How Do We Feel About In-Camera Software-Based Lens Correction? March 2009 Last year I was in the market for a high-quality compact digital camera, and ended up with the Panasonic LX3. It's a great little machine--small, fast, good-looking, and capable of taking quite amazing photos. Indeed, one of the best things about it is its lens--an incredibly sharp 24-60mm-equivalent zoom, designed by Leica. Judging from the camera's standard jpeg color output, the lack of chromatic aberration and purple fringing is striking. It replaced, in my bag, the Fujifilm F30, an otherwise excellent compact camera whose achilles heel was purple fringing. But all is not as it seems with the LX3. Back when I first bought it, I expected that Adobe would quickly release an update to Camera RAW that would allow the LX3's RAW files to be used with Lightroom 2, my photo processing app of choice. The update was slow in coming, however, and I wasn't too wild about the output from SilkyPix, the RAW processing app the camera shipped with. So I decided I would try manually converting the RAWs to TIFs, using the free application Rawdrop, and adjust the TIFs in Lightroom. The results are below, and they reveal that more is going on behind the scenes in the LX3 than I thought. I shot this photo in RAW+jpg mode; the first is the standard-output jpeg and the second is my converted RAW. (Yes, I know the colors have not been optimally adjusted, so sue me.) Panasonic LX3, 24mm, f/3.5, ISO 80, out-of-camera jpeg. Panasonic LX3, 24mm, f/3.5, ISO 80, processed RAW. Okay, so what's going on here? As you can see, the manually processed RAW image has more information in it. Notice the lamppost at lower right--it's quite cut off in the out-of-camera jpeg, and almost fully visible in the manually processed RAW. Obviously the lens gives you really dramatic barrel distortion at 24mm, and the in-camera software is diligently correcting and cropping before it lets you see the picture. SilkyPix, it turns out, is doing the exact same thing. In addition (and this is hard to see in these resized images, but trust me), the manually processed RAW is displaying horrible purple fringing up in the trees, every bit as bad as the F30's. The jpeg, however, shows almost no purple fringing at all. It soon became clear to me that the reason it was taking Adobe so long was that Panasonic was begging them to automatically apply the same corrections to the LX3's RAW files as the in-camera software and SilkyPix did. And in fact, Adobe eventually came through, and did exactly that. The question is, how do we feel about this? At first blush, it seems like some kind of horrible corporate deception. Panasonic is fooling us into thinking its glass is better than it actually is, and the software correction is akin to lipstick, as they say, on a pig. Recent reviews of Panasonic's new DMC-G1 suggest that the same situation applies there: those neat, compact interchangable lenses are not as nice as you think. In the case of the G1, the deception is especially sneaky, as many photo nerds are using that camera as a "universal mount" body for all their old manual-focus SLR and Leica-M lenses. The fancy manual-focus glass isn't being software-corrected, the Panasonic Lumix lenses are, and so you get the feeling that there's nothing so very special about all your Leica bling. In fact, there is--your M lenses are better engineered than the Lumix ones, and don't require the same software corrections. Liars!! On the other hand, I'm finding it harder and harder to care. In the end, I just gave up and now always shoot jpegs with the LX3. For what it's worth, Panasonic's in-camera purple fringing correction is stupendously good: I can't replicate it in Lightroom. And at 10 megapixels, results are indistinguishable, even in semi-large prints, from your DSLR, at least at ISO100. Software correction, it seems, is the wave of the present. And yes, probably the future, too. It is far cheaper and easier for a camera manufacturer to design excellent proprietary software than it is for them to create purer glass, or innovative lens designs. There is, of course, a sense that this is all an exercise in planned obsolescence--the prospect of using these new lenses on future cameras is pretty dim, given that they are made to work only on particular machines, running particular software programs. That is, it's the hardware that lasts, and this hardware does not appear to have its own legacy in mind. Still, those of you who care about actual physical engineering in the camera world will always have your M glass, which, if this whole EVF-equipped mirrorless-SLR trend continues (and I am certain it will), should have a long and healthy life mounted onto a veritable panoply of digital cameras. The difference is that everyone else will be taking pictures as nice as yours, using cheaper equipment. You won't begrudge them that, will you? Text and photos c2009 by J. Robert Lennon.