In the last couple of days, two widely conflicting opinions have been published on the Leica zoom lens which ships with the new Panasonic Lumix L1 camera. Vincent Luc, writing in Réponses Photo, is disappointed with it. Not that it is bad, but he finds that the sharpness and contrast are simply not up to the expectations associated with Leica. He does, however, add that there might be some scope for improving matters in post-processing. Now, Vincent Luc is no idiot, and the review is well considered and comprehensive, nothing like the recyled PR and datasheets that most web sites pass off as "reviews". One website which certainly does not fit that in category, however, is The Luminous Landscape. Michael Reichmann, in his L1 review, has a radically different view:

"Having taken many hundreds of frames with this lens during my week in Iceland I can tell you that this is one first-rate optic. No formal tests are needed to let me know that this lens is sharp, contrasty, and quite free of any serious aberrations – at least those visible without conducting a formal test suite".

Going back to the post processing issue, it is interesting to pick up on a recent post by Colin Jago, discussion in this case the sharpness in general of Olympus E-1 images (let's just imagine that the E-1 has the fully compatible Leica zoom attached). He observes:

"(...) one of the things that you always have to bear in mind is that you only have 5 megapixels to play with. Further, these are quite soft megapixels (the anti-aliasing filter). Whilst I think that properly sharpened native resolution prints from the E1 can be fantastic, (...)".

So what is everybody actually talking about here ? First, whilst I suspect that the Vincent Luc's results are based on JPGs, I'm sure Michael's and Colin's are based on RAW. The almost diametrically opposed opinions of the lens sharpness and contrast are striking. But... is Michael talking about the results as seen (and maybe optimised) in Adobe Lightroom?

Both Colin and Vincent Luc talk about recovering sharpness lost by the anti-aliasing filter, and this where I really start to lose the plot. An AA filter is a low pass filter, usually with an abrut cutoff. It is designed to prevent the sensor from recording high frequencies which it cannot unambiguously resolve. I don't want to go into a long discussion on filtering here, but in this type of setup essentially any data blocked by the filter is gone and no amount of post-processing can bring it back. Frequencies near the cutoff frequency will be attenuated. In photography terms, this translates as an irrecoverable loss of fine detail, or more accurately, a limit on the level of fine detail that can be captured. This is obviously extremely simplistic, and people could - and do - drone on for hours about it.

Sharpening in software can give a percerption of a more detailed image, by subtle enhancement of the actual detail. But doesn't make the lens sharper or more contrasty.

The approach of evaluating the camera-lens pair using DxO's system seems to be the only consistent way to review digital systems. But when the reviewer is looking at photographic output, as the three I quote here are, then the software plays an equally important part, and should be explicitly declared.

>Perhaps we should start to talk about lenses in a different way, saying for example that on camera X, processing with software Y, lens Z does not limit resolution or inhibit contrast. Then maybe it becomes easier to understand how two highly competent reviewers can draw such different conclusions.


So, is the Leica lens a dog or a gem?

I've been an avid listener to George Jardine's Lightroom podcasts, and whilst I'm still not really convinced by Lightroom, I have to say I really enjoy the podcasts. Jardine come across as a really excellent product manager, keeping the conceptualistation, expectation management and focus of the project under tight control, whilst sounding relaxed and enthusiastic. I'm sure it is an exciting job, and one that I'd grab in a millisecond given half the chance, but it must also be extremely arduous and stressful. The downside of growing up in public like Lightroom is is that the whole world can see every mis-step, and also expectations start to go out of control. Every potential customer expects the product to be tailored exactly how they want it, and will scream loudly when it doesn't. And of course, in the unlikely event of Lightroom failing, the product manager will be the first in front of the wall. Unlike some, George Jardine doesn't try to oversell Lightroom. In fact, he hardly tries to sell it all. He puts it on display, provides a lot of background, builds up a nice ambience, and lets it speak for itself. Certainly, after every podcast, I'm keen to start it up again and have another look – although since I'm usually listening during my commuting on train, tram & foot, I can't, really. When I do, I'm still not convinced that the overall concept (shared by Apple Aperture) works for me, and I still find the user interface overwhelming and often obscure. But the interesting thing is, after each podcast, I want to love it. I guess I'll get hooked sooner or later.

The new Panasonic L1 has been previewed by Reponses Photo (excellent French print magazine). As they say, on paper, a collaboration between the makers of the Lumix compacts, Leica and Olymous should be something special. But they're disappointed. Whilst they are quite enthusiastic about the general concept, the build quality, and the degree of control, there are a series of downsides.

• The "Live View" feature simply isn't as useful as the version on the Olympus E-330, mainly because the screen is fixed. However, unlike on the E-330, apparently you can use auto-focus without restrictions.
• The optical viewfinder is dark and cramped, and the physical design, which sticks out 1cm at the back, is simply asking to be damaged. They reckon that the eyecup will be lost within days.
• The handling is a bit clumsy, as balance, with the kit lens attached, is front heavy. Which exacerbates the viewfinder design issue.
• The "Leica" kit lens is interesting, but the aperture ring is awkward to use, it is very heavy, and whilst its performance is good, it does not meet the expectations associated with Leica.
• The camera is very expensive, twice the price of the E-330, which they consider to be a better camera on balance.
• Still stuck with that rather tired old Olympus AF module
• Did I mention too expensive ?

On the plus side:

• Panasonic provide Silkypix RAW software rather than reinvent the wheel (poorly), although arguably it would have been better to also use DNG format.
• The lens isn't all bad: as RP points out, this is the first stabilized zoom lens from any company with a decent maximum aperture.
• They describe the flash design as "genius": it has two positions, the first pointing 45 degrees upwards for bounce flash.
• The image quality is reported to be good up to 800 ISO.
• The camera also includes 3:2 and 16:9 ratio setiings, and this is where Panasonic's implementation of Live View adds an extra dimension. But of course these sacrifice resolution.

At half the price, well, maybe. But at 2000 Euros, though, it looks like Panasonic have screwed up this one. Pity.

Over the past few weeks, I've made a considerable number of updates to this website. Most of it was behind the scenes, cleaning up and rationalising code, but I have introduced some visual updates. The photography main page now has less text and more photos. The text has been moved off to a new "Info & Contact" sub-page. The photos on the main page are taken from 4 searches:

• A random selection from the full gallery
• A random selection from the last 16 to be added
• A random selection from 16 of my personal favourites
• And a random selection from the 16 most popular - most viewed - photos on the site

Unfortunately, I didn't notice that I'd inadvertently broken the mechanism that counts accesses, which has been running for about 6 weeks. Except that it the last two weeks, it was stuck at 2806... I've tried to make the gallery list a bit more obvious too. I hope it all works for you - please let me know, or leave a comment here, if any seems broken, or it just doesn't make sense. I'd really appreciate it.

Since I have a received a good few questions about my workflow, particularly from Olympus E-1 owners, I though it was maybe time to write something about it. Note, I do all of my digital photography on Macs, so I'm afraid this workflow is Mac specific, or at least the RAW conversion part is. I use three core tools on my workflow:

• Microsoft iView Media Pro, for ingesting, preview, preliminary sorting, and cataloging


• Iridient RAW Developer, for RAW development and image processing


• Adobe Photoshop, for image post processing and output

I also use Colorbtyte ImagePrint for printing, and FixerLabs SizeFixer for scaling up. For RAW processing, I sometimes use PhaseOne CaptureOne Pro and Olympus Studio. For Lumix LX1 RAW processing, I usually use Adobe Lightroom Beta. I only use Adobe Camera Raw in special cases, for example if I want to use Photoshop's HDR tool. In all cases, you can assume I'm using the latest versions of each application.

Stage 1: Ingesting
The first part of the workflow involves getting image files off the card and into the computer. I use MediaPro to import and rename the files, and to apply a basic personal metadata template. I don't really have a solid naming scheme, but I at least rename files to include a code indicating which camera the file comes from, and the date. I let MediaPro assign a serial number. Actually, the best renaming software I've seen is Olympus Studio, which allows you to use EXIF fields as components of the file name. The important thing is to have a unique name, and to keep it throughout the pipeline. In this way, it is possible to sync metadata in between different catalogues and different filetypes (so for example the captions from E1_20060603_0091.ORF and E1_20060603_0091.JPG can be synchronized. My filing system is quite simple: I have a master hard disk for RAW files, with folders for each month. Within these folders, I create subfolders whose structures depend a bit on the nature of the shoot. Usually, I create a folder for a single day, e.g "2006_06_03" (that's 3rd June…I'm European), but I might create a folder for a multiple day "shoot", e.g. "Iceland March 2006". No hard and fast rules, just whatever makes sense. If I end up using CaptureOne, it will require its own sub folder structure to be created inside this folder – at least, if you prefer to keep things simple it will. Other RAW developers will leave settings files inside these folders too, so it is important to ensure these remain safe. I generally back up each folder to DVD – one or more, as necessary, although this is not ideal, really, since the backup only store settings files created up to that point. I also keep an automated working backup using Retrospect. I maintain two "master" RAW catalogs for Olympus ORF and Lumix Raw (converted to Adobe DNG) respectively, and these automatically update. I plan in the future to manage archive backup creation from these catalogs (using a script to record the archive volume names in each image's metadata), but I haven't got around to that yet.

Microsoft iView Media Pro

Stage 2: Preview
Once the files are organized, I create a local catalogue using MediaPro – by this I mean a catalogue of just the RAW files in the particular folder. I set MediaPro to produce the largest, highest quality previews it can create. I then use the comprehensive previewing and rating tools to decide which images I want to work further with, and how I want to categorise them (for example, I might well have "fun", "family" and, er, "art" shots from the same shoot. MediaPro 3's new Lightbox tool comes in extremely handy here, although it is very important to note that you are working with an 8-bit preview here, so the histogram for example is of the preview, not the 12bit RAW. However, it is easily good enough to show if an image is irrecoverably over- or under-exposed, and the method is fast and effective. At this point I will delete any files which are really trash, although if in any doubt, I keep them. Disk space is cheap. I end up with sorted, rated files, and I can even print contact sheets if I wish.

Stage 3: RAW Processing
For RAW Processing in the vast majority of cases I use Iridient RAW Developer (IRD). IRD, thankfully, has the good taste and common sense to be "just" a RAW developer, and has no pretensions to act as a full blown "workflow manager" (no, I'm not going to get sidetracked). IRD has drawn praise from a number of reputable sources, and is possibly the most full featured product in its category. Certainly it can't be beaten on sharpening options. Initially IRD seems very complex, but the complexity is only there if you need it, and it doesn't get in the way. It also often provides several ways to reach the same end, for example tone curves and tone sliders (I prefer curves, because Photoshop forced me to understand them, and Bruce Fraser's books explained them). IRD is especially highly rated by black & white aficionados, but, typically, I don't use it to B&W conversion. I tend to open RAW files in batches of related images, by selecting them in MediaPro, right-clicking and opening in IRD (this works as well for Olympus Studio or Camera RAW, but not very well for CaptureOne – ironically, since there is some sort of marketing alliance between CaptureOne and iView…well, there used to be, pre-Microsoft). Once the photos are open in IRD (note how I use "photo", "file" and "image" interchangeably), they can be selected from the open files drawer, and processed in turn. I won't go into detail on how I use IRD here, but my default settings for E-1 ORFs include using light "Difference of Gaussians" sharpening as "capture sharpening" – although I'm beginning to wonder if multi-stage sharpening is necessary considering the lack of artifacts IRD introduces – and using ProPhoto as the working colour space, and Joe Holmes' ExtaSpace as output space. My principal output files are 16 bit TIFFs, which I save in a temporary holding folder called "IRD Output". I also sometime process directly to JPG for print or web, but for my web galleries I use a set of Photoshop actions (coming later).

Iridient RAW developer

Stage 4: Post-processing
Currently I use Photoshop (.PSD) format as my final archive format, for fully processed images. There are several reasons for this, number one being layers, although even I'm not using any layers, I still save as PSD for consistency – if I see a PSD file, I know it is "finished", or at least it has been worked on. The second reason is that at least 25% of my output is still film-based, and my film workflow always culminates with Photoshop. I don't know of any compelling reason to change this practice. Therefore, I open all files from "IRD Output" in Photoshop, and at a minimum save them as PSDs on another disk volume, which is my "finished work" repository. Here, I simply maintain a folder for each month, and save the file into the current month's folder (I use MediaPro, not the filesystem, to catalog, so it doesn't matter if a photo I took in March 2005 ends up in the January 2006 "finished" folder). Depending on the photo, there are several things I might do in Photoshop. Generally, I will have sorted out tone in IRD, but I might run a local contrast enhancement action to see if it adds anything (I have evolved a variety, which act on different tonal ranges as necessary – usually I find excluding highlights is a good idea). Noise reduction is often required on E-1 files taken at 800 ISO or over, sometimes at 400 as well. For this I use the Noise Ninja plug-in. If I decide to convert to black and white, I use the Convert to BW Pro plug-in on a layer. I save files unflattened, although I might compact things a bit if they get out of hand. The "finished work" gets cataloged in my "reference" MediaPro catalog, where I add detail metadata, and construct various sub-catalogs and sets.

Stage 5: Output to Web and Print
Output requires sharpening and sometimes scaling. If I'm outputting to print, I take the PSD file, and set the output size as necessary. If the resolution drops a bit below 240dpi, I will scale up using Photoshop, but if it is well below, I use SizeFixer SLR. Once I get to the target size, I use Photokit Sharpener to apply output sharpening (note, for SizeFixer, it appears that sharpening before scaling is quite successful, but how Photokit's algorithms react to this, I'm not sure. Whatever – if it looks right, it is right). I then flatten the file, and save it as a copy to a temporary print folder, where ImagePrint picks it up. For my web galleries, I run an action which converts to 8bit, sRGB, then creates three different sizes of the file, appropriately sharpened, in an output folder hierarchy. The largest files are managed in a MediaPro catalog, and this is synchronized with my online mySQL database using a set of Applescripts, which glue MediaPro, MacSQL and Transmit FTP together. There are ways of using scripting additions to do the SQL and FTP parts, but they are complex, and not worth the trouble to me. The Applescript is very specific to my configuration, but I'm happy to send it to anybody who would be interested to see if they can adapt it.

So that's basically it. It takes longer to write about than to do it. The foundation stone is obviously MediaPro, which is a very powerful, but subtle application. The fact that Iridient RAW Developer constrains itself to doing one thing very well makes it very easy to introduce into a composite workflow. And Photoshop remains Photoshop... At some point I will follow up with my film-based workflow, but it isn't really so different.