[snake]

Phew!

I never realized that what I thought was a simple request for information would turn into the nearest thing to a flame war I've seen outside of the defunct Politics and Religion forum. Actually there were remarkably few flame wars on the P & R forum, considering that the topics discussed were a bit more substantive than a cheap filter.

[GibbyTheMole]

Actually, I offered what I saw in the pictures, which he accepted (ie: milkiness, microcontrast, color cast issues). The pics are heavily oversharpened in some cases, so he unfortunately can't prove much about the quality of the filters he's asserting.

I stand by what I said- most of us want the composition phase to be the most important to minimize PP and restrict it to creative elements, rather than corrective elements. Most of us don't want to spend additional PP time correcting for a filter instead of just taking the low quality filter off.

I just want to clarify a couple of things and then I will shut up. Not for snake's benefit, but for others who might believe his statements toward what I did to the photos I submitted:

1) I "accepted" no milkiness, microcontrast, color cast issues with those photos. It's fine if that's what you see, but they were exactly as I intended them to be. Other than snake, I have never had a complaint about them.

2) The "milkiness" and "color cast issues" that snake mentioned were in fact effects applied in Adobe Photoshop with Filter Forge and a bleach bypass filter. These filters were applied only for effect, and NOT to correct a defect caused by a bad filter or any other anomaly.

3) The amount of sharpening I performed was only to slide the sharpen slider up to a maximum of 30% in Lightroom. It's also my experience that if you have a bad filter, lens, or anything else that makes for a blurry photo to start with, you can sharpen how ever much you want to, and still have a blurry, crappy photo. You can't sharpen details that aren't there to begin with. At least I have never been able to. Your mileage may vary.

4) I also strive to get the photo as close to what I want the finished product to be in the composition process. But my camera doesn't have a vignetting or bleach bypass filter built in. I prefer to apply effects in post where I can see them on a larger screen.

5) I posted the processed, filtered photos as demos because I was at work at the time (slow day) and those are the ones I had in my e-mail from when I sent the links to the people I took the photos of. Those were their favorites, so those are the ones I had on hand. I have the unprocessed RAW files on my home computer.

I don't care what anyone else uses for a filter, camera, lens, or anything else. But I did want to clear some things up, just so everyone knows. If "brand X" filter doesn't work for you, snake, or anyone else... fine. Everyone marches to a different drummer. They do however seem to work quite well for me, so I'll use them.

[snake]

I don't care what anyone else uses for a filter, camera, lens, or anything else.

Ok, cool.