New S9 and workflow advise

[GastAlf]

Hi folks,

I have recently bought a S9 kit 18-40 and I tried to review what is already available on camera and lenses on this forum and elsewhere finding many interesting subjects for my better understanding of its functioning.

I am a milanese in my 50s and I always liked photography, although I have never felt inclined towards manual controls and big gear. So I ended up practising with premium compacts first (canon and sony) and in latest years with premium photo phones (currently using Samsung S23U) with heavily modified and optimised gcam.

So I felt that the S9 concept of a FF with a contemporary digital approach could allow me to grow in terms of photo (and to a lesser extent video) performance and bring my experience to a new level. Maybe this sounds sacrilegious to real photographers but I hope you can nevertheless accompany me in this FF new world.

After necessary presentation, I would like to describe the status of my intended new workflow for photo mgmt (not done much editing before now) as I tried to learn from various online suggestions and in order to check with more experienced users/get hopefully further advise.

I decided to use IrfanView as a photo manager, Rawtherapee as raw converter and jpg basic editor, Darktable/Hugin for few HDR merge and KDenLive for a little video editing.

My main problem up to now are that I have not found lens correction profiles for lumix 18-40 for RawTherapee not even through the Adobe DNG converter (no lumix lenses seem to have profiles there and I do not understand why).

I have written much already but I just want to thank everybody sharing knowledge in the forum and I hope you can give me some direction. Grazie 1000

 

[Thearch]

Hi GastAlf! Congratulations on your new purchase, I have been shooting on an S9 for a year now and it is a cracking little camera!

Unfortunately I have no experience with the 18-40, as I bought my kit before it was out, but until now I have used apple photo and Photomator on iPad and have had no issue with lens corrections with 5 different LUMIX S lenses.

One suggestion as somebody also coming from smaller sensors: even though full frame has some benefits at smaller apertures, such as better tonal gradation and many times better resolution (the same absolute resolution is more easily achieved on a bigger glass), it really comes into its own with a bright lens: if I may suggest you might try the LUMIX S 50 f1.8, it is one of the most affordable lenses in the system, with great sharpness and rendering and swift autofocus. Then you would really enjoy the benefits of the format also in terms of available light photography and shallow depth of field.

Either way, all the best and enjoy photography in Milan, it is a very photogenic city (really missing it, I can only come back once per year now)