[peteer01]

I know there's a lot of issues with even high quality lenses. Otherwise good photos can suffer from distortions, vignetting, less than ideal sharpness in the borders, especially the extreme corners, and Chromatic Aberrations.

So...my question is, when looking for a lens, what can SW easily fix, and what is lost forever?

Right now, I have free SW only, which includes GIMP and Picasa. I'm sure there are some things a Photoshop pro can do with expensive software and refined skill that I don't have the software or skills to do. If anyone has any good info on what I can/can't fix, or any links or guide to how to fix those things that can be fixed, I would really appreciate it!

[orangepeel]

You can fix vignetting, lens distortion (barrel and pinch) as well as chromatic abberation.

You can't fix purple fringing other than to desaturate it.

Always best to get a lens that minimises these problems in the first place tho. You'd quickly get bored fixing these issues all the time.

Pretty much everything I own causes one problem or another. I'm constrained by cost so have to work round these issues.

[Dabhand16]

Do I recall some RAW converters having plug-ins that address al least some lens problems and are camera and lens specific?

I'm thinking of the software that emmettleffel advocates. Was it DXO, or something like that?

[P-E]

Yes I think it's DXO Graham.

[silkstone]

Bibble can fix lens distortion - it has a lens database but sometimes gets it wrong, although you can tell it what lens to use. It also has Red/Green and Purple/Yellow CA correction.

There are also various plugins for Bibble, with funny names. Some of them are available in both free and Pro versions - the Pro ones cost a whole $10. There's one called Percy Pro (really) which is for lens distortion and perspective correction, and gives plenty of control. It also has a CA correction filter in addition to the standard one.

[peteer01]

Wow. I downloaded the DxO Optics Pro demo, and I am very impressed. It's automated settings are pretty impressive and I've been pretty impressed it so far.

Thanks for the good advice on that one! I may download another program or two to compare it with something else, but there's a good chance I'll actually register DxO after the trial.

One question I had is, when uploading photos to places like Flickr or here, is there any protocol regarding editing? Should I present the untouched original, or the edited version? Should I mention any SW edits, etc?

[peteer01]

Almost 6 months after downloading the DxO demo, I finally forked over real money for it. As a user of open source (open office, linux, gimp, etc.) it took me a long while to get used to the idea of forking over that much money for their software, but I did, and I'm thinking that I'm glad I did. Thanks for the help everyone in this thread gave.