William Robb wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Dayton"
Subject: Re: PESO - Soft
Not bad. The effect is pretty good, but not exactly like a soft focus
lens. I have seen many attempts with PS to duplicate and have yet to
see the same thing. I suspect one issue is that when the picture is
taken, the actual depth of the image comes into play with the lens
effect. When in PS, you are really working on a 2 dimensional image
so have a difficult time simulating the depth.
I was going to comment on this earlier today, but was short of time this
morning.
I believe soft focus lenses are using uncorrected spherical abberation
to create the effects that they produce.
Interesting. They are very pronounced, thats for sure. I have borrowed
one from another list member and will post some pics taken with it and a
comparable non-soft lens of the same focal length.
If you want to emulate the old portraiture style, then short depth of
field combined with spherical abberation is what is required, along with
lighting that has a fairly rapid fall off.
What do you mean by the last bit, like vignetting?
Gaussian blur doesn't really do it.
I know, I just use it as a layer to add some scattering effects to the
sharp image. Its the closest I can get. Did you see the second pic:
http://www.g0nz.com/images/k2softaprox.jpg
Its basically a gaussian of the original plus some level adjustment, on
top of the original with about 20% opacity or so. I think it came out
much better than the first, where I tried to get fancier by trying to
upsize the image before blurring, so I would get a kind of ghost effect.
I've been leaving the sharpness settings on the camera at their minimum
setting, which seems to work as well as modern equipment can for classic
portraiture.
I have an old 7" Aldis Anistigmat that I bought from Dagor77 a while
back. At some point, I hope to mount it to a lens board and see what it
does.
Apparently, they were the cats ass of portrait lenses in their day.
Post some pics when you get around to it!
Thanks for looking
rg
William Robb
