But the mkII offered some very concrete benefits. Almost doubling resolution is a big one, even though it’s a relatively tame increase in linear resolution. Live view is something I’ve been wanting for a long time along with auto sensor cleaning. Video out of this thing is just incredible and it’s hard to believe the results you can pull out in low light.

Along with the camera upgrade I’ve decided to pull the trigger on a change I’ve been contemplating for a while: A switch to primes. Most of what I do is landscape work, much of which is happening on a tripod. I’ve used Sigma EX zoom lenses for a while, which in my tests at f8 and f11 are largely the equals of their canon equivalents at least in the ranges that I commonly use at least in terms of sharpness and chromatic aberration.

But dedicating some serious time to the cheap and wonderful 50mm f1.8 convinced me that I needed to consider moving to primes full time. I got sharpness out of that lens that is unmatched in any zoom in the 50mm range, including canon’s L series zooms. And being a landscape photographer who prints large, sharpness is one of my chief concerns. Other 50mm primes offer benefits in other areas, like bokeh, construction toughness and wide open image quality that I just don’t need. I need a lens that is just dead sharp corner to corner at f8 and f11. The 50mm 1.8 is a really cheap way to achieve that.

So I’m happy with the 50mm choice, now I need to fill out the range of coverage I’m going to want. I ran a report on my lightroom database to see what focal lengths I typically capture my images at. It was a distributed histogram to be sure, but it had definite peaks. 28mm, 50mm, 80mm and 200mm.

Now 28mm was as wide as one of my zooms could go and 200 was as long, and there were a good bit of images that played in that ballpark. but the bulk were living in the range of 45mm-90mm or so.

So I built a wishlist of lenses that seemed like they would fit the bill without breaking the bank:

1. Canon 24mm 2.8
2. Canon 35mm 2.0
3. Canon 85mm 1.8
4. Canon 200mm 2.8L (maybe)

Kelli thoughtfully got me the 24mm 2.8 for Christmas and I threw it on the 5D2 in anticipation. I had checked resolution charts for the lens and knew it wasn’t the best out there, but wide angles are a tough lens to get right and usually have significant shortcomings.

This lens was just terrible. At both f8 and f11 it was horribly unsharp in the corners and displayed really bad chromatic aberration. So I went back to the intertubes and did more research and while I think my copy was worse than what I’d seen online, this lens never really gets that great. So it was returned. I ordered a replacement 28mm 1.8 last night. All the online testing shows this to be a wickedly sharp lens at f8, so I’m expecting the goodness.

With the move from 24mm to 28mm, I doubt I’ll end up getting the 35mm f2. It’s just too close to the 28mm in coverage.

I ordered and received the 85mm 1.8 and wow this is an impressive lens. The HSM is really quiet and it focuses really fast. But most of all, this little puppy is just sharp as all get out. Color is great and if anything, the contrast is a little too high. Raw file sizes can sometimes be indicative of image detail captured (along with a lot of other factors like how complicated the scene is and how much dynamic range you’re capturing) and this lens is the first I’ve seen to put me into the 35MB per RAW category when using good exposure technique.

I’ve largely only used the 200mm range while working on panoramics in order to get closer in and allow me to produce larger stitched images. This can be great, but I’m not sure how much I’ll actually continue to use this. I might want to sneak up to 135mm on some occasions, but I want to get into the field more and get a feel for where I’m missing that 200mm reach. I’m guessing it won’t be that often.

So for the time being, I’m set on a 28mm, 50mm, and 85mm and we’ll see if I need to push out to 135mm or 200mm.

In my last post about the difference in detail rendering between Raw Developer and Lightroom, I gave Lightroom a little too much credit, by sharpening in photoshop instead of Lightroom.

So I wanted to so you an example that more clearly illustrates the problem.

As a quick reminder, Lightroom and Camera Raw in my opinion are too aggressive when suppressing noise in the demosaicing portion of raw conversion.

This image is a 200% enlargement of a file processed in both Lightroom and Raw Developer. It’s meant to show Lightroom’s tendency to bring out “worms”. The default image is Lightroom and if you mouse over the image, you will see the Raw Developer file.

The Lightroom file seems plasticy with large areas of color flattened out creating a cartoony or water-paint look. It screams “digital photo”. The effect can be somewhat suppressed by bringing the detail slider up very high while using very little sharpening, i.e. less than 20. I’ve tried a variety of different configurations, and this was the best I could make this file look while still sharpening it, i.e. the more you sharpen, the worse this effect gets.

The Raw developer image on the other hand, looks like an enlargement of a photo. Tonal transitions are smooth and the image looks very realistic. I should note here that I did very conservative unsharp mask sharpening on this image in order to do as much an apples to apples comparison as possible. As I said in my previous post, Smartsharpen in PS and R-L Deconvolution in Raw Developer produce a much more detailed image.

I think the problem is a combination of things. As I showed in the last post, a RAW file demosaiced by both programs and sharpened only in Photoshop clearly shows that Raw Developer is doing a better job than LR. However, it looks like Lightroom’s sharpening is at least partially to blame for the “worms” look that many files take on when sharpened. I think this is from the adoption of the PhotoKit Sharpener algorithms. They generate great results for most photos, but with fine detail like this, they really seem to fall down.

In Phil Holland’s review of the Canon 5D Mk II, he blames this smearing and water paint effect on the anti-aliasing filter. In his 100% crop of his tree photo, you can see another clear example of the problem. I’d be willing to bet this image was processed by camera raw. If Phil reprocessed in Capture One or Raw Developer, I’m sure he’d see that the anti-aliasing filter isn’t what’s causing the loss of resolution he’s seeing.

Once again, I have to recommend that if you’re shooting fine detail images you owe it to yourself to download the demo of Raw Developer and give it a try. I really wish the lightroom team would adopt the demosaicing approach that Brian has with RD because I love lightroom for everything else.

UPDATE: I’ve seen some comments back and forth on the luminous landscape forums about whether or not Raw Developer is simply sharpening micro-noise and not actually exposing more detail than Lightroom. There is a claim that you can get similar results by simply adding noise in Photoshop. On my 5DMK II, I can tell you for certain that Raw Developer is exposing more actual detail, which Lightroom is smearing out. To show the point, I’m going to give you another example.

Here’s a RAW file from a shoot from late last year.

RAW FILE [30MB ZIP]

Open this up in Raw developer and in the SharpNR tab, choose R-L Deconvolution with a radius of .6 and iterations of 30.

If you can make the file look better than that (from a sharpness standpoint) in Lightroom, I’d love to know the settings you’re using.

Michael Reichmann himself has pointed out that he uses capture one (which produces results very close to Raw Developer) to avoid the shortcomings of Lightroom’s RAW handling.

I can see the differences in prints, especially if I’m doing any amount of enlargement. The difference is subtle, but it’s definitely there and definitely visible to the naked eye.

Also, don’t get me started on the lightroom printing bugs. Ugh.

Here is an example. Lightroom on the top and RAW Developer on the bottom.

Actually, I cheated a little bit. Lightroom sharpening is just terrible on this image. So I do no sharpening, opened in Photoshop and used smart sharpen at 150% at .4 radius. This looks much better than the sharpening offered by Lightroom.

The RAW Developer version is using the R-L Deconvolution sharpening at .6 radius with 30 iterations.

You can see that the lightroom version looks “smeary”, killing all fine detail in the sand and rock. The RAW Developer version looks more film-like and certainly seems to be pulling out a lot more detail.

As far as I can tell, and from a short correspondence with Brian Griffith of Iridient, much of the difference you see is because Lightroom is being more aggressive about noise reduction in its demosaicing algorithm, even with all noise reduction turned off.

To test this, I processed a file with RAW Developer, and turned off sharpening. I then sharpened with both smart sharpen in PS and R-L deconvolution in RD. Both looked virtually identical.

There is some noise in the skies with the RAW Developer file, but nothing that lightroom masking can’t take care of. I really hope that the Lightroom team will make some effort to bring this level of detail into the lightroom engine and offer the ability to increase the noise reduction if necessary.

Update: Lightroom 3 Beta has made changes to the RAW processing image that give results virtually identical to Raw Developer. Good job Lightroom team!