Basic Photoshop settings for RAW JPEG conversion.. EX2F?

ttbek wrote:

Greynerd wrote:

I am not sure if that is so true for compacts as the actual aperture is pretty small anyway. The consensus of opinion I have read is that many are at their best wide open and diffraction sets in early. The lens is probably designed for this and a lot of compacts do not even a have aperture blades and fake a wide/narrow aperture with an ND filter.

With an ND filter? I haven't heard about this before, I'm a bit curious now.

Probably exaggeration to say a lot of compacts but those with aperture control with only a narrow and wide setting will probably be dropping a built in ND filter down rather than going to the expense of controlling lens aperture. A better way of doing it really if the shutter speed struggles with high light levels as apertures will get really small. I remember someone had a rant about a recent Olympus doing this but in practice it is not really a problem as depth of field is so large wide open anyhow with a small sensor.

The f1.4 on the EX2f has about the same aperture as f4 on a 16mm aps-c lens so probably stopping it down is OK but I think you would need to be careful about assuming it would help for a slower lens compact. Edit: My Panasonic TZ60 wide open has the same aperture as f11 on an an aps-c so you are heading into diffraction territory closing up the aperture.

You're quite right though, they are designed for this. It's a bit difficult to dig up actual data though on compacts, DXO has some, my internet is pretty slow right now so I didn't check many yet. I found that the Canon G16 lens is sharpest wide open, also has the most CA at that point though. It's a 12 MP camera, but even at it's best with the lens the effective MP is 5 at the highest and drops down quite quickly to 1-2 MP. DXO didn't have data on the EX2F lens, being a Schneider Kreuznach, I hope that it's better.

Dividing the actual focal length by the f number will give you the aperture area as far as I know. f number just scales the aperture measurement so you do not need to know the sensor size with your light meter. As it is a reciprocal the smaller the f number the wider the aperture. It is interesting setting up a spreadsheet with the cameras and lenses you have and compare the actual apertures at different focal lengths. With a long focal length supposedly slow lens the actual areas can be very large. Anyone please correct errors in this. Sorry to be off topic as I just use jpegs with my EX2f.

ttbek wrote:

I don't know about the "most pressing," but IQ must indeed suffer to a certain degree. You will find that almost all lenses have their performance increase significantly when stopped down a few stops.