Panasonic LX3 and Post Process Cropping
Many despair that the LX3 zoom
stops at 12.8mm (=60 mm) at the tele end. This can be fixed by using
cropping in post process in the computer (or at any photo lab booth)
and for some situations you can safely double the zoom effect to say
about 120mm equivalent or more.
For starters, here's a quick example of what can be done......
Here's a picture taken at 12.8mm (=60mm), ISO 80, f/4,
1/800 sec, Aperture priority mode with Standard Film set to minus 1 for both Saturation and
Contrast and Exposure Compensation set at minus 0.33 EV. It's the whole
16:9 image but reduced of course to 800 wide for display purposes, no post process at all so
looks a bit flat and unsharp.
Next below is a crop of the above, I cropped it from the
original 3968 x 2232 size to 1837 x 1033 size in FastStone Viewer, that
crop makes the result equivalent to using a lens of 129.6 mm
[(3968/2232)*60=129.6 mm] and the result again was downsized to 800
wide for ease of display, again no post process at all so looks a
little dull and unsharp.
Finally below is a true 100% pixel crop of the original image
at 800 wide and not fiddled with so again looks a little unsharp. If
you did this crop for screen display (never print at this crop factor)
it would be equivalent to a 297.6 mm lens [(3968/800)*60=297.6 mm].
In that 100% crop you can start to see the in-camera
jpeg artifacts appearing so a better idea would be to set the film used
to minimum Sharpness and Minimum Noise Reduction and then fix those
later in post process for a cleaner file for cropping like this. Or you
could use RAW files to do the same in post process.
The
result is that for screen display or small prints then a fair degree of
post process crop can be applied, if wanting to print large then maybe
you can not crop so much so may be stuck with the 60mm limit.
