Sensor behaviour
Sensor behaviour
The black line at the boundaries between extreme highlights and darker tones is a property of most, if not all digital sensors. The harsh delineation you note in your image is something many who have moved to digital from film have complained of. There is no 'roll-off' from highlights to darker tones. The effect is most noticeable at the transitions from very bright to very dark, rather than to medium tones. I can reproduce the effect with my leased Aptus 65, under similar conditions.
The aura you mention is either sensor 'bloom' (which the RD-1 is thankfully not prone to) or, as others have remarked, possibly an effect produced by the particular qualities of the lens when faced with the high level of contrast.
Post production will salve minor problems like this. A gentle application of the burn tool, at a low setting, to improve local contrast and reduce / remove the slight 'haze' in the affected area, plus careful use of the healing tool in CS3, should clean things up. Sometimes, I note that the black boundary lines can show up as red / magenta. Here, one also needs to employ the desaturation tool in Photoshop.
I use Leica's aspherical lens designs with the RD-1, and they work perfectly well. They do, however, have markedly reduced depth of field, on a stop for stop basis, compared to their non-aspherical predecessors. In this respect, the 28 Cron ashp' seems more limited in its DOF than the 35 Cron ashp'. I find I can't trust my focusing for close work with the 28 Cron ashp' at wide apertures, and so I have reverted to using a 28 Elmarit non-asph' on my RD-1 bodies. I can focus this with certainty at its widest aperture of 2.8, whereas with the Cron, even 2.8 presents a challenge.
Kind regards,
Crane
