Why I don't post more often, perhaps diffraction effects are working in my brain :)

Last Thursday I decided I would do some photographic tests to see just what Fuji's LMO or Lens Modulation Optimizer does compared to not using it.  I did some shots of the trunk of a paper bark tree around the neighborhood.  This was probably not the best choice of test subject, since only a narrow band would be in the area of focus.  I have plenty of brick wall's to shot but the proverbial joke about folks taking pictures of brick wall's instead of  'real' photographs is in my mind whenever I see one and am tempted to take some 'demo' shots.

So, I found the area of focus and created a table of 500 x 500 pixel extracts from each aperture with LMO turned on.  To create the non-LMO comparison I decided I would use a raw converter since LMO is only applied to Fuji's in camera raw to jpeg engine.  Of course the obvious solution, which I realized only last night, was to use the Fuji's in camera raw engine to develop the exact same way but with LMO off.  That would be the KISS way to do it.  And no, I do not mean the rock band KISS.   So perhaps it was for the best that I got caught up in a protracted search for more information.  Here's what happened and why this comparison is still unpublished.

First distraction was using the raw converter, I have Photo Ninja and that was my first choice.  The color's are not the same as Fuji's jpegs and I can't really get them the same in post processing as I am a little color challenged.  While I was doing the post processing I realized that I also have a deconvolution sharpening plugin from Focus Magic and I could use that and compare it to the Fuji LMO results.  It has been claimed, but not by Fuji, that I can find, the LMO is a deconvolution operation.  Fuji does claim that it works selectively between the edge's to the center of the image.  Straight deconvolution, like used by Focus Magic, would effect the entire image equally.

So off I went to do some research and see if I could find  more sophisticated deconvolution software to compare against the Fuji.  It was then that I found some old code created by John Costella over a 2 year period and released in 2001.  http://johncostella.com/unblur/  I then got distracted from there because he had developed this code to process  the infamous Zapruder film of the JFK assassination.  The results of this sharpening and reconstruction of the film frame by frame was claimed to prove that the film was significantly altered if not faked in it's entirety.  It's not my intention to weigh in on that argument, but I did find it interesting and it in turn lead me back into the seemingly endless material on the assassination.  I spent a few hours on that before I realized I dropping down the rabbit hole again.

Then preparations for Christmas began and I needed to take some holiday photo's and do other things.

So that's how that happens with me, I start out to do one thing, then a small amount of second guessing sends me to the internet to make sure I am not making a fool of myself, which seems nearly impossible to prove on the internet :)  I feel like I am an internet James Burke with a new series of 'Connections' episodes. Before I know it, day's if not weeks have passed, I have pursued and dropped several other lines of research and have lost my zeal for posting anything at all.  Then I have a break through as described above and am now thinking of going out with my tripod and using a brick wall.....

But wait a minute, have I actually examined the evidence I do have in hand?  Not closely it turns out, so I spend some time with that and it looks like I can see differences in detail both between lmo on and off and between lmo and focus magic.  Better yet, the differences are greater at higher apertures where diffraction blurring is most pronounced.