Should I turn lens compensation off on my Sony a7 III?

I’ll be shooting RAW uncompressed so should shading, chromatic aberration and distortion lens compensation be turned off in the camera since PL3 does that? I don’t want to double apply any correction.

Yes - that’s the best way to proceed, Tom. Sony does not “bake” corrections into their RAW files - so, technically, it should not make any difference - - but I reckon it’s best to avoid any chance for confusion.

John M

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That makes sense. Thanks.

Unless this affects the jpg embedded preview image in the raw file and you want to see the effect and compare it with what PL produces.

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Yes, certainly. Thanks.

I don’t know a thing about Sony’s A7 III Raw file format, but RAW should mean raw—that is, it should always be the actual sensor data. If it’s not the actual sensor data, then it’s not really “raw”, right?

ISO scaling usually occurs before the sensor data is turned into numbers by the digital-to-analog converter, so that’s one exception, but I don’t know of any others. The corrections you mention are probably added as metadata to the RAW file and applied only to the preview JPG.

If you shoot RAW, this setting, like a lot of others, makes no difference.

You could leave them on, but, again, it won’t matter to PL. If the corrections aren’t “baked in” to the RAW file, then it’s not like PL will somehow magically know how to make them—I assume the algorithms are proprietary to Sony. PL will either use its own settings or none at all. The only way PL would use the camera’s settings would be if you shot and processed JPGs.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. The programmers at DxO could reverse-engineer the camera’s algorithms, but I think it’s unlikely given that they have their own.

I could be wrong, but I would be disappointed with any RAW mode that wasn’t really “raw”. Some of the settings probably require demosaicing and if you do that, it’s definitely not a RAW file.

Bottom line: Turn them on or leave them off, it shouldn’t matter. PL won’t double-apply them. It shouldn’t matter to any other RAW processor either, except, perhaps, one from Sony, which could read the metadata and would have access to the correct (Sony) algorithms.