I’ve received requests to take a look at the distortion of the Fujifilm 20-35/4 GF on the GFX 100S. This being a thoroughly modern lens on an equally-modern camera, there are two kinds of distortion to consider. The first is the distortion the lens produces on the sensor, and the second is what you see after the distortion has been corrected automagically in your raw developer.
“Wait a minute!” I hear you saying, “If the distortion is corrected without my doing anything, how can we look at what it was before it was corrected?”
Good question.
The camera does not actually correct the distortion. It merely puts instructions in the metadata that tell the raw developer to correct the distortion. Some raw developers, like Lightroom (Lr) and Adobe Camera Raw, look at the metadata and silently perform the corrections. Then you never see what the lens is actually doing. But some raw developers either ignore the correction instructions entirely or allow the user to defeat them. I used RawDigger to evade the corrections — which Lightroom may or may not be performing for a lens this new.
There is some barrel distortion at 20 mm.
There’s a little pincushion distortion at 28mm.
There’s a lot of pincushion distortion at 35mm.
Now we’ll look at how well Lr corrects the distortion with the default settings.
Darned near perfect.
Excellent.
Hard to beat that.
Troy says
From what I’ve seen so far this is a 20-30mm zoom which is great!
SD says
Seems to be a great lens. But unfortunately CaptureOne is still not supporting that lens and LR seems to overtake C1 in terms of corrections like auto vignetting removal etc…
Whats going on at CaptureOne?
Ettore Tubino says
Still not supported
JaapD says
In C1 you can select ‘manufacturer Profile’, right? This should fully and completely do the trick. In my opinion Fuji’s profile is preferable to C1’s created profile. In sevaral cases I see that C1 crops heavier, unnecessary, w.r.t. Fuji’s profile. And I’m sure Fuji perfectly knows how to create a profile for their own designed lenses.
Hakan Yesil says
Capture One does not support the Fujifilm GF 20-35mm lens. Yes, still. This issue cannot be resolved using either the Manufacturer Profile or the Generic option. The photos appear as if they have no lens profile applied at all — straight from the factory.
I specialise in architectural photography, utilising HDR techniques combined with flash for localised lighting effects. In Capture One, I reset all adjustments before processing. I also disable Auto Align and Auto Adjust when creating HDR.
After merging, the HDR image’s lens profile changes to Generic, while the other exposures have different profiles. When I open these images as layers in Photoshop and start masking, the misalignment caused by these inconsistent profiles prevents the images from lining up properly.
This issue is very disruptive and seriously affects my workflow — it’s making Capture One unusable for me. By the way, great lens. Fujifilm’s Profile matches perfectly in Lightroom.