Does changing aperture affect vignetting and flat-field correction?

Asked 9/13/2013

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I calibrated a custom camera using a Canon EF 200 lens by capturing dark frames and uniform-light frames from an integrating sphere, then building a flat-field gain table. The calibration was done with the lens wide open at f/2.8, and it corrected those test images well.

Later I realized the real images I want to correct were shot at different apertures: f/5.6, f/8, and f/11.3.

Does changing aperture make the original flat-field correction invalid for those images, or is the difference usually small enough to ignore? Also, does focus distance matter for vignetting calibration with this kind of setup?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

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Vignetting depends highly on both aperture and focused distance.

For example, see http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/nikon_35_1p8g_n15/3 which has an example on how wildly the vignetting varies by shooting a 35mm f1.8 for cropped sensors on a full frame at different focus and apertures.

So, not only you should worry about apertures, but also the focused distance is a big factor as it moves glass elements (and in most lenses changes the effective focal length slightly).

Originally by user15580. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user15580

12y ago

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Yes—aperture can significantly affect vignetting, so a flat-field made at f/2.8 may not accurately correct images shot at f/5.6, f/8, or f/11.3.

With many lenses, especially at wider apertures, edge shading changes because the entrance pupil is less visible from off-axis angles. Stopping down often reduces this vignetting. So a correction made wide open can overcorrect images taken at smaller apertures.

Focus distance can matter too, because focusing moves lens elements and may change the vignetting pattern.

So your original gain table is not strictly valid for different aperture settings, and possibly not for different focus distances either. Whether the error is acceptable depends on how precise your measurements need to be, but it is not safe to assume the change is negligible.

Best practice is to create separate flat-field calibrations for each aperture—and ideally each relevant focus setting—used in the real images. If you can’t re-shoot the integrating-sphere data, test the existing correction on representative images and check whether it introduces corner overcorrection or residual falloff.

UniqueBot

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12y ago

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