my pics seem to lack sharpness

[OceanRider]

I am getting a little frustrated.

In general, I find most if not all muy pics lack that really detailed "sharpness". Everything seems to be working correctly, as far as i can tell, but the pics just are lacking. I can tell because the odd one in certain circumstances is REALLY sharp, but thats only few and far between.

Question: Besides the lens, do other factors like lighting, focal length ect contribute to sharpness?

Do I really have to have L type lens to make things sharp? Is there anyway to compare my pics to see if maybe there is something wrong with my camera?

:rolleyes:

Thanks in advance

JOel

[tim]

Can you post a sample picture? Or perhaps link to a full size one?

[Aethyr]

I've recently discovered Unsharp Mask tool in Photoshop, which helps the sharpness of my photos a great deal.

[PhotosGuy]

EXIF? Jpg or RAW? Sample pic? Geeez!

[photobuff]

Save your money on the L lenses.....I bought a 70-200mm 2.8L IS and I am starting to realize this wasn't the solution to things. Nice lense, but when my $75 50/1.8 lense rivals my $1700 lense on sharpness, something is amiss.
Take the previous advice on this thread.....PHOTOSHOP UNMASK SHARP. Just don't get crazy with it. I have found 100%, .5 to 1.5 pixels, and 0 threshold roughly gets me what I need. I think sharpness in post processing is a must with Digital SLR's.....bummer.
(sits back and let's the pro's eat me up because of this post);)

Good luck,

Steve

[mrclark321]

Is PHOTOSHOP UNMASK available for PS Elements?

I just baught it off Ebay if the guy will ever send it!!

[Jesper]

Unsharp Mask
PHOTOSHOP UNMASK SHARP
PHOTOSHOP UNMASK
???

This is starting to look like that game where you whisper something into your neighbours ear, then (s)he whispers it into his/her neigbours ear, etc...
Unsharp Mask is one of the sharpening tools in Photoshop. It's also available in Photoshop Elements.

OceanRider, did you previously use a compact digital camera before you got your 20D? One common complaint of people making this step is that their DSLR seems to make less sharp photos than their compact digicam. That's because compact digicams often apply much more processing such as sharpening in the camera itself. Canon (and other manufacturers) assume that people using DSLR's want more control over the processing themselves, so the sharpening done by the camera itself is less.

If you want really sharp photos right out of the camera, you can try setting the parameters a bit higher.

[photobuff]

I CORRECT MYSELF...UNSHARP MASK.....I get dyslexic in the morning hours...we all thank you for correcting that. Cute comparison, too.

Steve

[snibbetsj]

Is PHOTOSHOP UNMASK available for PS Elements?

I just baught it off Ebay if the guy will ever send it!!

Didn't you get Elements with your camera? Unsharp Mask is is available in Elements under filters > sharpen

[PhotosGuy]

I bought a 70-200mm 2.8L IS and I am starting to realize this wasn't the solution to things. Nice lense, but when my $75 50/1.8 lense rivals my $1700 lense on sharpness, something is amiss. I'll look for it in "Marketplace"!

[dapa-group]

If anyones interested? I use small plugin called, "Intellisharpen" available from www.fredmiranda.com
IMO it does a better job than Photoshops - unsharp mask.

[Hellashot]

Save your money on the L lenses.....I bought a 70-200mm 2.8L IS and I am starting to realize this wasn't the solution to things. Nice lense, but when my $75 50/1.8 lense rivals my $1700 lense on sharpness, something is amiss.

I applaud you! Finally someone on here has enough balls to admit that you don't need professional lenses to get sharp images. It's difficult to call an image "sharp" when it only exists in a digital form which everyone will agree that software based sharpening is needed with every image - whether "in-camera" or post processing. Most people here that have L lenses call all other lenses crap, except for the 50 f1.8. Maybe they do that to justify their huge expense for a lens that makes them look professional. I am a huge fan of the 18-55 EFS "fantastic plastic" lens and have only recently put it aside because I wanted more zoom range not because of quality.

[KevC]

The 85/1.8 is also an awesomely sharp one with beautiful bokeh.

However, pictures should be sharp straight out of the camera. Make sure your shutter speed is fast enough so that you can handhold it (or tripod if you can't) and be sure to stop it down a bit. Almost all lenses are sharpest around f/8.

[Hellashot]

The 85/1.8 is also an awesomely sharp one with beautiful bokeh.

However, pictures should be sharp straight out of the camera. Make sure your shutter speed is fast enough so that you can handhold it (or tripod if you can't) and be sure to stop it down a bit. Almost all lenses are sharpest around f/8.

What does straight out of the camera mean? A RAW image will not be sharp "straight out of the camera" and if you shoot in JPG you are applying in-camera sharpening!

[photobuff]

I applaud you! Finally someone on here has enough balls to admit that you don't need professional lenses to get sharp images. It's difficult to call an image "sharp" when it only exists in a digital form which everyone will agree that software based sharpening is needed with every image - whether "in-camera" or post processing. Most people here that have L lenses call all other lenses crap, except for the 50 f1.8. Maybe they do that to justify their huge expense for a lens that makes them look professional. I am a huge fan of the 18-55 EFS "fantastic plastic" lens and have only recently put it aside because I wanted more zoom range not because of quality.

Yeah, I wasn't aware that all digital images needed some type of sharpening. Don't want to misdirect the original post but I guess it does apply, since the person mentioned L lenses. I mean, if you have to do all that post procesing, you might as well go considerably cheaper. I figured with all of the complimentary talk on the internals, it should have a sharper quality.....it doesn't.
Also, I didn't realize there was a "marketplace" section...I shall visit it soon;)

Steve

[OceanRider]

Thanks all, great info as usual. Jesper, I did not know that!!! And Yes I had a compact digital before my 20D ...s-50 and it was sooo sharp compared to my 20D thats what been bugging me all to heck. I guess I will start playing a bit more, too bad they could not get the results of the S50, it was fantasitc

Cheers.

[OceanRider]

Save your money on the L lenses.....I bought a 70-200mm 2.8L IS and I am starting to realize this wasn't the solution to things. Nice lense, but when my $75 50/1.8 lense rivals my $1700 lense on sharpness, something is amiss.
Take the previous advice on this thread.....PHOTOSHOP UNMASK SHARP. Just don't get crazy with it. I have found 100%, .5 to 1.5 pixels, and 0 threshold roughly gets me what I need. I think sharpness in post processing is a must with Digital SLR's.....bummer.
(sits back and let's the pro's eat me up because of this post);)

Good luck,

Steve

Can anyone tell me WHAT the "100%" "PIXELS" and "THRESHOLD" mean...I mean what am I doing to the picture here (really simply.) In laymen terms

Joel

[Andy_T]

These are the settings in the 'Unsharp mask' command.

Just try it out.

Best regards,
Andy

[Andy_T]

I applaud you! Finally someone on here has enough balls to admit that you don't need professional lenses to get sharp images.

Not really.

If you follow any of the posts from knowledgeable people (like most contributors on this forum :wink: ), you will notice that the general advice is to get a prime lens as it is a lot easier to construct an optically great normal prime lens than a zoom lens.

Also, most will point out to you that the artist is more important than the tool.

Best regards,
Andy

[OceanRider]

ya I tried them out and did not really see any differences (with the 100% .5 1.5;0) anyway...I was jsut curious exactly what I was changing

Thanks

[OceanRider]

one other quick question.... why would I use UNMASK sharpen to sharpen and not "sharpen"

Confused!

Joel

[Todd Jacobsen]

one other quick question.... why would I use UNMASK sharpen to sharpen and not "sharpen"

Confused!

Joel


You have more control and options with USM.

[PhotosGuy]

ya I tried them out and did not really see any differences You'll see less effect on a 6MP image than on a small one for the web. Sharpening should be done as the last step & I save before I do it so the sharpening is NOT saved to the original large file. Prints sometimes need more sharpening, too.
one other quick question.... why would I use UNMASK sharpen to sharpen and not "sharpen" The unfortunate name is a holdover from film sharpening techniques that used a blurred mask to keep sharpening to certain areas of the print. ;-)

[mrclark321]

Why would Canon do something like that? I can understand that you want control but why not make the pictures as sharp as possible on auto the same as the point and shoots especially considering the price you pay for them. I think this approach would cost a lot of sales. There are a lot of people that are new to photography
me being one that would like to learn how to use the DSLR to it's full potential but if you start out on auto and get poor quality pictures there would be a lot of dicouragement in learning how to use a DSLR ( Look honey I just sold our $350 point and shoot to get this $1500 DSLR, Oh don't worry the picture quality will get better as soon as I figure out how to use it....Yes dear I know where the dog house is! )
This is my thaught on it anyway, I know my wife would have been pissed!

Dan
Unsharp Mask
PHOTOSHOP UNMASK SHARP
PHOTOSHOP UNMASK
???

This is starting to look like that game where you whisper something into your neighbours ear, then (s)he whispers it into his/her neigbours ear, etc...
Unsharp Mask is one of the sharpening tools in Photoshop. It's also available in Photoshop Elements.

OceanRider, did you previously use a compact digital camera before you got your 20D? One common complaint of people making this step is that their DSLR seems to make less sharp photos than their compact digicam. That's because compact digicams often apply much more processing such as sharpening in the camera itself. Canon (and other manufacturers) assume that people using DSLR's want more control over the processing themselves, so the sharpening done by the camera itself is less.

If you want really sharp photos right out of the camera, you can try setting the parameters a bit higher.

[PhotosGuy]

I can understand that you want control but why not make the pictures as sharp as possible on auto You can set sharpening parameters for jpgs, no? Doesn't it sharpen enough?

[SSquared2000]

Well this is an extremely timely thread for me. I got the Rebel XT about a month ago and have been plagued with what I considered to be soft focus images. I tried everything. Even taking shots with my old Canon G1 and comparing it with the XT. The G1 was CLEARLY sharper.

This thread definitely helps to explain a lot, and goes along with something someone sent me in e-mail today. Thanks for all the insightful information.

One note...I finally installed the Rebel XT software this weekend which includes Digital Photo Professional. To my surprise, DPP had the sharpness, the brilliance, and the pictures came alive, just how I expected them to look. Comparing the same image between the built-in Windows image viewer and DPP show a huge difference in sharpness. My conclusion is either the Windows image viewer uses anti-aliasing (removing jaggies and softening the image), or it is not capable of fully rendering higher megapixel images. In the end, DPP brought my confidence back and made me realize there was nothing wrong with the camera or lens.

[Jesper]

Why would Canon do something like that? I can understand that you want control but why not make the pictures as sharp as possible on auto the same as the point and shoots especially considering the price you pay for them. I think this approach would cost a lot of sales. There are a lot of people that are new to photography
me being one that would like to learn how to use the DSLR to it's full potential but if you start out on auto and get poor quality pictures there would be a lot of dicouragement in learning how to use a DSLR ( Look honey I just sold our $350 point and shoot to get this $1500 DSLR, Oh don't worry the picture quality will get better as soon as I figure out how to use it....Yes dear I know where the dog house is! )
This is my thaught on it anyway, I know my wife would have been pissed!

DanBecause sharpening can also do harm to your photos!

Sharpening destroys some of the original information in the image. If you sharpen too much, you get strange, ugly looking white halos around edges in your photo. Sharpening sounds like something simple, but there are lots of different techniques, have a look at these, for example:

A Smart Sharpening Tutorial (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/smart_sharp.shtml)
High Pass Sharpening (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/high-pass-sharpening.shtml)
Sharpening 101 (http://www.bythom.com/sharpening.htm)

Most beginners will probably shoot in JPEG mode, and in JPEG mode you can just set the sharpness parameter on the camera and you won't need to do much more sharpening on the computer.

On the original Digital Rebel (300D), the default parameters for sharpening, colour and contrast were set higher than on the 10D, because Canon expected the Digital Rebel to be used by people coming from compact digital cameras, who are used to a lot of in-camera processing. Cameras like the 20D are aimed at more experienced users who don't want a lot of in-camera processing.

[intechpcx]

You know, there's a lot of information in this thread, but I noticed the one thing that wasn't brought up. What aperture are these shots taken it. It is no secret that every lens has a sweet spot where the pictures come out the sharpest. If you're shooting wide open aperture, you will notice some lack of sharpness on almost all lenses (better built ones less so than lower quality lenses).

No, you definitely do not need L glass to get crisp images, anyone that tells you that you do I would commonly refer to as a Canon bigot. I'll go so far as to say you don't need Canon lenses to get the best quality images. Every manufacturer has their good and bad lenses. Tamron, Sigma and Canon have all made some great glass and also some crap lenses. And price isn't always an indicator of quality either.

However, as has been covered before, any digital shot will require some sharpening to get close to film quality, it's just the nature of the beast. I've seen this echoed many times in countless digital photography articles.

Personally, I'd love to hear more about the pictures in question, what lens and what settings they were taken with.

[SSquared2000]

Part of my experimentation involved using different aperture settings. I used Program Shift to scroll through higher aperture values. Although the DOF changed, the sharpness did not. I just ended up with more of the image with a soft focus feel.

I used the 18-55 kit lens.

[OceanRider]

Lots of god infor here.

Question: How do we set the parameters on a 20D to make them as shape as our point and shoot couter cameras?

I LOVED the sharpness on all my S-50 shots....not getting them on my 20D in comparsion!! Man, I am sorry I bought this beast sometimes.!

[GyRob]

L glass on a 20d makes very little diffrence in the real world the images STILL need photoshoping to get a really sharp photo,i share your disapointment with this camera.
Rob.

[O/confusion]

L glass on a 20d makes very little diffrence in the real world the images STILL need photoshoping to get a really sharp photo,i share your disapointment with this camera.
Rob.

You know, I recently grabbed some casual shots of a seagull on an overcast day from about twenty feet away using my 70-200 f4, hand-held and using parameter 1 with minimal in-camera sharpening on the large, fine jpeg setting, and when downloaded from the card and viewed on my computer's monitor at 100% I nearly cut myself on the bird's beak it was so damn sharp. Right out of the camera.The same holds for shots—taken at the appropriate aperture and shutter speed combinations for the subject at hand——with the 50 f 1.4 and 17-40 f4. I have no experience using any other lenses, so I won't make claims for other glass used on the 20D.

It really bugs me to see some people repeatedly dumping from a great height on the same gear in several different threads when the problem is, in all likelihood, operator error. The 20D is a sophisticated piece of equipment, and if people are not prepared to make the effort required to learn how to get the most out of it, they should at least have the decency not to put other people off buying it. I've only had mine for a couple of months, and it's the first digital camera I've ever used. It's also the first camera I've owned with anything "automatic" built into it at all. I don't claim to be an expert, but I have spent a good many years learning how to use a manual 35mm film SLR passably well, and I get the strong feeling that a few of the more habitual complainants to this forum would do well to better acquaint themselves with some of the fundamentals of photography in general, and learn to apply them to digital SLR use, before heaping scorn on perfectly good equipment in this forum when newcomers ask for (presumably informed) advice.

If some people don't want the flexibility that a digital SLR offers in terms of post-camera image manipulation, and they don't have the patience to learn how to use the in-camera image adjustment settings properly for the times when they don't want to play with the output, and they don't feel the need to understand how all the variables involved in making an exposure affect the outcome, then there are plenty of other cameras out there that do all the decision-making for you and would probably suit their needs better.

Complaining about the need to post-process raw images out of this camera to make them sharp makes about as much sense as complaining that you have to shift gears manually on a high-performance sports car.

Again, I'm sorry if my little rant offends anyone--I don't usually get too excited about this kind of thing, and it may seem like an overreaction here, but I came to this thread directly from another one with the same poster panning the same camera for the same reasons. The 20D is an excellent camera when used competently and as intended——as the many, many outstanding images from it that have been posted on the forum since its debut demonstrate brilliantly.

Sincerely,
Terry

[rdenney]

Ah, sharpness. The holy grail of photographers. I wonder if painters keep looking for brushes with a single hair of finer and finer proportions?

Well, sharpness is really the merger of several features. One is acutance, which is, in digital terms, over how many pixels will a hard edge be spread? Then, there's resolution, which how small can patterns be on the image and be discernable. Finally, there's contrast, which is a measure of whether a black thing next to a white thing is truly rendered as a black thing next to a white thing.

The combination of these things affects our perception of sharpness.

But sharpness is not always a good thing. I have a Special Edition print of Ansel Adams's Tenaya Creek and Dogwood. And that same image is reproduced in Yosemite and the Range of Light. I've compared them side by side, and found (!) that the reproduction was "sharper" than the photographic print. Even so, more detail was visible in the print. How can this be? The screen on the reproduction was not fine enough to provide the normal gradation around objects in a photograph, and rendered them as a hard edge between rows of dots. Any detail smaller than what could be rendered in those dots was lost, but still it appeared sharp. The contrast at the edge of the reproduction caused by the lithograph screen was enough to both create falsely sharp edges and obscure some fine detail.

So, give me acutance and resolution, but keep your constrast (except that which is provided by the lens). I'll add in the contrast later, thank you.

Unsharp masking is called that because it started as a physical technique applied to real photographs. One would make a contact negative of a negative through a very slightly diffused sheet of glass. This positive, when sandwiched with the original negative, had two effects. The first was that it would reduce constrast, and that's why we did it. We were printing high-contrast slide film onto Cibachrome, and the Cibachrome could not record the range in the slides. So the unsharp mask was a contrast reduction technique. But we discovered that the unsharp edge made the Ciba print's dark areas a little darker at their edges and the light areas a little lighter at their edges. If we think of the edge as a slightly fuzzy gray band between the dark and the light, we would take the light half of that gray band and make it lighter, and the dark half of the band and make it darker. That would make the gray band appear smaller, and the image would appear sharper.

So, that's what Unsharp Masking does: It lightens the edge of light areas and darkens the edges of dark areas to add contrast right at the edge.

The three settings become apparent when we know this. First, we want to know how much to lighten and darken (Amount). Then we want to know how many pixels back from the edge to apply our effect (PIxel Radius). Finally, we want to tell Photoshop how big a change in color constitutes an edge (Threshold).

Why would we need to do this on a DSLR and not an S-50? Two reasons. One, a DSLR's programming is concerned with providing as much information as possible for the photographer to use to make a print. Unsharp masking in the camera, just like the lithograph screen of that Adams print, is a processing artifact that necessarily reduces the reality of the image. And a DSLR's programming is strongly biased towards providing a realistic raw image to start with. The other is that the camera is designed to prevent problems of interference patterns between fine patterns in the subject and the pattern of the pixel grid. Thus, they have an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor to make sure that patterns too fine to be properly rendered are filtered out instead of being allowed to create moire effects.

A consumer digicam like an S-50 is intended to make finished images directly, according the desires of most snap-shooting consumers. Thus, it applies considerable unsharp masking and not too much moire filtering. The resulting pictures have more snap, but they lost fine detail in the process.

Just take the images to the store and have them make prints. Most of the time, the store's machine will apply level control and sharpening automatically. Or, you can set the "sharpening" parameter of the 10D to maximum, but it won't make much difference in any prints that don't exploit the full resolution of the sensor.

I apply sharpening mostly as a final step when targeting for a particular output device. That means I don't know how much sharpening I need until I decide the final resolution. I don't want the camera second-guessing my intentions.

And many things affect acutance, resolution, and contrast. Focusing properly, lens quality, use of optimum aperture to minimize lens faults (and all lenses including L's have faults) and to provide sufficient depth of field, and camera/subject movement all affect acutance, resolution, and contrast.

Finally, here's an image. Most people look at this and think, wow, that's sharp. But at the resolution displayed here (600x400), the sharpness of the camera has absolutely nothing to do with what you see. The image looks sharp because the water drops have very bright edges.

http://www.rickdenney.com/images/seattle-waterfront-fountain.jpg

Rick "who thinks sharpness is a state of mind" Denney

[mrclark321]

I hope my comments did not upset anyone!I am new to this hobby, I started with a A80 and then baught a G6 and finally the 350XT. If I would have been patient I would have got the 20D ( and I wish to this day I had the 20D ) I have noticed an improvement in the picture quality from the A80 to the 350XT. I always just used auto before but know I would like to learn how to use the camera without auto. Sometimes this gets agrivating but there has been a lot of help on this forum and it is greatly appreciated. I will continue to post my pictures and in time I hope that my skills will develop. ( and my pocketbook shrink ) There is no doubt in my mind that these cameras take excellent quality pictures even without editing because thats what got me into this hobby.


Dan

[OceanRider]

Redenny: Great explanation, thanks. That did help allot. You sound quite knowledgeable on the subject. I could only hope to be that knowledgable.:rolleyes:

But I still am frustrated. :evil: Many of us do not like sitting at a computer for hours on hours playing and manipulating pictures. I am a perfectionist so its even more torture because I am never sure if I have it "right" so I continue to play for hours trying to get "that perfect look" with a tweak here and a pixel there. Driving me crazy!!

Canon should have (maybe they do? Whats the setting for in camera sharpening?) a simple feature or "mode" that allows those among us who want to be creative yet with the minimum amount of post processing. Like man, do I really want to sharpen, resize, re-dpi, and crop 600 wedding photos? Man I am going to go crazy!

Now Canon makes it convenient [read $$$] that I HAVE to buy the high end (or even just certain cameras to get certain features) (like 5 shot per sec) or the ability to change lens. I was VERY happy with my S-50, and its quality of shots. It did great everything, including blows up almost every size.... but I wanted to use my lens again and the shutter lag made it IMPOSSIBLE to shoot certain scenes well...soooo I had to move up.

So I moved up in cameras, but man, what a learning curve.
Cleaning sensors, post processing..yada yada ......some of the things you guys talk about is like another language! I am mean u gota be brain surgeon? When I had my film rebel, I just shot, played with the creative effects and bango! Great shots. Now I got to sit in the basement for hours growing a beard and miss my kids growing up to get the fricking pictures to look decent! ahhhhhh!!!

Thanks for the info and letting me rant. Here is a copy of pic fromy S-50. I may not be able to show it justice on this as I find resizing for web posting to be complicated and I do not know WTF I am doing, but on my screen this is SHARP!! and nothing my 20D comes close to this.

I have been shooting for 15 years, first with a rebel and then a S-50 so I have a reasonable understanding of taking the appropriate aperture and shutter speed combinations for the subject at hand——. This camera rocked!

[OceanRider]

and no this pic I posted did not do ANY justice to how sharp it is.....I could not post a big pic here to save my life. WHY??? It wont let me post anything bigger than 100K, this one is 79 ish but even the 100K is not big, why? Every one else can post bigger pics.

Can any one help me here?

[mrclark321]

OceanRider check this older post out.

Dan
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=38424

[OceanRider]

WOW great link thanks man...perhaps I have not bee shooting with the best f/S relationship thatj I could! I noticed he shot that in RAW, will APATURE P work the same, give or take?

Joel

[rdenney]

and no this pic I posted did not do ANY justice to how sharp it is.....I could not post a big pic here to save my life. WHY??? It wont let me post anything bigger than 100K, this one is 79 ish but even the 100K is not big, why? Every one else can post bigger pics.

Can any one help me here?

We may link to bigger pics, but we don't attach bigger pics. Attachments take up space on the POTN site. Most of us have our images elsewhere and just link to them.

If you can't get an image noticeably sharp on your 20D at, say, filling the screen with your image, then you have a problem not related to the design of the camera. My images, when reduced down enough to fit on a screen, are quite sharp, even without processing.

Are you sure the images are focused correctly?

Open your images in ANY software (even Microsoft Photo Editor will allow this) and crop out a small piece from the middle of your full-resolution images. Then attach those. That will show us the full resolution, but will be a small enough piece of the picture so you can attach it.

Rick "who thinks we've had our 1000 words and now we need an example" Denney

[O/confusion]

Canon should have (maybe they do? Whats the setting for in camera sharpening?) a simple feature or "mode" that allows those among us who want to be creative yet with the minimum amount of post processing.


Are there actually people out there who drop this much cash on complex equipment and don't even read the manual to see what its feature set includes? If you take the time to check your manual with even minimal attention you will discover that there are two available preset image processing parameters in the menu, as well as user-definable "Sets" that allow you to adjust sharpening, saturation, and other image variables to your taste--for jpeg output. Have you managed to find the settings for the various levels and quality of jpeg output? This, too, makes quite a difference to the kind of quality your "straight-out-of-the-camera" images will exhibit when you try to print them.

I have no problem at all with people asking for help or opinions when they've run into a wall, but forgive me for being somewhat blunt when I say that the very least you could do before complaining on the forum about Canon's failure to consider your needs is to check the manual first to make completely sure it hasn't.

Terry

[OceanRider]

Confusion: Well, I did read the manual, several times (and about 8 other books-cover to cover). Some of this stuff is very complicated. Sorry my brain is not too tuned to this new stuff (or even the old). Even the manual assumes a certian level of knowledge, which I have minimal in, including computers. Sorry to come off complaining, that was not the intent. Iam frustrated.

After reading every ones post and the links, I think I have figured out the issue. I have been using not enough f to get the DOF I need to get them sharp-hense they are soft. I think I will get better results in the f7-f11 region, not 5.6, which seems to be where I have been staying for some reason.

Thanks everyone for your AWESOME time and info. I learned allot as usual. You guys ROCK!

[Paul_B]

Well, this topic has also helped me out as well. I too was very confused about sharpness (P&S vs dslr).

rdenny: thank you so very much for that detailed explanation.

[SSquared2000]

As I had mentioned earlier, it may also be the image viewer people are using. I realized the other day the Windows image viewer was softening all of my pictures. Using Digital Photo Professional, Zoom Browser, and The Gimp...the pictures look sharp and crisp.

...all the other information was extremely important as well. Hopefully you will be seeing new life in your pictures.

[robertwgross]

Why would Canon do something like that? I can understand that you want control but why not make the pictures as sharp as possible on auto the same as the point and shoots especially considering the price you pay for them. I think this approach would cost a lot of sales.

Dan, if you check it, the degree of sharpening needed for an image is somewhat a function of its intended use. For example, if you are publishing it to the web, then you might want to do it one way. If you are printing it out at 4x6 inches, then you might want to sharpen it differently. If you are printing it out at 24x36 inches, then you will want to sharpen it completely differently. How in hell is the camera going to know, at the time of the shot, what your intended use is going to be for the image? So, many of us shoot it RAW, and then we can see what we got and then see what to do with it in terms of sharpening as a post-processing step.

---Bob Gross---

[Andy_T]

One thing more about P&S cameras is that they do not just apply more sharpening in the camera, but also have vastly larger DOF thanks (:confused: ) to the smaller sensor.

While this may be a good thing for landscapes, it really sucks at portraits.

So when you know from your P&S that you get everything sharp and in focus when using f/5.6, you definitely have to re-think this attitude with a DSLR (and maybe use f/8 or f/11 instead, e.g. if you want to do landscapes).

With my G2, I always shot RAW, converted the pictures to TIFF, worked and resized them in PS and applied liberal amounts of USM to get the final result nice and sharp.

On my 20D, I find that the sharpness out of the camera (with the right lens at the right aperture, e.g. 50/1.8 @ f/2.8 or Tamron 28-75/2.8 @ f/4.0) is sharp enough for most of my applications - and clearly better than my G2 pictures.

Best regards,
Andy

[mrclark321]

Thanks everyone .....there is a lot to learn about this hobby! And everyone here has been great!!!

Dan

[rdenney]

Like man, do I really want to sharpen, resize, re-dpi, and crop 600 wedding photos? Man I am going to go crazy!

I do exactly that. But I do it in a batch process, using Breezebrowser. It converts from RAW, auto-sets the levels and gamma, resizes for proofs, sharpens after resizing, and creates a folder with images I can take to a lab on a CD and print for the proof book.

But if the bride's mother (who's the real boss at a wedding, as you know) wants an 11x14 print of Grandpa Fred dancing with the bride, I can go back to my raw image, correct color balance and exposure, convert to Adobe PSD, retouch the photo, correct the color some more, adjust the contrast (for this particular image), make sure the tonal values of the dress are present, bring up the tonality of the dark tuxedo so it isn't a black hole, blur the background if needed, save my corrected image, resize and crop it for 11x14 printing, adjust color for my printer, sharpen it, save my targeted image (with a new name), and print it. You should not think that it takes any less to produce commercial-quality results--the big prints have to be noticeably better than the proofs. Several of those steps would be difficult or impossible if the camera was trying to second-guess my contrast and sharpness desires. We used to work just as hard with chemical prints, by the way, with more variable results.

Rick "who doesn't expect or want the camera to read his mind" Denney

[SSquared2000]

One thing more about P&S cameras is that they do not just apply more sharpening in the camera, but also have vastly larger DOF thanks (:confused: ) to the smaller sensor.


This is exactly one of the (many) reasons I wanted to upgrade from my G1. I was starting to get interested in using DOF to create more effective photos and it was extremely difficult to get a shallow DOF. Not only that, but the blur I would get often times just did not look right.

I have been extremely pleased with the results I get on the Rebel XT.