Using Photozone's methods FF/BF does not matter as they take shots changing focus manually until they attain maximum sharpness. These results are even corrected for field curvature so real world flat plain shots will show much worse performance. I think the reviews are good to go by as different lenses are suitable for different things.

This lens though just appears to have abysmally bad corner resolution.

I think it is great for static subjects, good job.

I hope that doesn't mean stacks of bonfire material...

If you want to match print to screen you need to calibrate both with a colorimeter.

There are screen, print and combined colorimeters you can get.

This sounds like you are having problems with the colour space though. Are you using sRGB, AdobeRGB, CMYK?

http://www.thinkcamera.com/news/article/mps/uan/706

It seems you misunderstand how the aperture ring operates and how the aperture is actuated by the camera.

The aperture ring mechanically sets the minimum that the camera's aperture actuation lever can close the aperture. This only happens when the shutter is pressed and an exposure is made. Using the aperture ring does not bypass this mechanism as it it the way the k mount has always operated.

The A setting just allows the camera to read the maximum and minimum aperture a lens has available and thus control the aperture from the body. The camera will know how far to move the aperture lever and it will not need the mechanical stop provided by the aperture ring.

By default the aperture of a k lens is fully closed and on the camera it will be fully open.

You still get manual control with or without using A as long as the camera is set to a mode where aperture can be chosen manually. In fact, you get more settings in camera as you can do 1/3 stops or 1/2 stops. Many K, M and A lenses only have half stops at best and between certain f numbers they have no stops at all!

So set the aperture to A and get a much better experience, flexibility and control.

That is how all K mount lenses work.

The camera would be unusable if it didn't open the aperture fully for looking through the camera. It would be very dark!

The aperture only closes down momentarily when taking a photo or when you use the optical DoF preview function. Look into the camera when taking a photo and you will see.

The aperture ring on an A lens is useless as you can manually control the aperture from the control wheels on the camera. In fact, it is better to do it that way because the camera records the lens data, otherwise it records nothing.

With M and K lenses you need to use the green button for stop down metering.

Elements 9 has content aware fill as well but I never find it is anywhere near as good as spending time doing it by hand.

Puppet wrap does look interesting but again at the moment I draw the changed as it allows me to correct for light/shadows.

Looking to take the plunge myself eventually. The K10Ds we have are still good but there is a huge difference when compared to the K-5.

I use Lightroom for most of my work.

I used Photoshop Elements 2 up until a week ago for anything more complicated. Hugin for panoramas and a few other bits here and there.

I now use Photoshop Elements 9 as it is the first one to really bring significant changes. I use it more now as I can bump files back and forth between Lightroom, Photoshop and Première.

I don't really see how CS products really bring 10x (as it costs 10x as much) the number of features. Elements is powerful enough to do practically everything.

Evolution has no direction, wherever benefits a gene's spread in a population will be favoured. Stupid and making lots of babies is 'better' in terms of success than clever and no babies.

There is more to it than that but there is no direction or end point. Just different selective pressures.