Originally posted by First Poster although I didn't fully appreciate the problems with narrow depth of field (shooting wide open for best bokeh) and general lack of sharpness.
Yeah, that's the tradeoff with older lenses. But with digital PP, you can do a lot. And "sharpness" is often a perception, a mixture of bright/dark contrast, colour contrasts, amount of detail captured, and so on. Often, just fixing CA and fringing will make the photo look much better. And using a good, tight lens hood (for APSC) can help with contrast a lot
Here is a photo with Zeiss Flektogon 35mm, didn't really do any PP other than NR and sharpening, applied selectively. I sharpened mainly the centre of the photo and at 100% you can see the little hairs that line the edge of the leaves, but only of the ones that are right on focus. Just a millimeter further, and its blurry.
delicate