Voigtlander Color-Skopar 21mm f/4 VM P – Made For Film, Can Work For Digital.

Ok, that title does not exactly roll off of the tongue. This post will likely not resonate with lens purists seeking M mount perfection. Understandable. But I had found myself in the unenviable position of becoming attached to a less than perfect lens before I realized the full extent of its faults. But, I found a workaround to meet my needs.

As Hamish mentioned in his recent post about the Remaster Slim lens kit, “We chat often via email about whatever latest bit of kit we are playing with…”. A recent exchange I kicked off had to do with the subject of this post, the Voigtlander Color-Skopar 21mm f/4 VM P.

I was sharing that the lens journey started out with promise and then risked going sideways before I found a workable solution… for me. I will explain in more detail below. Then Hamish stated the following:

“I find this sort of thing interesting – we can’t be the only ones out there that geek out to this level?!… …There might be a little article in this if you’d be up for it?”

Where it started

I will spare you my full many year M mount journey. That started years ago before my post here about a group of Artisan lenses. I made peace with them. Then a ZEISS 50mm f/2 ZM entered the fray, followed not long after by a 50mm-ish M mount many for one trade towards a Voigtlander 40mm f/1.2 VM. I like this lens, which despite my prior allegiance to the Artisans put me on the hunt for wide and portrait length Voigtlander M mount lenses. The portrait part of the program went very smoothly. The Voigtlander Heliar Classic 75mm f/1.8 VM is perfect for my needs. On the wide end, I found the Voigtlander Color-Skopar 21mm f/4 VM P. All was well at first. That is an understatement. I immediately became attached to this lens and it unexpectedly displaced my 40mm as my most used lens for daily carry. It was a great fit. Great colors. Sharp wide open. Easy to manual focus and zone focus. Worked perfectly with film.

Before I talk about digital there is something I would like to mention. Since I use aperture priority with my M Typ 240 I manually set the lens profiles so that the shutter speeds are adjusted properly. No lens profile matches, since Leica lenses are listed of course, but I find a lens close enough to get the job done. For the 21mm f/4 I used the Leica 21mm f/2.8 profile. All was well. Was snapping away like a madman and really liked the results.

Then about a week in seemingly out of nowhere a prominent magenta vignette popped up. I was baffled. Why had I not seen this before? Was prominant in photos with light corners. Had I not noticed it before? No. I had plenty of photos like that with few issues. Upon closer review some magenta was found in a few pics…

…but nothing like what I was now seeing now. These photos were unusable as is. Then after some study I realized something.

Wrong in camera profile

The earlier images had the benefit of the Leica 21mm f/2.8 lens profile. With these new unusable images I had switched from the 75mm f/1.8 lens but had left the camera set to the Leica 75mm f/1.25 lens profile. Up to this point I had thought the only thing that the lens profile impacted was the shutter speed. Not so. Had thought if the images were impacted it would be JPEG only modifications. Also not so. Would seem that the selected lens profile impacts the RAW files also. The more you know <insert old time-y PSA star here>.

So… mostly cleaned up. But now I saw it in some images, even faintly, and that will not do. I briefly considered swapping lenses, but I had made a mistake by this point. I was very attached to this lens. It does stuff like this.

I even considered letting it rip and for those files where it bugged me I could crop the magenta vignette out or convert them to black and white…

…but that was not a proper fix. Then I found another way.

Lightroom lens profile

To my surprise there was a Voigtlander Color-Skopar 21mm f/4 VM P lens profile in Lightroom. Even with the messy magenta images created with the wrong 75mm in camera profile I found that the Lightroom lens profile mostly cleaned things up. But then I realized that it would basically rid me of the magenta menace entirely if the in camera profile was used also.

Here is the image with only the in camera Leica 21mm f/2.8 lens profile applied.

A bit messy at the edges. Here is the same image with nothing else, but the Lightroom Voigtlander Color-Skopar 21mm f/4 VM P lens profile applied.

Are there still issues? Yes. An odd green cast is created in some images. I purposely chose the worst offender for this example above. But in most scenarios this does the trick. For example:

Perfect?

Far from it. Good enough for my purposes? Yes. Here are some of my favorite images so far.

To recap

Film: No issues.

Digital M: A bit of faffing about is required. Either the in camera Leica 21mm f/2.8 profile or the Lightroom Voigtlander Color-Skopar 21mm f/4 VM P lens profile should be applied. Otherwise cropping or a black and white conversion may be in your future. For best results apply both profiles.

For everyone? Certainly not. A bit much? Yes. But a small price to pay for my purposes to keep a lens I really like.

The Artisan lenses had a good multi year run. But I have now successfully completed my Voigtlander M mount lens trio.

Happy capturing.

Eric L. Woods

I shoot a variety of new and old digital and film cameras. Industrial Engineer by education, IT is my vocation, and I really enjoy using, testing, and writing about cameras. All three of the latter are very therapeutic exercises for me. If you are so inclined my blog address is ewoodsphoto.com and I can be found on Threads and Instagram. All the best to you.

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