Looking to Yesteryear
Today would have been the annual Pinedorado Parade in Cambria. But instead we must satisfy our nostalgia by looking back at last year's. These cars are always my favorite part of the event, and to me they are the very spirit of nostalgia made tangible. Now, on top of that feeling, even a photo of them from last year is a look back to another era, when we were relatively carefree and couldn't imagine that one year hence we'd be living anxiously in a quasi-wartime world.
Anyway, on the technical side of it, I continue to be impressed by how Capture One handles my RAFs. And consequently I'm also gaining new respect for my Touit. It's often stated that it doesn't have the Zeiss pop, and it's true that it does not give the pronounced sense of depth and form that I get from my vintage 25mm Distagon, but I realized today that when C1's lens correction is applied, it doesn't straighten out barreling as I expected, but instead appears to correct for pincushioning, and as a result of either its inflating of the center (or maybe it's actually undoing a baked in correction?) the lens suddenly gains some Zeiss pop! The flat subject reaches out as soon as the correction is applied, and suddenly the Touit isn't just an optically capable lens, it's the Zeissy lens I think we all want it to be. Maybe not to the extent of some of the classics, but this lens already conveyed depth better than the XF35, and now it's been given a still greater advantage in that area. Seeing the results it's capable of in attractive lighting has reaffirmed my decision to set aside the XF in favor of the Touit several years ago.
This also reminded me of five years ago when I was shooting almost exclusively with my Nikon and 35/1.8G, which is a very barrel distorted lens that utilizes significant in-camera correction. When I started shooting in raw and processing in Lightroom, I was surprised to find that I was consistently turning on the distortion correction, comparing the results, and then turning it back off. While the lens needed the correction to not obviously distort straight lines or very close subjects, in normal uses I realized that correcting the lens flattened the results, while leaving it distorted preserved more depth and realism. What I discovered today with the Touit in C1 was the same thing: turning its correction on was the same as turning LR's off for the Nikon, only the effect is even more pronounced. So not only is this a pleasing discovery in itself, it's also a bit like running into an old friend.
Edit: I looked it up and the Touit does naturally have slight barrel distortion as I recalled. And the OpticalLimits review notes that C1's correction strangely corrects it from 2% barrel to 1% pincushion. And yet, in my version of C1, it appears straight to me without correction, and when correction is applied I see barrel added. So I don't know what's going on, and I haven't tested enough to draw conclusions, but it feels as if the barrel is being corrected automatically, and C1 made a decision to apply an aesthetically pleasing correction that overrides the automatic? If that's not the case, then I just have no idea why its correction adds barrel to a lens that has it to begin with. Whatever the case, I'm glad they do what they do.
(DSCF1641c)
Looking to Yesteryear
Today would have been the annual Pinedorado Parade in Cambria. But instead we must satisfy our nostalgia by looking back at last year's. These cars are always my favorite part of the event, and to me they are the very spirit of nostalgia made tangible. Now, on top of that feeling, even a photo of them from last year is a look back to another era, when we were relatively carefree and couldn't imagine that one year hence we'd be living anxiously in a quasi-wartime world.
Anyway, on the technical side of it, I continue to be impressed by how Capture One handles my RAFs. And consequently I'm also gaining new respect for my Touit. It's often stated that it doesn't have the Zeiss pop, and it's true that it does not give the pronounced sense of depth and form that I get from my vintage 25mm Distagon, but I realized today that when C1's lens correction is applied, it doesn't straighten out barreling as I expected, but instead appears to correct for pincushioning, and as a result of either its inflating of the center (or maybe it's actually undoing a baked in correction?) the lens suddenly gains some Zeiss pop! The flat subject reaches out as soon as the correction is applied, and suddenly the Touit isn't just an optically capable lens, it's the Zeissy lens I think we all want it to be. Maybe not to the extent of some of the classics, but this lens already conveyed depth better than the XF35, and now it's been given a still greater advantage in that area. Seeing the results it's capable of in attractive lighting has reaffirmed my decision to set aside the XF in favor of the Touit several years ago.
This also reminded me of five years ago when I was shooting almost exclusively with my Nikon and 35/1.8G, which is a very barrel distorted lens that utilizes significant in-camera correction. When I started shooting in raw and processing in Lightroom, I was surprised to find that I was consistently turning on the distortion correction, comparing the results, and then turning it back off. While the lens needed the correction to not obviously distort straight lines or very close subjects, in normal uses I realized that correcting the lens flattened the results, while leaving it distorted preserved more depth and realism. What I discovered today with the Touit in C1 was the same thing: turning its correction on was the same as turning LR's off for the Nikon, only the effect is even more pronounced. So not only is this a pleasing discovery in itself, it's also a bit like running into an old friend.
Edit: I looked it up and the Touit does naturally have slight barrel distortion as I recalled. And the OpticalLimits review notes that C1's correction strangely corrects it from 2% barrel to 1% pincushion. And yet, in my version of C1, it appears straight to me without correction, and when correction is applied I see barrel added. So I don't know what's going on, and I haven't tested enough to draw conclusions, but it feels as if the barrel is being corrected automatically, and C1 made a decision to apply an aesthetically pleasing correction that overrides the automatic? If that's not the case, then I just have no idea why its correction adds barrel to a lens that has it to begin with. Whatever the case, I'm glad they do what they do.
(DSCF1641c)