Tested with 117-35 AFS, 18-70 AFS, and 85 1.4D with some high dynamic range scenes and mostly all have chromatic aberration (bluish-purplish) somewhere. I wanted to know if this is acceptable or a trip to Nikon Melville is on the agenda.
Optical chromatic aberration will usually disappear by enabling Chromatic Aberration Correction in Nikon Capture 4.3. I see at most trace amounts in your photos.
I see nothing in your photos that I haven't also seen with other brands. Any trivial chromatic defects that are present are dwarfed by the unappealing lighting and processing of the photos.
I don't know how you processed the photos, but at least the one with mother and child on the pier appears to have been smeared by overly aggressive noise reduction (or something else) which results in an overall melted-plastic look. I always shoot raw, so if this is an out-of-the camera JPEG, check your parameters as the results are quite poor IMO.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
All the above were NEF's, then opened with Capture 4.3.1 and transferred as 8-bit Photoshop CS2 files. I then saved a copy within CS2 and either do auto-level or auto-contrast before doing a 150% unsharpened mask before saving into JPEG for WEB posting.
The one at the pier was shot with an extremely strong 330PM EST sun with plenty of ground and water reflections. The use of the SB-800 diffusion dome may have added more to that artifical look. What troubled me were how all the overhead wires have that weird bluish/purplish color.
I purposely tried to create a high/low dynamic range inside the room tobring out the CA.
Paul
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Around such extreme light and darks and thin things like wires no lens and camera that I have seen would do much better. I don't see CA here but a bit of halation around the edges of light windows etc. Hope it helps. Everything looks fine to me, don't spend too much time sweating this stuff it will only make you nuts and keep you from making images.
Alex
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
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Lloyd,
I purposely tried to create a high/low dynamic range inside the room tobring out the CA.
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What confuses the issue is the question of (1) optical chromatic aberration (of which there are two kinds), which is a property of the lens, and (2) the loosely-used term "purple fringing" around areas of high contrast, which is a property of the camera (in my experience).
The former (lens-induced) shows as red on one side of an edge (even low contrast sometimes) and cyan/green on the other and sometimes (though harder to see) yellow/blue.
The purple fringing seems to occur only in high contrast areas, and is definitely camera-dependent, with the Nikon D70 exhibiting far worse behavior than the Nikon D2X. Whereas optical CA gets worse away from the optical center, the purple fringing does not vary across the frame, which is the way to recognize it.
Confusing the issue is the fact that both effects can occur together.
The good news is that there is very minimal CA on most of Nikon's ED lenses and that the Chromatic Aberration Control option in Nikon Capture gets rid of virtually all of it. In fact, it even reduces or eliminates it when used with 3rd-party lenses, even shift lenses fully shifted!
This gives otherwise excellent lenses like the 10.5/f2.8DX fisheye, the 24/f2 AIS and 28/f2 AIS a new lease on life; they have severe color fringing which is nearly eliminated by C.A.C. in Nikon Capture. Nikon screwed up on the 10.5/f2.8DX by allowing way too much color fringing, but C.A.C deals with it very well, except in the far corners.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I know about the Enable Color Aberration Control in Nikon Capture Editor 4.3.1, but never really see it "working" or "in process". Is there a progress window? Is there a way to see the changes it made?
Similarly, I can never see how the Capture dust off function work either, as there too, there is no before or after window.
Paul
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Linear Mode
