Cold cast VS warm cast of your most used lens

Which lens rendering do you prefer? Super clean, contrasty, clinical, cold/normal cast (modern Zeiss Sony) or warmish look/cast, slightly soft wide open (modern Samyang 50/1.4 AF)? Or that does not matter and PS amends everything?

I have experience with many lenses and they all rendered differently. But they tended to be slightly or quite warm on digital.

Pentax 40 limited which is my basic lens now (Oriental knick-knacks, people taking a selfie and the teacher in "no words" are all taken with it) is keepeng the balance between.

softness and color balance aren't related. You can't fully make up for softness in PP, but you can lessen sharpness.

I haven't noticed any particular color cast with any of my lenses, but I have had only two brands (Canon and Tamron) since switching to digital years ago. Do you shoot raw? In-camera JPEG conversions all have specific color balances. Also, if you shoot raw, the initial rendering of the image by the raw conversion software assumes specific parameters based on the WB set in the camera, which may not be to your liking, but they are easily changed.

I prefer the look of Zeiss lenses on my Sony A7/9 cameras. I like their consistency throughout the focal length range of the set. They have high contrast and little flare, even shooting into the light, which makes colors pop, especially greens and blues. They are also uniformly sharp from corner to corner, wide open. My Leica lenses from the '60s have far less contrast, and tend to bring out reds and yellows, highlighting foilage which has seen better (wetter) days. Lens coatings in old lenses is not as good as today. There was always a conflict between more elements (sharpness) and contrast. Old Leica lenses are definitely sharp, which I can't say about old Nikon lenses.

It is very easy to adjust images in Lightroom, including warmth and contrast. However I seldom make changes for that purpose alone, if at all. Ultimately you have to pick a style and equipment which suit your personal taste.

So if we have a look at this photo, it's warm. And it is evident that this is an old lens. Nikkor used to be my favourite, I liked warm cast as the portraits were very good with it film-like. And if we move WB to cooler area still we won't get the Zeiss modern look. As for the sharpness I tested it side by side with modern Planar 50/1.4 ZF and the Nikkor is sharper in close-up to 2 meters while the Planar is sharper from 8-10 meters and to infinity.

Modern 4/3 Olympus glass 25/2.8 in similar light.

The previous shot's contrast was boosted.

Olympus is almost similar to Zeiss but does not have pop.

Do you shoot raw?

Yes I do.

Differences from lens to lens aren't going to make anywhere the differences that are introduced by in camera settings or RAW converter settings.

I can remember putting warming filters on everyone of my RB lenses and going out to shoot weddings. Talking to the printer at my lab one afternoon, he said, "What happened your shooting? Everything used to be spot on and now I have to take some red out of every image?"

Oh well . . .

Differences from lens to lens aren't going to make anywhere the differences that are introduced by in camera settings or RAW converter settings.

Absolutely. If AWB is on, forgeddaaboutit.

People worried even more back in film (analogue to naifs) days. With such tests as these in the old photomags.

Modern Photography 1971-03

I'll confess, however, that I held a suspicion (superstition?) that Nikkor lenses were colder....

I see it deeper. If we take a "warm" lens and try to edit it the way that the image be cool we can do it (we remove warm cast) BUT the final image would not be just like modern Zeiss produces. Our natively warm image would be duller and more lifeless, paler. So the character of lenses is beyond sliders of PS. And old lenses tend to produce more gorgeous B&W photos with many gray gradations with a bit of "dirt" .

Here we see how warm the Samyang is.

Here we see typical film era Nikkor.

old lenses tend to produce more gorgeous B&W photos

Great photographers produce gorgeous B&W photos. Lenses are one of the tools/instruments photographers use to do this.

Not so many years ago, I got new glasses with the best antireflection coating available.

My eye doctor said it was especially recommended for people who use computers

(and stare at screens all day).

It was a very good coating, but the residual reflection was bright pink!

(For many years, I had glasses with no antireflection coating, especially useful

when someone tried to sneak up from behind.)

The next time, I got the slightly worse coating, which has a green residual reflection.

(I remember green reflections for many multicoated camera lenses.)

I suppose that there is some effect on the color in the transmittance spectrum of

coated lenses.

Otherwise, in the film days I always used skylight, 1A or 1B, filters.

For those who don't know (a lost art by now), skylight filters remove UV that

color films are sensitive to, and so gives a bluish cast to pictures in daylight.

But also, they have a small amount of warming, with 1B more warming.

Most people don't like a cold cast for pictures with people, so a slight warming

is good. I might even put a 1A or 1B on a lens for a digital camera.

Otherwise, for digital cameras you can adjust the white balance any way

you happen to like it.

Coatings might have some effect, but very little beyond flare or ghosting. Light not reflected is light transmitted, and with modern coatings, very little is reflected. On th eother hand, optical glass is not necessarily water-white, and some rare earth glass is decidedly yellow. Thorium glass gets even more yellow with age, although it can be restored by exposure to direct sunlight (UV).

As we have found trying to emulate film with digital, filters and adjustments don't always work well when the root cause doesn't track well with RGB choices. Our own eyes, for example, have asymmetric color response, with B and G nearly coincident, and R well to the end of the spectrum.

I see very little difference between Zeiss and Sony lenses, but an easily seen difference compared to old Leica lenses. I'm in kind of a crunch now, but I'll put a comparison together when I have time (and my wife isn't watching). There's always something else I should be doing ;)

If you want to get an head start, shoot something green (foliage). Green rendering is sensitive to blue absorbtion, and the human eye is particularly sensitive to subtle shades of green.

Great photographers produce gorgeous B&W photos. Lenses are one of the tools/instruments photographers use to do this.

Definitely no. That's why some lenses are recommended for B&W photography and that is why Leica created a monochrome camera and the Thambar with a single coating! If that should be so simple with tools then "great photographers" would use smartphones or primitive point-and-shooters. I experimented with many lenses for B&W and they differ like say stock fiddle differs from Stradivari violin. etc. More clearly - like 50-buck speakers differ from 3000 dollar speakers. Like day and night. One lens produces just colorless flat shot the others have thousands of gray shades and flaws, imperfections which goes to drawing style. For B&W portrait I would take an old Helios 58 mm rather than a flat monstrous Sigma Art 50 every time.

Great photographers produce gorgeous B&W photos. Lenses are one of the tools/instruments photographers use to do this.

But still great photographers do know how-to... And still they need their proper brushes. Me, not being great, need one too.

Thambar... I said about this (link)

Coatings might have some effect, but very little beyond flare or ghosting. Light not reflected is light transmitted, and with modern coatings, very little is reflected. On th eother hand, optical glass is not necessarily water-white, and some rare earth glass is decidedly yellow. Thorium glass gets even more yellow with age, although it can be restored by exposure to direct sunlight (UV).

 

As we have found trying to emulate film with digital, filters and adjustments don't always work well when the root cause doesn't track well with RGB choices. Our own eyes, for example, have asymmetric color response, with B and G nearly coincident, and R well to the end of the spectrum.

 

I see very little difference between Zeiss and Sony lenses, but an easily seen difference compared to old Leica lenses. I'm in kind of a crunch now, but I'll put a comparison together when I have time (and my wife isn't watching). There's always something else I should be doing ;)

 

If you want to get an head start, shoot something green (foliage). Green rendering is sensitive to blue absorbtion, and the human eye is particularly sensitive to subtle shades of green.

So having read and examined all online comparings Sony Zeiss 55 vs Samyang 50/1.4 AF I see that Sony Zeiss 55 is cleaner, sharper and has more 3D pop. Moreover it has way better AF.

If that should be so simple with tools

Who said it was simple?

One lens produces just colorless flat shot the others have thousands of gray shades

Yes. A lens may be responsible for shades of gray produced ... not for a photo.

stock fiddle differs from Stradivari violin

Have you ever listened to a great country musician play a stock fiddle and a first-year student play a Stradivarius? There’s a difference between the sound of an instrument (or potential sound) and music! Strange that when laypeople say to photographers, “That’s a beautiful photo, you must have a great camera,” many photographers find it amusingly naive, yet you seem to advocate it.

great photographers" would use smartphones

Many do and certainly will in future.

I'm puzzled by this.

In the old days of film, color cast mattered a lot because--assuming standard processing--the color that hit the film determined the color of the output. That's why even amateurs carried color filters, like yellow warming filters and red filters to accentuate skies.

That's no longer true. there is no "standard processing", and it is trivially easy to change color balance. Since any point in a color space can be represented by the values on any three orthogonal dimensions, any global color cast should be correctable using the three sliders provided in software like photoshop.

Here's a test I would like to see. I can't do it because I now have only lenses from a single manufacturer. Take otherwise identical photographs with the lenses in question, using a scene with a lot of color variation. Include a good spectrally neutral object like a whiBal card. Set WB using the whiBal with the eyedropper tool in ACR or Lightroom. Do no other processing at all. Then compare the results to see how much of a difference in color cast remains.

That would only indicate how much initial difference there is, holding constant WB settings. The next question would be how hard it would be to remove or replicate any difference that remains.

Have you ever listened to a great country musician play a stock fiddle and a first-year student play a Stradivarius?

Hm... let's face it - what guitars do Mark Knopfler or McCartney play? What wires and speakers do they use? Each item of it is more expensive than an apartment or a new car. As a musician, I say that even serious countrymen don't play a junk instrument.

Many do and certainly will in future.

There is an idiom in my place of living "Fairy tales of Vienna woods". Widespread/popular on this site but nowhere else. I have a luck to know some prominent photraphers from Ilya Rashap, Alexander Vinogradov and Mukhina to Rodney Smith (passed away), for what they exhibit, for what by means of they bring home bacon, never.

Mark Knopfler or McCartney

I don't give their instruments credit for the music, though I may give the instruments credit for their sound.

I have a luck to know some prominent photraphers from Ilya Rashap, Alexander Vinogradov and Mukhina to Rodney Smith (passed away), for what they exhibit, for what by means of what they bring home bacon, never.

I'm not impressed by name dropping and am not going to get into a debate about the merits of iPhone photos.

That would only indicate how much initial difference there is, holding constant WB settings. The next question would be how hard it would be to remove or replicate any difference that remains.

I did not carry such experiment but having some old lenses I say old lenses can not replicate top grade new digital era lenses.

You can make little by sliders, coz WB is a part of the task. That is why in my numerous examples and links warm lenses stay warm. That is why for making some movies (

I'm not impressed

But millions of people are. Being in photography for very long, and being a tetrachromat according to tests, including Rabkin tests, believe me, I do know and understand what I say. As for smartphones I have allergy on them. So don't.

I do know and understand what I say.

Saying that lenses produce great photos shows me you don't understand what you say. The fact that you know three photographers millions of people think are great tells me nothing about whether a lens is responsible for a photo.

I used to be an avid cyclist though I never got involved in pure bike racing, I did a number of triathlons and would do occasional training rides with racers. I should clarify, these were training rides for me. For them it was just for fun.

And I participated in a number of online cycling forums. There were frequent and very similar arguments about equipment vs the rider. And actually an interesting study done about who benefited more from better equipment for distance rides, - amateurs or professionals. And it turns out that better equipment made more of a difference for slower riders than faster ones. The theory as to why this was true was that the small differences between bikes added up over time, so the longer you spent on the course, the greater the benefit.

Of course the study was sponsored by a major triathlon bike brand, - so take it with a grain of salt. ;)

It's well understood though that the small difference the bikes make pales in comparison to the strength of the rider. If you want to spend money to improve your times, hire a personal trainer and forget the new bike. I'm sure the same is true for cameras.

So what about iPhones?

One thing that was fairly universally agreed upon that frequently gets overlooked is bike fit. There are people who make a living doing "custom fits". All the way from shoes to pedals/cleat position, to crank arm length, frame size, seat tube angles, stem length, bar shape, tire width, inflation PSI, etc, etc. This affects aerodynamics, pedal stroke, and of course comfort.

What does that have to do with phone cameras? A bike that fits you and your riding style is going to be better than a more expensive bike that doesn't.