No 1 for me, I prefer the closer perspective and foreground details.

Am impressive scene, well caught - I like the boldness of planting the sun smack in the middle, works great. Exposure is good also - maybe tone down the sky brightness a bit, and boost contrast to give the clouds more definition.

The image suffers from some pretty hefty colour noise, seen as yellow & blue patches mainly on the sand and waves. Eliminating it will inevitably lose some sharpness, but with the right software you should be able to restore a fair amount of detail.

I use Photoshop Elements with the Topaz DeNoise plugin (Topaz Labs) - you can select an area first for working on and then run the plugin, reducing noise just where it needs it. It has sliders to restore detail and reduce blur also after reducing the noise.

Alternatively, if you shot in RAW then look for colour noise reduction in your RAW converter software.

Hey, that sounds almost exactly like what I was saying before! I think that we compensate out the 'cast' on different surfaces based on our perception of the dominant natural tone on each object - eg the stonework in Davids picture. It is when the camera has not done this, spreading a single cast across the whole picture indiscrimimately, that we start to find it 'unnatural'.

Good to find some common ground

David, yes the detail you can get out of this Samyang is very good - its resolution is definately a big plus. I still have my concerns about how images seem soft on this website, wish they could look like they do in my viewing program.

I know what you mean about the yellows, but you know, I was there, and that was just what it looked like.

Nanhi, I toyed with the zoom idea as well, and the siggy 10-20 is well regarded. Guess I just liked the idea of a nice shiny new lens - the FF aspect appealed as well. The resolution of the Samyang was the main draw. I havn't found distortions to be too much of a worry for the stuff I taking, although on FF at the edges it'll be more of an issue, but I'm thinking then just shoot back a bit and crop some off.

Thanks for the settings advice - I presume you're referring to the custom image settings in the camera? Actually, I processed the shots in PDCU4 firstly, changing some Custom settings, but a lot of the contrast and brightness control has been done in Sagelight Editor 4. I was a bit disappointed at how the sharpness is rendered on this website - they are noticably softer here than when viewed directly through a viewer program on my laptop

Transit, good to see a Pentax shooter out in Aotearoa, you must have plenty of wide angle opportunities in your neck of the woods. Any Samyangs for sale there?

Ever since getting my K7 & 18-55 early this year, I've been yearning for a wider view - keep stepping back and bumping into things!

After much deliberations and good advice from this forum, I took the plunge and invested in a new Samyang 14mm f2.8 IF ED UMC Aspherical. You can see how it pairs up with the Pentax here -










I have had it out a few times, and I am really enjoying working with it. This is a manual focus lens, with an aperture ring and 'A' setting, giving full camera controlled Av & M mode exposure control. Another factor I considered for the future was that it provides full frame coverage, if I go FF one day. It has a solid and professional feel in use.

Here are a few examples using it - I have made some distortion and converging verticals corrections on the shots containing structures at the edges, where these effects are more obvious.

The park and house is Canazarro, Wimbledon, the houses just the local area.

































I was worried that I might really need a zoom, but so far I've had no trouble getting the framing I want with a bit of footwork. Focussing can be hard to assess very precisely with these wide views, but I have found that picking an object a third to halfway into the scene and keeping aperture at 6.7 or 8.0 usually does it. Contrast I have found to be high with this lens, and this is helpful as I find I am catching a wide DR.

As always, any responses and comments much valued!

It appears to be the case that as sensors (larger than compact type anyway) have developed recently, the need for the aa filter has diminished, as other quality enhancements have negated the effects of the moire issues in most situations.

Maybe the days of the aa filter for DSLRs are limited. From what I can ascertain so far, for the type of shots I mostly take, (that is general outdoors shots, landscapes, portraits) at lowish ISOs, it seems to be a no brainer. The extra definition and sharpness out of camera (I still sruggle to call it resolution) is all good.

It will be interesting to see if it suits all shots though - I wonder if we will soon see in Photoshop an 'anti aliasing' filter effect, to reduce definition!

Ah, I clicked why you're ending up with JPEGs - you are using Pentax Digital Camera Utility to export them as Jpegs and then opening the Jpegs in LR - I think thats whats happening am I right?

You can edit the Jpegs in LR, but as most of us are saying you'll be able to 'get more out of them' if you can work directly with the DNG. Peter has said above already that you could just use PDCU, but I appreciate that if you have LR you would want it to actually work for you.

Your other thread has gone much the same way - the suggestions are along the lines of updating the ACR plugin and checking the versions etc. If thje issue is with the LR image library, wonder if you can just directly open a DNG, like from a standard FILE - OPEN menu and try that?

I think Peter's right - you can't use the Pentax Utility software to convert the RAW file into any other kind of RAW. I think originally we didn't understand the problem you were describing - I thought you meant you didn't want to export to a JPEG.

It is obviously strange that LR3 is not recognising the DNGs. I would suggest you describe what happens when you try and open a DNG, do you get some error message ? I'm not a Lightroom user, but I believe it uses the Adobe Camera RAW plugin - it is possible this is not working properly.

I'm sure some LR users will assist also, but you could try to update the ACR plugin from the Adode website. Also there is a free RAW converter program available from Adobe, DNG Converter I think its called. Running your DNGs in this and saving them might work. It would be interestiong to see if it can open your files at least.

Globally applied photographic filters or software colour toning are not as versatile as the human perception. If a dominant cast in a photo is prevalent over a wide range of different surfaces and objects, then it won't be perceived as natural, because the photo will not benefit from the ability of a viewer actually present to compensate automatically when scanning around the scene.

For example, taking some comments from the shootout, the blue was seen by some as unnatural where it 'spilled over' onto parts of the scene that wouldn't actually be blue, despite the time of day.

In the shot in this thread, personally, I find the magenta tinge 'natural' in the sky areas, but not so on the stonework, where I am aware that if I were present my colour perception would 'filter' it out when I glanced in that direction.

We have a great advantage now with digital where we can recreate this human 'auto-correction' function by making selective colour toning choices.