Some neat editing.

Panasonic LX-1, 28mm, 1/1000, f/3.6, IS 100

Snapped in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The editor of this little comedy had even gone to the trouble of trying to match the paint color, and while I may not agree with the result, it is every bit as tedious to be constantly reminded of the purported existence of a supreme being (it’s even on the currency, for heaven’s sake!) in what is averred to be a secular society. In America, it seems, there’s more religion involved in running for elected office than even the next Pope has to contend with. Bizarre.

Technical note: The widescreen format of the Panasonic LX-1 is a welcome feature here. The small sensor and stretched lens design needs quite a bit of sharpening and chromatic aberration correction – here are my default import setting in Lightroom – bear in mind that I use the camera at its widest lens setting almost all the time. That means 6.3mm, equivalent to 28mm on a full frame. Chromatic aberration falls as the lens is zoomed.

Lightroom import setting for the LX-1

While the LX-1 has been obsoleted by the current LX-2, I would guess things did not change in this regard as the lens on the LX-2 is the same. You can read about automatically applying these corrections in Lightroom here. If anything, I would guess that more sharpening is called for with the LX-2, owing to the overcrowding caused by all those extra pixels on a miniscule sensor, each competing for every photon of light.

There’s a significant amount of barrel distortion at 6.3mm/28mm, too, and when it matters I use the ImageAlign plugin to correct that, round-tripping the file through Photoshop CS2. I believe ImageAlign has been discontinued but similar native functionality exists somewhere deep in the bowels of Photoshop CS3. Unless your subject is one dictating straight lines, it’s generally not an issue.