Hello,
You may have seen elsewhere in this great forum my posts about my old Samyang 60-300 lens that produces images with horrible contrast. I found that the pictures can be tweaked in Photoshop to the point of saving some.
Well, I recently went to an airshow. With the crowds and distances to the performing aircraft, my kit's lens was not much help. So I took a leap of faith: Use the crappy almost useless telephoto, shoot in raw, shoot like a maniac and hope some can be saved.
Back home I started the painful post-process. At the end, the workflow was to use Pentax Photo lab to crunch the luminosity levels (shadows/highlights) to stretch the histogram, apply noise reduction, tweak white balance in some cases, saving as highest quality JPG and turning over Photoshop for fine tuning, cropping etc. The process was far from optimized but at the end, I was surprised I was able to save many pictures.
But this took anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per picture, adding up to almost 2 weeks. So bottom line, yes it can be done, but is far from practical. That's why I'm in the market for a better lens.
But it was a good exercise nonetheless.
Here is a link to my album with the pictures:
http://public.fotki.com/tatocorvette/puerto-rico-airshow-2009/
Here are some samples:
As a reference, here is how it looked like to my son's point and shoot with no zoom:
Here are some of mine after pushing it beyond the wildest dreams of the lens designer
raw image
my tweaked version:
The album has 150+ pictures. Not exactly PPG material, but I'm happy.
Thanks,