Sigma 85mm/1.4 Art

Ironheart

@flip my experience is that the Art lenses render ever slightly cooler than the Nikkors, which tend a bit towards the warmer side. If anything the Art lenses are more accurate, as the Nikkors have always been a tad warmer. Of course this is fixed in a jiffy if you shoot RAW. If you are a JPG'r then you may want to tweak your picture controls, but you are probably already doing that.

Personally if I'm shooting JPG for a family event, I go all Kodachrome and set the picture controls for "vivid" and crank up the saturation to max. Oh wait, that's KR, not me.

PeachBlack

Ooommmpaaaa.... Loooompaaaaaa

WestEndFoto

It is k

PeachBlack said:

As an aside, I almost always desaturate my photos a little bit. It is my firm belief that the vast majority of non-professionals are far too fascinated by saturation and by and large abuse it even when it's not appropriate.

I like this effect. I have not explored it enough to settle on a style, but this is one attempt.

PeachBlack

@WestEndFoto: it's a cool, gritty look, but the guy does look a little ashen. It looks like desaturated florescent light, which will give the skin all the wrong RGB values. I will preface what I am going to say by putting out there that I spend a ton of time on toning, and I generally separate out different areas of the photos and treat them separately. What I am going to say is like a quick and easy version of what to do with skin tones.

In Lightroom: When you put the cursor over skin, in the histogram it will give you a value for R, G, and B. generally, R should be about 10 higher than G, and G should be about 10-15 higher than B for skin tones for white people. I would move temperature and tint around until you get that. After that, I usually bring the Saturation down about 10 and if you'd like, vibrance up about 10.

The general problem with bringing down saturation alone is that the shadowy areas start to look ashen. A way to kind of avoid this in Photoshop is to copy your photo layer, convert it to black and white, and bringing the opacity down to about 10% (more or less to taste). For some reason, this works way better than just desaturating.

Now like I said, this is for normal photos with good lighting. I go crazy with toning as you can see with the photo above, but the skin is still in the range of real skin, and it's definitely desaturated.

Anyway, this is the wrong place for a discussion of skin but there you go.

One more thing: the reason why presets that you buy or download NEVER look like the example photos is because presets just apply adjustment to your base photo. The preset assumes that your photo will look a particular way before it goes to work, and then makes adjustments. The problem is that the initial conditions are different in most cases and very often the photo you have just won't work with a particular preset no matter what. Thus, presets generally either suck or are just a starting point that need to be tweaked.

WestEndFoto

OK, I will try that.

PeachBlack

Even given the usual caveats about MTF charts, these aren't even close. The Sigma stomps the Nikon.

heartyfisher

What I have seen of MTF is you cant compare between manufacturers.. maybe lensrental did a review?

PeachBlack

heartyfisher said:

What I have seen of MTF is you cant compare between manufacturers.. maybe lensrental did a review?

This was an argument that LOTS of people made when the 35 Art came out. The Art MTF was way better than Nikon's and everyone called BS. All later tests confirmed what the MTF clearly showed.

This is usually something that people dislike the results of the comparison say. If the focal lengths are the same, for the most part most differences are minor. Remember: manufacturers will generally use a method that makes them look the best.

Just look. The Art lens MTF is a LOT better. It's not even close. I've used both a ton now and I can say that I MUCH prefer the Sigma lens. It's a lot better.

heartyfisher

I am sure the sigma is great :-) its just a fact that if you are comparing MTFs you need consistent parameters and methodology. Just have a quick look at this review..
Note the multiple lines of MTF plots depending of input parameters even for a single lense.. The sigma and nikon MTFs have different input parameters. Its consistent within Nikon and within Sigma but you really cant compare them directly.. I am not saying sigma is not good .. My fav lense is a Sigma !

https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/01/third-party-ultra-wide-lenses-mtf-comparison/

PeachBlack

Hearty, I hear what you're saying, but you're still missing the point. There are differences in measurement, but they are SMALL. They absolutely could NOT account for the huge differences seen in the above chart. Differences range from about .1 to about .3. That's HUGE.

Ironheart

PeachBlack said:

Differences range from about .1 to about .3. That's HUGE.

Given that MTF ranges from 0 to 1, I'd say that's a 20% difference. What we don't know (and what I can't seem to find out anywhere) is how many line pairs sigma uses to produce those two lines. Nikon uses 10 and 30, clearly stated on the graph legend. If sigma uses 15 and 40 it would easily account for the difference.
Has there been any head to head reviews of these 85s?

When Rodger reviewed the previous sigma 85 the Nikon was king, but his MTF for the 85 looked better, and again here we know the line pair counts (10, 20, 30, 40, etc...)

heartyfisher

@PeachBlack It is a "nice" gap :-)

BVS

I believe it's just the way the world works. One company makes something, and then another company makes it better. 6 to 8 years ago when the Nikon 1.4Gs were released I'm sure they were top of the line. However, time and technology marched on and Sigma released a set of lenses that are sharper than the Nikon ones. One day, when Nikon releases its 1.4E primes I'm sure they'll be better than the Sigmas.

All the older 1.4G primes (24, 35, 50, 85) were seemingly designed in a similar fashion - relatively weak wide open (sharpness-wise), with steep improvements as you stop down, and peak around f/4 ~ f/5.6. The Sigma Art lenses were designed to be very sharp wide open, at the expense of size and weight.

However, looking at recent Canon and Nikon releases (35 1.4LII and 105 1.4E) it appears they've gotten the memo that users value wide open sharpness, so I'd expect future 1.4E primes to be sharp wide open, big, heavy, and expensive.

PeachBlack

@BVS: I don't believe that you are entirely correct. Nikon's latest offerings have been pretty good, but except for the 105/1.4, haven't really drawn universal praise. The 24-70? Meh. The 70-200? Meh. They've done some fun things with coatings and VR, but their optical performance hasn't blown anyone away.

What has become increasingly unfathomable—and stupid—though, is that even as the competition has gotten better, and started to provide equal or better quality and much lower prices, Nikon has continued to drastically increase its prices. It's like they are in complete denial about the realities of the marketplace.

Executive #1: Hey guys! We're losing money as a company!
Executive #2: Let's raise prices then!
Executive #1: But the competition! People will just switch!
Executive #2: Some people won't. We'll just charge them more because they won't buy those other brands no matter what. If we lowered our prices, people would still switch because their lenses are better, and we can't lower prices because we're already losing money. Nope, we'll raise prices and get money from those people who are willing to give it to us.
Executive #1: Good idea!

Either that, or they are just closing their eyes and trying to pretend that it's not happening.

This is not a long-term viable strategy and in the long run Nikon will eventually lose. As I've said before, in the 1980s, Detroit thought itself bulletproof. They built crap cars and charged a ton for them. People had bad opinions of brands like Honda and Toyota because in the past they had built laughable little cars. Then they got serious and started taking on the big boys, even making luxury vehicles. Today, only 3 of the top 10 cars in the US are American.

US carmakers were deemed too big to fail and were bailed out. I'm not sure Nikon will be as lucky.

PeachBlack

@Ironheart -- The DxO scores of the original Sigma and the 1.4g are actually very close (38 vs 40). I don't know what you are looking at, but to me the MTF above for the Sigma is worse than the MTF for the Nikon; indeed, much worse. And yet in the end only a 2 point difference from DxO.

I'm afraid you've just undermined your own argument.

Ironheart

@PeachBlack Not sure I was arguing for anything, other than making sure we have the proper information to make an informed decision. Roger puts the lenses (and usually a bunch of copies) on his own optical bench to run his own MTF charts.

https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2014/09/just-the-lenses-canon-and-nikon-mount-85mm-f1-4-and-1-2-primes/

DxO is only looking at the center of the image where the (older) Sigma was strongest.

Don't get me wrong, I think Sigma makes a great product, and it's great to have the competition for both Nikon and Canon as it keeps them on their toes.

PeachBlack

@Ironheart - Sure thing. The argument that's often made, though, is that "MTF charts are meaningless." I argued that while in theory this was true, history shows that in the case of Nikon vs. Sigma, they are not.

The MTF of the 35 Art was much better than the Nikon 35 and everyone was saying MTF charts are meaningless. Subsequent evidence has shown that the MTF charts were right.

Likewise, the MTF charts above showed that the 85/1.4 of the original sigma should be a little worse than the Nikon, and subsequent evidence has borne this out.

So rather than saying "MTF charts are meaningless," a more rational approach would be to see how synchronous previous Nikon and Sigma MTF charts have been. It seems to me that there are no wild differences in the way they measure things.

So, if I were a betting man (I'm not), given a comparison of the Nikon 85/1.4g and the Nikon 85/1.4 Art, I'd stake that the Sigma would beat the Nikon by at least 5 points in the DxO tests. And I wouldn't be surprised if that number were closer to 10, which is a ton. And this leaves aside my personal experience with both lenses, which in the case of the 85/1.4g is extremely extensive. To me there is no contest, the Sigma is a *much* better bowling ball... umm, lens.

heartyfisher

@Ironheart Thanks for that link to the lens rental 85mm review. Such amazing info he has. I wish he did more lenses. Wish there was a way for him to get some income from the reviews he does you know, like Youtube views get the content provider some money, so he can do more reviews. Maybe some kind of crowd funding scheme where you vote for reviews to be done and pay a few cents when the review process is actioned for your voted lense.