Lensbusters.com

To UV, or not to UV, that is the question. When acquiring a new lens, many folks will buy a “clear” filter to protect the front surface. The most common type of filter is a “UV” filter that appears to human eyes to be clear.  There’s some controversy about how such a filter affects image quality. Theoretically, the more glass surfaces the more problems they can cause. But in practice does that really matter? I have a newish Tamron 17-28mm lens for my Sony E-mount cameras. It’s a nice lens. Thus far my only complaint is the lack of a lens correction profile for Photoshop and Lightroom, though I’m sure it’s in the works. I hadn’t yet purchased a protective filter. Today I was digging through a bag of free filters and noticed a vintage Vivitar Skylight 1a filter. My guess is this filter was made in the 1970’s or 80’s. It does not have multicoating and has a slightly warm cast to it. Voila, I have a filter to test! In fact this test is ideal, because the filter itse

Storage has long been a problem. Despite Moore’s Law, I seem to keep filling larger cheaper drives. Ok, so it’s a first world problem, I admit it! At some point in the past, I was converting all my raw files to RAW. The appeal then was that the DNG files promised to be more universal than the RAW files produced by various camera manufacturers. Comparisons of RAW and Lossy DNG with Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and Capture One at 1:1 ARW file processed in Photoshop with auto settings (left), Lossy DNG processed in Photoshop with auto settings (center), Lossy DNG processed in Capture One with auto settings (right) all at 1:1 pixels. Unfortunately, Adobe seems to be a less and less friendly company. I’ve been doing the right thing for decades and paying for their software. But they seem to be trying to make everything much more difficult with licensing and not sharing the details of their DNG format with other image editing competitors. None-the-less We’re stuck with Adobe for a lot of t