There are some odd things about this picture. There are small spots of smudginess eg the shoulder of the guy in the peach coloured shirt and baseball cap.
The sea also looks a bit strange, almost chunky textured like oil painting.
Is that noise reduction at work, perhaps?
I don't know what Ted might have done with that. It's a crop from the original OOC jpeg, and since it's a jpeg from a crop of a jpeg, there could be some artifacts visible. At the time I shot that photo, I was using Landscape color mode, if I'm not mistaken, and I may have even allowed some noise reduction to happen, or maybe Sigma defaults to more noise reduction, when the camera is in Landscape mode, because of the extra sharpening that it applies to those images.
I now use Portrait color mode, because the camera sharpens those jpegs less, and when I turn down the sharpening all the way, it really does turn it down almost all the way. The halos are almost non-existent in Portrait color mode, but in Landscape color mode the halos are really obvious, even when Sharpness is turned all the way down. I don't know what level of noise reduction is applied (I have it turned all the way down now), but I would guess Sigma set the noise reduction pretty stron in Landscape mode, in order to kill the Quattro sandiness that we were seeing when the Quattro cameras first came on the market. As Roland has pointed out a few times, ALL Sigma cameras, with their Foveon sensors, require noise reduction, and in-camera jpeg production would involve at least some noise reduction, or they'd produce noisy jpegs. I wonder what the situation is with the fp, with regard to noise reduction in the camera.
