Getting the most out of the RF 16mm f/2.8

I have done an editing experiment with a shot from an R5 with the 16mm f/2.8 and the the results are interesing. The RAW was edited first with DPP with DLO on, then with LR in ACR and then in DXO Photolab 6.3. The DPP result has the smallest angle of view and the most expansion of the image. LR corrects a bit farther out and gives a wider angle of view. With Photolab, you can turn off cropping and see the entire corrrected image. Subsequently cropping that image to a rectangular shape results in a slighlty wider than 16:10 aspect ratio and a much wider field of view. If the DPP image is actually 16mm, then the PL6 image looks closer to 13 or 14mm and the corners aren't that bad. The only noticeable defect was that PL6 didn't catch all the CA on the upper left corner, but I was able to correct it (as shown here) in LR with manual mode. There was no attempt here to match color temperature and this image had immense contrast that had to be corrected in LR, so there are some color differences, but that is not the point here. PL6 turns that little 16mm pancake (almost) into a significantly wider lens with quite usable results. The last frame is the the cropped PL6 image after a pass through Topaz Sharpen and now we have a really snappy image.

Developed in DPP with DLO on

Developed with Adobe LR in ACR

Developed in DXO Photolab 6.3 and cropped to max usable area

PL6 image sharpened in Topaz Sharpen

Corrected but uncropped image from PL6

If the last image is cropped to 3:2, it will lose some width, but still wider than either DPP or ACR. Also these images are all at original resolution, and note that the rectangular PL6 images have less pixels, because they have been corrected, but not scaled up to the original camera resolution (as they are automatically in DPP and ACR) but they are still sharper. If upscaling is needed, then a fractional setting in Topaz GigaPixel would likely produce the best result.