rangefindermoment - Rangefinder Moment Podcast - Voigtländer ...

 I had purchased the Voigtlander Super Wide Heliar 15mm f/4.5 M  lens recently, as I have always loved to shoot landscapes from this wide perspective. 

The image quality, build quality, sharpness, and overall experience of this lens on the field was exceptional. However (and please remember I'm new to the range finder world), when I started to some post processing in Lightroom 4, I noticed and unacceptable about of magenta shift on the corners. 

Before

 I reluctantly cropped many pictures so that they were presentable.  I shared the magenta-shifted images to Michale M. Cohen. He reminded me that this was very common when using these extreme wide angle lenses. I found that this is caused by the extreme angle at which the light rays hit the sensor when coming from a super-wide angle lens. Michael suggested that I check into the Leica Super Elmar M 21mm ASPH. 3.4 lens.  At $2995.00 U.S retail, that was not going to happen any time soon.

Michael also reminded me, that we had had a discussion about a free piece of software called Corner Fix made just for this type of thing.

Now this free software is wonderful; however, the documentation is difficult to follow at times. You can find more information on this software at the FAQ page.

Once I finally figured it out, I was able to get a significant reduction of the magenta shift. Here is an example of the same image after Corner Fix.

You can see from the image above, that the magenta shift is all but gone.  My conclusion was that my time would be better spent shooting more pictures,  rather than spending time doing post processing to get rid of this annoying defect of this otherwise wonderful lens.

I may one day buy this lens again, or save up for that Super Elmar 21mm. I'm grateful that Corner Fix was able to come to my aid , and although I returned the lens to Adorama (a wonderful experience by the way), I'm going to take that refund, and save it for another wide angle lens, that hopefully can provide a better experience.