This will be a basic guide to how to process photos created by Motion Six’s Cinema lenses. Processing your image is a good idea of you’re working for a client or the photographs are going to be blown up to a large canvas. The aim of this post is to get you started with the processing of the image which you can add your own techniques and flavours to. Generally, Cinema lenses don’t require much processing however, it’s advisable that you “Pretty Up” the images when working for clients or if the image is going to be displayed to the public.
The photo you below was taken with a Cinema 58 lens with and oval aperture. We used a Canon 5D MKII with with a RAW JPEG. This image was shot on a low ISO and shutter setting to get a artistic vignette effect inside the camera. If you’d like to see more photos shot with Cinema lenses, visit our Image and Video gallery.
Curves
Using a simple “S” curve for the main value, we bring some contrast back to photo. You can also use Levels, but we prefer curves as is has a nicer visual presentation which we can copy to different photos without copying values.
Chromatic Aberration
As with all lenses, there will be minor chromatic aberration. However, with Cinema lenses CA is super low. You don’t even need to do this step though, we’re really fussy about clean images. Chromatic abberation with Cinema 58 is super low. However, with Cinema 29 there will be some considerable amount of CA and will need a higher setting for image correction.
Lens Distortion
Cinema 58 has little to no lens distortion. However, Cinema 29 will have some edge distortion due to being a wide lens. A general rule of thumb is not to shoot foreground object with wide angle lenses. We applied a minor lens correction filter to our image to make the image appear more “Symmetrical.”
Digital Noise Reduction
The photo we’re processing was shot at daytime and with outdoor lighting hence there is very little digital noise to clean up. The amount of clean-up that you’re photo is going to require depends on camera settings and lighting of the shot. For this particular shot, minimal amount of noise reduction was used; mainly for the parts underneath the trees.
If you’re shooting footage, we made a post on how to Denoise Your Footage Using Open Source Tools.
Pulling flare information
A lot of the time, the flares will get buried in the image due to compression and colour data. This is quite common with RAW file operations as there i quite a lot of dynamic colour information involved. Although this isn’t a major issue, it just means we have to bring the flare colours back to our image. The image we shot had very subtle flares on the edges as there were no bright light sources to full activate the flares. A Red coated Cinema 58 lens was used to create this image hence we used an “S” curve to bring back the red flares on the edges of the images.
The result should be a generic “cleaned” photo as it were. The next step of the process will be colour grading for artistic looks.