Originally posted by vonBaloney Wouldn't you also need those files for your claim that one looks better than the other? (Or else upon what basis did you make it?) Wouldn't different lenses always be involved, making it a tricky and subjective claim either way?
I'm just trying to clarify how he came to the conclusion he did. From my perspective, maybe he's on to something. We all know a corrected lens will perform better than an uncorrected lens. That's why we pay the big bucks for the corrected one. Saying you don't need them and can do the same thing in Lightroom, to me , that's an extraordinary statement that would require proof to be believed.
And yes the proof would be fraught with dangers… but if you're going to make the claim, you need to support it, or at least have some reason for making it. I doubt that it's true because if for no other reason, in my experience more correction leads to higher resolution, and I doubt Lightroom can replace lost resolution. It would be very unlikely that someone would put the effort into doing a correction on a lens without putting some effort into making things superior all around. But practically all we want to know is what gives us an better image, a heavily corrected lens, or an uncorrected lens corrected in Lightroom. I'd certainly be interested in seeing an evaluation of that, despite the difference in lenses. Another usual feature of heavily corrected lenses is very smooth bokeh, so that brings up another point. Does the bokeh in the cheap lens, with Lightroom correction, match the bokeh in a corrected lens of simlar focal length?
I'm just trying to make this assertion into something that might be useful to me. As I said, it's an extraordinary claim.