Changing the EXIF

There’s some command line tips buried somewhere here (I did a bunch of work on this last year to be able to profile my Canon EF 80-200mm f2.8 L lens from the nineties. It was always a huge pain in the neck. I never did find a viable GUI for the work despite trying several (OS X), including some paid apps from the app store like ApolloOne and Photos EXIF Editor.

In the end, I’ve moved 100% of the time to Nikon (thanks the the Z6 as the gateway drug, for a solution to shoot my manual vintage lenses). Of the lenses which I want to profile only the Nikkor 300mm f2.8 ED AF-n (the one with screw autofocus) would normally not be profiled but PhotoLab picks up an alternative version (the longstanding manual focus Nikkor 300mm f2.8 ED IF with the same optics). I.e. my problem went away and PhotoLab won again (got rid of the cameras – Fuji – and the lens, this EF 80-200mm f2.8 L which caused trouble). It’s frustrating though when one’s gear is not covered and there’s no way to add a lens profile manually (as I could have done by using the original EF 70-200mm f2.8 L profile).

Between the distortion tool and the Fine Contrast slider in the Contrast palette (requires FilmPack 5 Elite), you can get pretty close to Lens Sharpness. It’s possible to create a Preset to apply to all shots from that lens with the distortion settings matched to the lens and fine contrast about where you want it.

PS. I’d be willing to subsidise the creation of a GUI tool to add alternative lens profiles to EXIF data to trick PhotoLab into applying a different lens profile to the tune of $50. Perhaps if you and I and some others get together we can raise enough money to get someone with good coding skills and an interest in photography/PhotoLab to code a very nice simple GUI app for us.