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Cheap little Spiratone Portragon Lens for DSLR

Jim Galli

Member
_DSC4286BWs.jpg

mexican wedding

While in Oregon last week my daughter and I were priveleged to donate our combined photography to this sweet couple above. We worked for the joy of watching the dancing and all the Sangria we could drink. There was lots of loud Mariachi music, lots of dancing, and a 5 gallon pickle bucket of home made Sangria wine. FUN!

Asher was asking about the soft focus lens in the Rowan Portrait thread.

These little Spiratone Portragon's typically fetch about $50 on ebay. They have a thread mount with a host of adapters possible. There is no aperture, it's at f4 for better or worse. They really don't lend themselves to color photography and the picture above is a clear example of why. The lens is nothing but a simple meniscus. All three colors land in a different focal plane so the blue purple band is what you see with color.

Still I photograph with it in color and then convert the images in PS. My work flow goes something like this; (not as difficult as it looks)

Open
Convert to grayscale (discard the color info)
Convert back to RGB
Levels (in levels I simply hit the 'auto' button for a beginning, then I choose 'blue' and tweak it to a ghastly yellow, then red to tweak it back towards brown. Yechh. It looks like dog doodoo at this point.)
Hue Saturation (I desaturate to about 96%. This gives the almost imperceptible warm hue you may or may not see)
Duplicate Layer (choose soft light for this layer. Use the Opacity slider to adjust to taste.)
Flatten Image
Curves (final tweak for contrast to please)
Image Size (as needed)
Done.

Something fun to try although it's maddening that it's just about useless for color images.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jim,

Would it be sacrilige to cheap soft focus spiratones to use the softness but correct just the chromatic issues of RGB focusing differently? After all, it would be only one extra step in the workflow! Then one can enjoy the blur but not the superimposed edge triple lines, even in B&W.

With deference to the little green men, we won't change the green then, only the red and blue! :)

Asher
 

Jim Galli

Member
Jim,

Would it be sacrilige to cheap soft focus spiratones to use the softness but correct just the chromatic issues of RGB focusing differently? After all, it would be only one extra step in the workflow! Then one can enjoy the blur but not the superimposed edge triple lines, even in B&W.

With deference to the little green men, we won't change the green then, only the red and blue! :)

Asher


Asher, honestly, I wouldn't have a clue how to do that, in fact I would be very surprised to find out it is possible. Time is, well, time. Someone might take the challenge to prove it's possible but let's say you had a package of 150 wedding photos and you wanted 20% to be soft focus just for the effect and then of those you want about half in color. Is it going to add hours to the necessary work flow? If it does, you'll be looking for a more expensive lens that doesn't have the chromatic aberations but still provides a pleasing look. For me at least this lens only has the possibility of B&W. I'm interested to see what you can do though. Wasting time is......sacriliige?
 

Ken Tanaka

pro member
OK, I'm having a teachable moment here. You can correct that nasty blue purple line in one step? I'm all ears.

From the menu: Filter > Distort > Lens Correction

Although I admit that the c.a. in this image is so awful that I doubt you'd be able to completely fix it with this filter alone. You'd probably have to use the filter to shift the halos to a relatively pure color that you could eliminate with a Hue/Sat layer.

Or you could just shoot it well to begin with. <g>
 

Jim Galli

Member
From the menu: Filter > Distort > Lens Correction

Although I admit that the c.a. in this image is so awful that I doubt you'd be able to completely fix it with this filter alone. You'd probably have to use the filter to shift the halos to a relatively pure color that you could eliminate with a Hue/Sat layer.

Or you could just shoot it well to begin with. <g>

LOL, thanks Ken. Ya made me laugh. I knew you wouldn't be able to resist that last. What, just put a modern lens on and make a perfect picture?? How blasé :~')) Not to worry, my daughter took care of the important pictures with her D70s.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
LOL, thanks Ken. Ya made me laugh. I knew you wouldn't be able to resist that last. What, just put a modern lens on and make a perfect picture?? How blasé :~')) Not to worry, my daughter took care of the important pictures with her D70s.
Jim,

As a matter of fact, all the Canon G series cameras have CA aberration at the wide end. I's too much to expect these lenses to be perfect. So one can really improve the line of the the R, G and B with standard adjustments in Photoshop or Adobe Raw. Once you know the numbers that work for that setting, they can be used for all such pictures in a batch mode. In fact you can have an action made into a droplet on your desktop. Just drag the files there to be corrected.

Asher
 
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