24-240 / 24-105 7.1 / 24mm IS comparison

jwilliams wrote:

highdesertmesa wrote:

FWIW, the 24-105 STM is much better corrected using RAW and doing so manually in Capture One — it corrects to where it looks better than the 24-240 in the corners at 24mm. Canon didn’t do enough peripheral sharpening correction in their processing, and Lightroom/Adobe simply mimics what Canon does in-camera. On the 24-240, the distortion correction is too extreme for extra sharpening in the corners to make any difference. My guess is that given the resources available during the pandemic, Canon engineers didn’t pursue peripheral sharpening on the 24-105 STM because it hadn't helped the the 24-240.

Would love to see some examples if possible. I have the f71. and 4L versions of the 24-105. Love the size/weight of the f7.1, especially on the RP. I don't yet have SW setup to do RAW conversions so I can only see JPG results. Would love to see how much native distortion the f7.1 has and how it can be cleaned up so to speak at 24mm.

I'm terrible at RAW processing, but I have wondered how the f7.1 version would perform if you did the distortion correction manually and didn't try to get all of it out. In other words partially correct the distortion while leaving some of it in hopes that sharpness would be better. For scenes without straight line this might produce better results.

I didn't have my original 24-105 STM test shots any more, so I took a few new ones. I took a series at 24mm from f/4 through f/16, and f/8 was the clear stand-out winner for best corner performance. I think when I did this last time, I was looking at f/4 or 5.6, which I don't think the in camera corrections can clean up as well. Anyway, when processing them manually, I think it's pretty much a wash compared to in-camera. There may be a bit more detail when corrected manually, but the in-camera corrections are better at chromatic aberration correction, so I think that gives an edge to Canon's JPEG versus what I was doing. Here are all three for reference on the R6. Differences probably become more apparent on the R5 of course.

I did notice on the R6 it has a new setting (or at least I never noticed it on the R) under Digital Lens Optimizer – options for Standard and High. Perhaps these lenses (24-105 STM and 24-240) would benefit from the High setting.

No correction applied to the RAW – this is the optical performance of the lens. Not great, but not as crazy as the uncorrected 24-240.

Corrected RAW in C1 Lens Correction Panel: Distortion: 92; Sharpness 250; Light falloff 7

In-camera corrected (DLO) JPEG