Vintage glass is a cheap way to get fast glass. A Canon RF 50 1.2 is $2k Mamiya Sekor 50mm 55mm 1.2 1.4 $36 to $300 on ebay, sometimes you can find them at a garage sale for less.

Simon Utak has some great videos on the quality of bokeh of vintage lenses This one on the M42 mount which fits on most mirrorless cameras. I have a helios 44-2 with swirly bokeh. I need to get out and use it more.

https://youtu.be/bSxyHCm8N4A
https://youtu.be/AbGMqkDimFY

This is totally true. Because you can even add fake bokeh to the finished product even add bokeh balls in editing so you would not be able to tell what lens. In other words use editing to mask clues to what type of lens or F Stop you are using. Bokeh or LoCA Longitudinal and standard Axial CA or both can show up in an image an be difficult to fix in post, and fixing soft corners usually causes artifacts and noise trying to fix those. (a reason to have lenses that don't have these traits when shooting specific genres of photography

There are other differences that cannot be seen by the viewer that are seen by the photographer. A prime with a fast aperture like 1.4 or 1.2 can see differences in autofocus performance in low light. The photographer will see he has more keepers with fast glass than with slower zoom glass. If shown to the viewer, it would just be an out of focus shot.

So the word depends pops up again depending on what is done in post (not the adult diaper)

Luminar Neo uses a single side car it is a .state file next to the original. All your edits are saved there automatically. You need do nothing and just close the program and it is remembered. It can also use a catalog if you want.

On1 uses a single sidecar a .on1 file which saves your edits. You can press done or close the program and the edits are remembered.

When you want to create a jpg file or other file then you use the export button, which gives you a pop up dialog box as to what you want to save it as, name and where it is saved. On1 has presets so you can have different variations of these parameters

Using aperture mode means you will adjust aperture manually and the camera will make decisions on exposure. The other cool feature of mirrorless is focus peaking so you get a visual aid to set your manual focus correctly. Especially helpful on fast glass.

My understanding is lidar is us for 3d object mapping I don't know about it's use in this type of photography.

My S22 ultru does not have lidar, it has a laser for AF and uses 2 cameras for depth map. So there may be more than one way to do this.

Cell phones have been doing this for years. They use two cameras and take a stereo picture. With this information they can judge distance (this is how depth map is used for fake bokeh in advanced cell phones) and can measure the size of things. Apps do this, you just put a credit card in the picture somewhere and it will judge the size of objects accurately.

The the simple answer is yes but not always. Depends on the lens and the person who is using it.

You cannot get the bokeh same level of effects from a 2.8 zoom you get from a fast prime.

Took this last weekend, the other Christmas.

It is the same reason crop sensor cameras do not have to deal with these issues as much on FF lenses because they only use the sweet spot and crop everything else out.

Depends. The newer and more expensive the zoom lens, the closer it is in to sharpness to the prime. So without looking at every test, I would agree, more often than not. But does that include every cheap sigma, tamron, Tokina, cheap Chinese knock off? I don't know.

The question was. "Can you really tell the difference in a photo if -using a prime 5omm vs
A 28 to 70 zoom . Set at 50mm

my answer was

Depends on the lens and what fstop the zoom will probably be F2.8

But the key s are Can you tell the difference in a photo.. If a photo has soft corners, then yes you can tell the difference. You may not know the specific lens. But there are differences in zoom lenses how sharp they are in the corners.

If the zoom lens has corner sharpness issues, you might be able to tell it was a zoom because in general, zooms are not as sharp as primes at their sharpest aperture.

But it also "depends" on other factors. If I crop out the corners in the image, there is no longer soft corners and then we are back to you cannot tell the difference if both images are cropped the same.

Yea, This customers are beta testers is garbage. These companies need to put out better products at launch. I have not used it lately but Adobe is better (not hugely) at this than other companies. We have to realize On1 and Luminar are small companies with limited budget, where as Adobe has huge numbers of people renting their software at 10 buck a month coming in every month. That is a lot of money and that gives them an advantage over the small companies.

Luminar Neo. It is another great too. In some ways I like it better than On1 but If I could only have one. But since I am not limited I use Neo as a plug in to On1


https://skylum.com/luminar

I am trying to improve my macro and it is not happening in this picture. I tried to re-crop, color the background, and I don't really like it. I can make excuses, I could not put my physical background photograph behind the spider. Since the AI masking isn't working and I don't want to take the time to edit in a new one, I am not happy with the image.

Longshadow said Compare requires two or more things.

If you look at one image only, can you tell if it was taken with a 50mm or a zoom set at 50mm?

No you could never tell that. Most people cannot tell what the lens you used, brand, focal length mm, what amount the zoom lens has unless you look at the exif data.

The reason I showed the comparison is because it absolutely goes against the assertion "U can compare till the cows come home. Fact, many of today's zooms are just as sharp as most primes. Case closed."

So "I" cannot tell you what lens a person was using in a specific photo. But what I can tell you is that if you used the zoom in my example, you would be able to see in a landscape image that the corners are soft. ( Again, it also depends, if you are taking a landscape picture of a moving water in a lake at a slow shutter speed, you will probably not be able to tell a lens has soft corners.

Regardless of any differences there may be between the two lenses.

Can you tell the difference between a lens that is broken and all the glass is shattered compared to known good working lens, even though you don't know what brand, or focal length? Of course you can an that makes it important. I know this is Captain Obvious stuff, but it needs to be said.

I am not sure what you are saying.

But lets compare the cheap non L 50 1.4 which was soft wide open with lots of chromatic aberration. Lets compare the Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Lens both at F8

But as I said before, there may be a zoom at F8 is as sharp as the canon nifty fifty at F8 But it is not because the lens is in the hands of a good/pro photographer.

https://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/ISO-12233-Sample-Crops.aspx?Lens=295&Camera=979&Sample=0&FLI=2&API=3&LensComp=115&CameraComp=979&SampleComp=0&FLIComp=0&APIComp=6

Not on a portrait, but on a landscape, absolutely. Corner sharpness is important in landscape, not portrait.