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Sharpest EF compatible lens?

D

Damian Grady

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Hi there,

Anyone got any EF compatible lens recommendations for achieving the sharpest images?

We have a couple of zooms - Canon L 24-70, L 70-200, Sigma 12-24 - and a 50mm prime but for me the images are not as crisp as I would like.

Any help would be very much appreciated.
 
You might need to consider at what f-stop you are shooting. All lenses have a sweet spot, with those on your list likely around f5.6.

Further to this a little post sharpening can go a long way, but use it sparingly!
 
Do you have the EF 24-70mm 2.8 II & 70-200 II 2.8 or the older versions? Latest versions are extremely sharp. After them, you just get primes (e.g. Otus, Sigma Art, Canon CN-E, some Zeiss ZE). But as Ben said, most lenses are adequately sharp when shooting f/5.6-8.
 
Try Sigma 18-35 if you want zooms, or Sigma Art series if you'd like some primes
 
The sigma art are very sharp....especially the 50mm....
 
Damian Grady said:
Hi there,

Anyone got any EF compatible lens recommendations for achieving the sharpest images?
Click to expand...

You might do well to throw some science at the problem, specifically by controlling your variables. Can you make crisp images on your Canon camera but not your RED camera? If so, you need to sharpen your R3D images to overcome the RED OLPF. If you are unhappy with the crispness of your EF lenses on your Canon camera, of course they will be disappointing on the RED.
 
Might consider trying the Canon 24 TSE as well.

Thank you very much

Fury
 
Sharpest Canon-Mount lenses? Zeiss Otus! Both of them. Those are the best still lenses you can get, especially for film work.
SIGMA Art too, not all of them, but the 50 and 35-primes and the 18-35 are great. I haven't tested the 24 so far, but heard good things.

Aside from that, i can get sharp shots out of a Canon 24-105 L or the 50/1.8. As others said, it's a matter of finding the sweet spot (f-stop-wise) and then dealing with the unsharpened RAW-footage.
 
Assume you've also checked your FFD (back focus) is set correctly?
 
ericyoung said:
Assume you've also checked your FFD (back focus) is set correctly?
Click to expand...

That's a good point. I haven't checked the back focus since we sold our RED FOCUS. However, our EPIC-X is currently having its innards upgraded to DRAGON so would I be right to assume that RED will check the back focus is spot on before sending it back?
 
Another small note - I would recommend adding some sharpening on output to your Red footage.

There is zero sharpening added in camera, and other manufacture'rs cameras often add some degree of sharpening even at "Zero" or "-10"

the perception of sharpening and sharpness can be drastically different depending on your output settings and even the way you are debayering.

Granted the original 24-70 2.8 L is more of a round nub than a sharp tack. If viewing in RedCine X and checking for sharpness, I often find the frame I want to check sharpness on and click to full debayer (unless you have a rocket this can be slow at times) but will let you see more dramatically whether you nailed focus or if detail is lacking in a shot.
 
Damian Grady said:
That's a good point. I haven't checked the back focus since we sold our RED FOCUS. However, our EPIC-X is currently having its innards upgraded to DRAGON so would I be right to assume that RED will check the back focus is spot on before sending it back?
Click to expand...

I never assume anything! :smile:
I would ask them to specifically check.
 
Damian Grady said:
We have a couple of zooms - Canon L 24-70, L 70-200, Sigma 12-24 - and a 50mm prime but for me the images are not as crisp as I would like.
Click to expand...

You will find Dragon is sharper than MX because of the OLPF. The MX OLPF is really aggressive and overly softens the image. With that said, sharpening needs to be applied to Red footage because they do not pre-sharpen the image. The Otus lenses are the sharpest EF lenses around. I have the Otus 55, 85, Canon TSE-24 MK II, 24-70 MK II and 70-200 MK II. Otus has better contrast, is sharper and less CA than the others I mentioned.
 
I'll add that you really do need to sharpen ( unsharpen mask ) all RED footage pretty heavily to punch through their OLPF, any version on any camera. The detail is "there" but that should be on all RED output, along with noise reduction.
 
I have been doing some work with deconvolution (dcon) to recover lost detail. Here is a file that has the source file, the dcon file and a difference image showing you the pixels touched. This was not meant as creative sharpen but rather capture sharpen. Goal was to simply recover lost detail. Creative sharpen would happen later.

This is very early work. Not actually using a true point spread function (PSF) at this time. The idea is you shoot a chart at a given f-stop and focal length. You then run the captured image and the image used to create the chart through an algorithm that figures out the proper PSF kernel to undo the blur. Its a slow process and a lot of work, but if you want to extract all of the detail from an image, it is an interesting idea. Right now, it is really unoptimized and takes around 3-second per iteration. The number of iterations is adaptive. My sample image collection goes from 4 up to 20 iterations per frame.

This was also done on the Y channel in XYZ space, which is linear light. I will probably go back and do it on each channel using a different PSF per channel. This might allow it to also reduce chromatic aberration of the lens. I also want to look into ACES space vs. linear light RGB. For this, I did run the frame through ADD to reduce noise. The dcon does use damping to not sharpen noise.

I like to zoom into the image 1:1. Then switch back and fourth. Take a look at the front of the grill on the truck as well as the signs on the trashcan.

Image has not been graded. I think it was simply RG4 / DC2, white balanced on something in frame and then used ADD and exported as a 16-bit TIFF. I converted to 16-bit PNGs just to take advantage of the lossless compression. I also stripped out ICC profile information. Long term plan is to export as OpenEXR and process and then when Red adds ADD to SDK I will read the R3Ds in directly. May also put into an OFX so it can be used in 3rd part apps. This is a long ways off. Need to test a lot more content.

I think this frame was the Otus 55mm at F8. I wanted as much in focus as possible. Also had the Motion Mount installed and was set to 2-stops of ND.
 
Charles Bergquist said:
I'll add that you really do need to sharpen ( unsharpen mask ) all RED footage pretty heavily to punch through their OLPF, any version on any camera. The detail is "there" but that should be on all RED output, along with noise reduction.
Click to expand...

I have played around with Sharpness and Denoise settings and the puzzling thing is, they don't appear to do anything. I have zoomed straight into 200% and adjusted from 0 to 3 but these 2 sliders appear to do nothing to the image. I do get the little 'processing' circular symbol when I move them but no noticeable change in the image.

Am I doing something wrong here?
 
Try the Canon TS-E 24mm, f/3.5L II Tilt-Shift, preferable at F/5.6 (Manual lens with a long focus-throw!)

Yes, the Sigma Art prime series is certainly one of my favorites in this point as well.
But, not that I have one, Zeiss-Otus 55 or 85, with no doubt.

I have the impression that a high compression ratio, if lots of details are in the image, takes sharpness/texture.
 
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