K10D newbie questions

hi

I got my K10D a week ago, I am still trying to learn how to use it. Here I got couple of questions for you guys:

I bought a Sigma 70-210 f/4-5.6 lens from ebay, I found the picture look very flat (I mean the colors are not vibrant) from this lens. Below is a picture I shot this morning, I used Av mode, focus length 160mm and shutter speed 1/179 s, the picture look cloudy with low contrast. With your experience, is this normal or I used the wrong settings?



I had another lens which is a 135mm f/2.8 prime. I found the contrast of the images from this lens is much better. However, by magnifying the images, I found there are blue-rims at the focus of the picture. The center crop of the whole picture is as follow



again, is this normal? how can I reduce the chromatic aberration with this lens?

A third question is again from this 135mm lens. The out-of-focus regions seems not giving naturally blurred objects, instead, you can see shadows with color edges. Please notice the dry grass at the top part of the following picture crop:



so, does this means my lens quality is bad? or I should be careful on certain things when shoot with this distance?

thank you for your input

Qianqian
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K10D, 18-55 f/3.8-5.6, 70-210 f/4-5.6135mm, 135mm f/2.8, 50mm f/1.7, 50mm f/1.4

The first picture looks a little under underexposed to me - try playing with the exposure compensation on camera (it comes up better afters some post processing - boost intensity & contrast a little) .

It might be worth playing with raw and the pentax software - you can adjust for some of the problems there - and see if you can get better results

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J.

use raw to fix for your satisfaction or jpeg (set to bright mode).....experiment a bit.....yes, a lot of CA on the f/2.8 lens, curious, what is the brand?

forget to mention, I shot with JPEG at "bright mode". The brand of the 135mm lens is "Deitz". I have never heard of that brand before, but it was not expensive on ebay.

do you do post-processing (play with color curve) quite often for your pictures?

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K10D, 18-55 f/3.8-5.6, 70-210 f/4-5.6, 135mm f/2.8, 50mm f/1.7, 50mm f/1.4

Personally I have only been using the raw converter for about a month - but there are various settings you can tweak - though I think Pentax Photo lab doesn't feel a particularly well put together UI and you need to make sure all the panels are visible

FangQ said:

do you do post-processing (play with color curve) quite often for
your pictures?

Click to expand...

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J.