Does the colour rendition of a lens matter when shooting RAW

I disagree completely. I shoot mainly Pentax but with some other brands mixed in. My 90’s 1.4/50 gives sort of pastel look compared to my modern high end glass that gives very high colour “clarity”. I’ve done test shots (now deleted…) where you can see that some lenses fail to render small colour/tone differences that other lenses manage to describe.

Older glass (70’s or so) have various other effects on tone and colour depending on lens but in general they have less “dynamic range” and loose data in the shadows way quicker than my best modern glass. You notice that the files break more quickly when editing. Modern glass gives near infinite ability to push. It’s similar to when you open a file from someone elses older (sometimes new) camera and you realize the files can’t take any pushing.

As I mentioned aberrations affect colours in that relationships are skewed or data lost. Sometimes this gives an extremely nice look. As i said tests charts barely catch this because they are often ideal set ups where aberrations and internal reflections play very little part.

Sorry, the image was posted tongue-in-cheek to suggest that often a target is “better” for measurement purposes, i.e. this lens versus that …

The image does have some veiling flare at the top. How does one measure it, I wonder?

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I have been dipping in and out of Cambridge In Colour, it’s a great site when you want some bedtime reading.

This is an interesting read on lens quality.

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/lens-quality-mtf-resolution.htm

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