do these images/crops look too soft? paranoid about my 7D taking soft pictures

7D will show up ANY flaws in technique or lens at 100%.

The 50/1.8 is soft at 1.8, it gets good by 2.5.

I had to dial mine in to about +3 or +4 MA to get it to focus spot on, and I have more 'luck' with it when I use spot focusing and use the right focus point (no focus and recompose).

As for shutter speeds, 2 * focal length is a better guestimate for sharp pics unless your technique is great (or you get lucky).

Remember crop factor of 1.6 + super high density sensor.

Try the same shot but use Liveview 10x and manually focus. Put the lens in MF, first.

That should remove the human factor and any lens adjustment that may be needed for AF.

i'm not sure..i just did the exact same settings, WB, flash, at the same spot, focused on the same point, the 7D is significantly blurrier. the shots look pretty decent, but zoomed in it's not changing a whole lot. could the nifty have that much effect? i'm getting an 85mm 1.8 in the mail hopefully friday, but i'm thinking i have to send this body in to canon.

edit- will try liveview now

You are shooting RAW but not processing the photo the way it needs be be done.It needs to be sharpened in LR3.
Your photo sharpened . Using your small jpg is not the way to do it but you can see a difference.
Get away from using the very small f stops to judge the photo.Use 5.6 as a start.

thanks for the tips guys

bohdank's tip about liveview/MF first/x5 helped quite a bit. i just took another shot and i could already tell a difference zooming in reviewing the picture on the lcd.

gooch - i normally sharpen and remove noise in LR and then export in jpg, but with all the copies i was making of the pic, i could have grabbed the wrong one. but is my original work flow right?

i guess i just expected the advanced AF on the 7D to be the same as my T2i's just more options.

I dont think your camera is soft...

Thats an uber crop of that eyeball and your shutter speed is pretty slow for 50mm on a crop body. Plus, the little bit of noise reduction you did could have hurt sharpness a bit too.

As for the first brick wall, the crop you gave us looks to be from a part that is nearing the edge of your DOF - could be starting to get out of the focus plane there.

Also a contributing factor is your 50 1.8 - not exactly the sharpest lens wide open and the not known for its focus accuracy.

Finally, your shots from the 7D will NEED a sharpness boost coming from RAW to make up for the strong anti-aliasing filter. Cant expect a RAW image to come out looking like a razor....

you guys don't know how happy i am that i was prematurely thinking my camera body was bad instead of just realizing how much of a novice i am.

better? a bit of sharpening, didn't mess with the WB though.

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Yep, now stop worrying about brick walls and focus charts. Go out and shoot with that camera!

Heres a shot from my 50/1.8 and 7D after MA.

robtk wrote in post #12173274
thanks for the tips guys

bohdank's tip about liveview/MF first/x5 helped quite a bit. i just took another shot and i could already tell a difference zooming in reviewing the picture on the lcd.

gooch - i normally sharpen and remove noise in LR and then export in jpg, but with all the copies i was making of the pic, i could have grabbed the wrong one. but is my original work flow right?

i guess i just expected the advanced AF on the 7D to be the same as my T2i's just more options.

The first images were soft. No amount of sharpening would have given you good results.

So, if the sharpness is much better using MF it means you should micro adjust the camera for that lens. Sometimes specific copies of a lens do not work well with a specific copy of a body. Search the board for micro adjust or MA to get comfortable with how to do it.

bohdank wrote in post #12173500
The first images were soft. No amount of sharpening would have given you good results.

So, if the sharpness is much better using MF it means you should micro adjust the camera for that lens. Sometimes specific copies of a lens do not work well with a specific copy of a body. Search the board for micro adjust or MA to get comfortable with how to do it.

damn. just did a MA to +7 and it's waaaay better. thanks for the tip, gonna do this on my tokina tomorrow.

what would i do without you people..

Enjoy....

robtk wrote in post #12173348
you guys don't know how happy i am that i was prematurely thinking my camera body was bad instead of just realizing how much of a novice i am.

This happens far too often on the 7d, and it gets a bad reputation for the owner's lack of skills/knowledge/readi​ng ability. Glad you got it sorted out. Both of my L's needed a bit of MA'ing to get them dialed in as well.

mrgooch wrote in post #12173243
You are shooting RAW but not processing the photo the way it needs be be done.It needs to be sharpened in LR3.
Your photo sharpened . Using your small jpg is not the way to do it but you can see a difference.
Get away from using the very small f stops to judge the photo.Use 5.6 as a start.

Just about the worst advise ever, your basically advising him to keep and accept a faulty camera/lens. Sharpening in software, degrades the image and causes artifacts, and generally makes the image look un-natural, sharpening should only have to be used sparingly.
With a 50mm 1.8, if focus is correct the images should be sharp at F2, if they are consistently un-sharp, either the camera or lens is duff and needs calibration.