S95 and chromatic aberration - anyone else?

[imhotep]

I've been shooting with an S95 for about a month and I'm curious if other S95 owners have noticed a problem with CA. Here are some examples:

This is Cable's Mill in Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Tennessee.

100% crop, RAW processed straight to JPEG:



100% crop after desaturating blue and magenta:



Final processed image:



There's still loads of yellow fringing but the worst is dealt with. That might seem like an unusual case but it's actually very typical of what I'm seeing in the daytime photos I took during a week in Smokies. It shows up on just about any back-lit subject and reeked havoc on landscapes with even the smallest amount of filtered daylight, such as around leaves and branches. Another example...

This is near the summit of Mt Cammerer, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Tennesse.

100% crop, RAW processed straight to JPEG:



100% crop after desaturating blue and magenta:



Final processed image:



In this case desaturating only replaced the problem with a less annoying one....sort of. Instead of bright blue branches I get solid gray ones....

Maybe I'm asking too much of a tiny point-n-shoot lens, but I consider this a fairly obnoxious amount of CA. I bought an S95 after deciding to take a break from lugging my DSLR + lenses all over the place. Having a lightweight camera on my hip has been great for hikes and sight-seeing but I'm afraid this is the price you pay with the S95 and possibly others in the same 'league'.

Feel free to tell me "what did you expect, go back to bigger glass if you don't like it". I was just a bit surprised given the S95 is a more serious PNS. Desaturating has proven effective on this images which are loaded with greens and browns, but what if I'm shooting a red barn or a scene with more blues? That subject matter would be neutered along with the CA using this technique.

[elogical]

I compared your shots to some of mine and that looks to be a typical amount of CA for that kinda strongly backlit shot.

I don't mess around with a whole lot of manual adjusting on it most of the time, I just use the automatic lens correction from lightroom with the CA adjustment on the default level. I have it set to do lens correction automatic on all my imports so on a lot of the shots, I never realized how bad the original was until going to look.

It doesn't get rid of all of it by any means but it gets it down to a manageable level that I hardly notice on the full shot. It'd take a lot of adjusting to get some of the back-lot shots to a level where they are usable at 100% though.

[tkbslc]

I had some on the S90, but if you use the free DPP program that comes with the camera to process the RAW files, there is a quick couple click fix in there.

[imhotep]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into the DPP program it comes with. Right now I'm processing all of my RAW files with UFRaw and post-processing in GIMP 2.

[elogical]

It's been a while since I've used gimp, I wonder if you can find or make a profile for the CA correction and save it as an action to apply

[PaulRivers]

What's the exif info on those photos?

I've found that I am seemingly randomly getting some photos like that with noticeable chromatic aberration - but then in other photos I'll take nearly the exact same kind of shot and get very very little. There's a specific photo I have in mind that's several tree branches against a blue sky that has almost none...but then I have another that's also tree branches and leaves against the sky that's absolutely terrible, even at screen size.

My current theory (that I haven't gotten around to testing yet) is that maybe you get more chromatic aberration at f2.0 than you do at f4.0...just the theory I've been mulling around in my head...

[edofloat]

Originally Posted by PaulRivers

My current theory (that I haven't gotten around to testing yet) is that maybe you get more chromatic aberration at f2.0 than you do at f4.0...just the theory I've been mulling around in my head...

Yeah, it seems like there is more CA at f/2.0 for sure.

[MikeFairbanks]

I grew up in CA, so I like it.