It happens that I don't have with me any raw file of pictures shot with soft focus lenses.
I have many SF objectives, but I haven't used them lately... and I have in my laptop only an archive with recent photos.
Cleaning some old jpg's that were of no use but took a lot of space on my laptop's SSD drive, I found a few interesting shots.
The pictures are ugly. No doubt about that. Though they can be useful as reference.
Here is a rock made by some marine invertebrates, shot in rather strong light with a super sharp objective, a rather sharp one, and a Pentax soft focus.
The pictures are resized/resampled at different levels to keep a similar size (the focals and of course the magnification ratio were different).
The three lenses are:
1) Sigma AF Macro 105mm @f/4
2) Tamron AF SP (52E) 2.5/90mm (the AF version of the original Tamron macro f/2.5, very common in Adaptall-2 mount), with Kenko AF-Pz 2x tele extender (real aperture f/8)
3) SMC Pentax Soft Focus 2.2/85mm, shot at f/5.6
I am positively sure the Pentax was used at f/5.6 cause it's written in the filename, and I think to remember the two macros were both shot at f/4 or f/5.6.
I have another shot taken with the soft focus wide open which has way too much halo. So I left it out.
Sorry for the hugely different exposure. I don't have the raw's, therefore I preferred not to mess with the jpg's, and leave the shots as they are.
The point of posting these rather uninteresting pics is the huge difference between a super sharp lens (the Sigma), another macro lens with the IQ affected by a 2x teleconverter, and the old SMC Pentax 2.2/85mm stopped down all the way to f/5.6.
The difference is impressive. The pictures explain, better than any written text, that under strong contrasty lighting a soft focus lens can show a huge amount of halation even when shot at mid apertures.
I was going to erase all the jpg's in a huge folder. Before doing that I decided that these images could be shared as a simple, humble example of how a strong, directional light can affect the rendering of the 2.2/85mm SF.
Please forgive me for the really ugly pics