my SA is too: no (bad) influence on quality....I never had lenses with fungus too - but I think this would be a real great problem - influencing quality..
 
JSU said:
Phil--
Have you processed any SA/M9 DNG's in Adobe Camera Raw (4.6) using the "lens correction" "chromatic aberration" "Fix Red/Cyan Fringe" slider?
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I don't use photoshop nor any of the adobe suite because they haven't ported it to linux. I could run it on Windows but then that detracts from the whole point of me using linux in the first place. If they would support more open source users I'd totally buy it and use it daily. Until then we develop our own.

Phil Forrest
 
went to Hawaii and shot some colour film recently, first time in years. B&W still has my heart, but for vacations I think i'll stick to colour :)

and for those talking about SA's with schneideritis etc, my early black F3.4 SA has it. it has milky 'bubbles' around the edges of the rearest element and both the rear and front elements have marks on them. it's a real beater, it CLA'd by DAG just before I received and had a report from him too on the condition of the lens. there aren't any issues I've experienced apart from highlight blooming and flaring with a bright light source on the edges of the frame wide open, but it's not objectionable and as far as I know something that all/most SA's 'suffer' from anyway though mine may be a little more pronounced than a 'minty fresh' copy :) YMMV - but if it shoots good it is good, regardless of the cosmetics.
 
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