Basic Photoshop settings for RAW JPEG conversion.. EX2F?

Greynerd wrote:

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.

No errors.  The area will be large for those large lenses, but they are still fairly slow.  This is because despite the larger aperture their increased length reduces the amount of incoming light by cutting down the angle of view.  This is why the ratio of length to area is a good indicator.

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.