Anamorphic lenses for stills

[boojum]

Looks good to me. What is the lens quality? Does the lens it is in front of suffer much?

 

[shawn]

Looks good to me. What is the lens quality? Does the lens it is in front of suffer much?

It isn't an anamorphic adapter, it is a anamorphic lens. The Sirui 35mm Saturn. Will need to use it in better light to get a sense of it. Wide open was pretty sharp in the center but softer on the sides. Will see if that improves stopped down.

Also found a relatively easy way to desqueeze video without going through a full editing program. Re-encoding through Handbrake can desqueeze if I want a quick, lower sized video to share.

 

[shawn]

Mostly shooting video with the anamorphic lens but here is a still from today.

 

[shawn]

Just tried the exiftool command and lightroom did apply the horizontal scale which should desquish an anamorphic photo. The resulting imported photo in Lightoom had a 2.4:1 ratio which is what it should have given a 3:2 image with a 1.6x Anamorphic lens. I tested on a regular image and the resulting file was stretched horizontally.

Iridient also respected the EXIF. DXO Photolab 6, Affinity and Photos did not.

I used Adobe DNG converter on the raw files and then ran
exiftool -DefaultScale="1.6 1" *.dng

in the file location of the DNGs.

I should be able to test with an anamorphic lens tomorrow.

Found a simpler way of doing this so everything happens in Lightroom. When I import the anamorphic shots into LR I 'Copy as DNG' in Lightroom so that it converts to DNG.

I then use the Lightroom Lens Tagger plug in to updated the data for the imported pictures to set the Lens Name, focal length and so on. I created a profile for the Sirui anamorphic lens and then just edit the command to include -DefaultScale="1.6 1" along with all the other commands. Once it finishes running on the files Lightroom de-squeezes the files.

The only gotcha is Lens Tagger won't store that extra flag into my anamorphic lens profile. So I have to add that flag every time I want to run this. I have contacted the developer to see if this is something that can be changed.

For any LR users if you haven't tried Lens Tagger it is great for adapted lenses or film cameras as it lets you store a bunch of information to a lot of files very quickly.