Good lens not necessary in digital??

Dear All,

There are numerous technique to alter photograph using editing software, like

sharpening, distortion fix, etc. In this era, is good lens/optic not necessary?

If your lens doesn't capture enough light, you won't have enough information TO alter after the fact. If the light isn't good enough to provide a short enough exposure through a slow lens, or the lens doesn't create a sharp enough image on the digital sensor, the resulting blurred image can only be sharpened after the fact through artificial means ... meaning, the sharpness ("quality") that you'd get in after-the-fact sharpening would include false information that isn't really in the image. Such artifacts generally look very false to the eye. You can't re-create information that the lens never delivered to the sensor in the first place.

 

The good news is that even relatively inexpensive lenses these days are quite good. For a little more money, you can get VERY good lenses. For a lot of money, you can get incredible lenses. But since you haven't mentioned what sort of camera or subject matter you're thinking about, it's a little hard to comment further.

actually better lenses arenecessary for digital photography. This is well known. Garbage In,

Garbage out still rules.

An excellent lens can overcome the limitations of a mediocre camera body. But, the best camera body in the world can't mitigate the effects of a poor lens. This is true for both film and digital cameras.

 

Except, of course, for the Holga, where a poor lens makes on difference at all......

You can perhaps make a photo taken with a bad lens look less bad, but you can also make a

photo taken with an excellent lens look even better.

 

(And some of the digital alterations are not without cost.)

 

Dan

The photographer is more important than any other factor, but don't for a moment think that glass doesn't matter. Especially now that higher resolution bodies are commonplace, glass matters as much as - or even more than - ever.

I think the answer to your question is : NO. Good lenses help.

 

The more annoying question, with the opposite answer: YES, would be "Good photographer not necessary in digital?"

 

Why would I instinctively answer YES to this one? Adobe will help any poor capture and make you into a brilliant photog. Just spend $500 for Photoshop CS and hours of your time to do this transformation of poor capture, bad composition, sloppy technique into art in post capture via

digital manipulations to gain 7/7 ratings from other phnetters.

 

But good lenses will give you better images, with digital or film.

<p>Some lens defects can relatively easily be fixed in software. An image with low contrast can be punched up. Curvilinear distortion can be undone, and with relatively little degradation as long as the distortion is moderate. Lateral chromatic aberration can also be undone with relatively little degradation.</p>

 

<p>But a lack of fine detail (i.e. resolving power at high spatial frequencies) cannot be fixed. If the detail simply isn't there in the picture you capture, no amount of unsharp masking or other sharpening techniques can make it appear. Susceptibility to flare is difficult or impossible to fix post-exposure.</p>

 

<p>So I'll still spend money on quality lenses. Besides which, wouldn't you rather spend less time editing out lens flaws and more time shooting or doing other editing or maybe even having some free time to read the paper or whatever? I sure would.</p>

The answer is obvious. Everything that lands on your sensor passes through a piece of glass. Good lenses accurately reflect light, color balance, contrast and sharpness. Crappy lenses reflect crap.

 

Try an experiment. Take an out of focus picture and try to sharpen it. It won't work.

 

Here's another one. Take your f5.6 lens to a dark nightclub and take pictures with no flash. It will work but you'll end up using slower, possibly unusable shutter speeds and/or higher isos which yield more noise.

 

Good glass is more important than a good camera.

The lens is the heart of any photograph. The camera -- any camera -- is just a box that holds the lens at one end and the film/sensor at the other end. Use a POS lens and you get POS photos.

I agree to most of you.

 

However, many digital images are software enhanced with very rich colour and very high contrast. This canceled out the characteristics of a good lens of tonal gradation and subtle texture.

Today, it's difficult to buy a bad lens. So with respect to achieving great results, I'm in

the camp where your eye and photographic vision are hugely more important than having a

great lens. Even though that flies in the face of the tradition of many here posting to find

"The Best" of this and that, including lenses.

a great lens, for me, is one with a signature that benefits my photography. as a champion for wide-open fast lenses, I find the whole notion of sharpness a bit silly.

 

but that's just me ... f1.0 and be there!

 

daniel