7D Image quality??

MakisM1 wrote in post #14491303
Please review this

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=857871

and see whether you can get a better MFA procedure.

It's easy (but expensive) to give up!

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.
BTW reading another link it advised the AF mode to be on Quick and not Live. I tried that and I don't know if I've suffering from PP blindness but it did seem sharper already. Not perfect but better

crumbleton wrote in post #14491322
Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.
BTW reading another link it advised the AF mode to be on Quick and not Live. I tried that and I don't know if I've suffering from PP blindness but it did seem sharper already. Not perfect but better

There you go! From what I've read, the 7D AF system is very sophisticated, but it takes some getting acquainted effort.

MakisM1 wrote in post #14491360
There you go! From what I've read, the 7D AF system is very sophisticated, but it takes some getting acquainted effort.

Indeed! It's a beast but prodigious scanning of the POTN forums seems to pay off dividends There are plenty of options in the various menus all mentioned in the manual but rarely does it actually tell you what the end result will be if you enable/disable it or why you should do so.

You can ask for 7D-specific books for how to and why... I think there are a couple of authors who specialize in this.

Post a phot and the 100% crop once you get some significant improvement!

SkipD wrote in post #14491012
Could you please explain what you're talking about? What in the world does pixel density have to do with shutter speed?

Thanks.

A higher density of pixels recording movement at 100% leads one to try to get faster shutter speeds to get a more crisp shot. This has been discussed before, and even Canon talks about this in their white papers on the 18mpx crop bodies. It is a result of the pixel peeping disease that is rampant.

It is the same phenomenon where people think that the 7D (and its siblings) exhibit more CA than previous generations, but what happens is that at 100% viewing, the CA seems to be larger than the previous bodies. However, CA is really not any worse, it occupies the same amount of area as on other sensors, just more pixels recording it and when pixel peeping, it appears enlarged.

Mike55 wrote in post #14490251
I know this is a lame question, but have you micro adjusted your lens? There's an awesome way to do it with a laptop and the EOS utility. Stick a stuffed animal in a tree that is your most common distance and have at it.

Yupe i MA the camera+lens combo, but then i have this HUGE question on microadjust that no one seems to be able to answer. Here it goes:
When one start MA the lens, i take it the person should turn the focus ring until the viewfinder shows everything is blurr. Then press the cable release to achieve the One Shot focus until the confirmation beep, right? (I assume the answer is: Right). Ok, my question is, which way should I turn the focus ring to deliberately blur the focus prior to half-press the cable release, to the macro side or to the infinity side? The reason i ask is, they (the turning sides) cause the AF to lock focus on different spot. A sample phenomenon that i encountered would be, if i blur the focus by turning the ring towards the macro side, half-press to AF would give me front focus. In contrast, turning it towards Inifitinity side, the AF nails the focus spot on. So, how should in interpret this?

From memory I believe Chuck Westfall recommended defocusing towards infinity and, to me, this makes a lot of sense. The reason it make sense is that when tracking a moving subject you will usually (not always) shoot something approaching you rather than moving further away. Therefore it seems that to have the AF bang on with the focusing closing towards you from far away is preferable to having it bang on for subjects disappearing into the distance.

e.g. if shooting a footballer, racing car, horse, bird in flight, aircraft etc. you will probably prefer to shoot the front of the subject as it moves towards you instead of the rear of the subject as it vanishes. In this scenario the focus will be ever moving in the direction from far to near, so why not set the AF calibration to operate optimally in that direction too?

If you want to be really thorough you could repeat from both directions, see what difference you obtain in AFMA value and then consider splitting the difference if the gap is large, maybe erring a little towards the figure obtained when sending focus towards infinity.

tdodd wrote in post #14491754
From memory I believe Chuck Westfall recommended defocusing towards infinity and, to me, this makes a lot of sense. The reason it make sense is that when tracking a moving subject you will usually (not always) shoot something approaching you rather than moving further away. Therefore it seems that to have the AF bang on with the focusing closing towards you from far away is preferable to having it bang on for subjects disappearing into the distance.

e.g. if shooting a footballer, racing car, horse, bird in flight, aircraft etc. you will probably prefer to shoot the front of the subject as it moves towards you instead of the rear of the subject as it vanishes. In this scenario the focus will be ever moving in the direction from far to near, so why not set the AF calibration to operate optimally in that direction too?

If you want to be really thorough you could repeat from both directions, see what difference you obtain in AFMA value and then consider splitting the difference if the gap is large, maybe erring a little towards the figure obtained when sending focus towards infinity.

That makes sense. Although sometimes shooting bird inflight the subject is flying away from me, it's not a good perspective anyway (wing might block the head). So, missing some focus at that point is not too catastrophic.
Thanks for the clarification.

Ok we have a new problem............

The same friend that I am trying to help by starting this thread is having another issue. He tried changing some of the settings that were suggested here to improve image quality but now he has to bump up the ISO very high in order to get any image at all. I don't see anything in the EXIF that would suggest a settings problem. Here is one of the images...........

StanNJ1 wrote in post #14491793
....but now he has to bump up the ISO very high in order to get any image at all.........

Can you elaborate more because i don't quite get this statement. Do you mean if he does use, say, ISO1600, no image would come out at all?

The way i interpret the EXIF of this image is (provided this is SOOC, no PP), the user shot this with a EF 135mm f2L, ISO2500 gave him SS of 1/500s at f5.6...... The light wasn't abundant but should be enough.
At 135mm, SS of 1/200s should be enough for handheld. So, i would use ISO800, that would mean 1/160s to achieve the same exposure with the aperture held constant. Or, to get better DoF, I'd go f8, ISO1600.

I think the ISO he had to use here was 2500 otherwise his images are very dark. The light in this scene should not require something that high. We believe there is a settings adjustment that he may have inadvertantly selected

StanNJ1 wrote in post #14491861
I think the ISO he had to use here was 2500 otherwise his images are very dark. The light in this scene should not require something that high. We believe there is a settings adjustment that he may have inadvertantly selected

Since exposure is a result of those 3 factors, that is what was needed. In fact, I think he needed to either slow the shutter down a bit, or move up to ISO 3200. Underexposure on the 7D will yield quite a bit more noise that you would have to deal with during post.

StanNJ1 wrote in post #14491861
I think the ISO he had to use here was 2500 otherwise his images are very dark. The light in this scene should not require something that high. We believe there is a settings adjustment that he may have inadvertantly selected

Well, if everything else (SS, f-stop)is held constant, moving the ISO of course will see the results darker/brighter. You didn't mention what mode he shot this image in.
If he fails to identify which setting he accidentally has set, then perhaps just reset all settings back to Factory default, and start over.
Off top of my head i can't think of any setting would have contributed to requiring such high ISO. Does not make sense.

The problem here is that there just isn't enough light to shoot at a low ISO, medium aperture, high shutter speed. I don't mean to sound rude, but I think perhaps the user would do better with a camera with various modes such as "portrait mode" and "sports mode". Either that, or they need to learn a bit more about photography such as the effect that light has on an image.

On top of that, I still see some fuzziness that just shouldn't be there -- even at ISO 2500. Here's an ISO 3200 at f2.8 at 200mm 1/250 from my 7D with my Sigma 70-200 f2.8 EX DG OS HSM.