Help, Why are some images Tack Sharp? And some are not?

Flores wrote in post #15097925
Colors are MUCH better now. the baby looks healthy and pink, not like casper the friendly ghost!

A few things to try, and post your results?

Set your DoF to be 'right' for the amount fo space you want to be in focus. 5ft from subject with F8 gives you about 12" of 'in focus' area to work with. (try measuring it out on the spot where your subject is. it's not nearly as wide as it sounds), adjust everything else around that (shutter, ISO, flash power) for proper exposure.

do a custom white balance.

maybe use the T2i if you find your having to bump the ISO to get the right exposure? anything less than 800 on that body is pretty noise-free.

Are your flashs adjustable? Don't want to ass-ume anything, but if they are, you should have more than enough power to light the subject on your set, and still keep your ISO at 100. If anything, i would be worried about having too much light! squeezing down the aperture will help with that a lot, as well as give you the DoF to achieve the look your working on.

Good luck!

Thank you for all this great stuff to try!! My flashes are adjustable.
I am going to go experiment in my little studio today (hopefully my 2yr old will cooperate) and I will come back and post.

SkipD wrote in post #15098652
It looks right on my calibrated system.

SkipD what did you use to calibrate?

hvaught32 wrote in post #15099198
SkipD what did you use to calibrate?

I have a NEC MultiSync PA231W monitor which was supplied with an NEC custom variation of the x-rite sensor and custom software. The real beauty of the way this works is that all manual adjustments that I used to have to do (brightness, contrast, etc.) are now done automatically by the software.

The monitor is extremely stable and the total package is the best I've ever personally seen.

SkipD wrote in post #15099278
I have a NEC MultiSync PA231W monitor which was supplied with an NEC custom variation of the x-rite sensor and custom software. The real beauty of the way this works is that all manual adjustments that I used to have to do (brightness, contrast, etc.) are now done automatically by the software.

The monitor is extremely stable and the total package is the best I've ever personally seen.

Sounds fancy So another silly question... are you editing with a MAC or PC and what do you know much about which one is "better"? I hear a lot of stuff and I am not sure what to believe. And I think I may be in the market for a new system.

hvaught32 wrote in post #15099304
Sounds fancy So another silly question... are you editing with a MAC or PC and what do you know much about which one is "better"? I hear a lot of stuff and I am not sure what to believe. And I think I may be in the market for a new system.

I use a PC. It's a really fast PC that I built a bit over a year ago, but I'm running XP SP3 in it. The hardware would be fine with Win7, but I hate Win7.

Ok. Check this photo out.

tzalman wrote in post #15097781
I use Picture Window Pro, but lots of programs give you a numerical readout of pixel values and even more show three channel histograms. Numerically, the highest value a jpg or other 8 bit image can have is 255, but if it is at 255 it is possible that it has that value because it theoretically should have been higher but practically can't be, so the relationships between the three channels are distorted. In a histogram you see it as the graph being piled up hard against the right side - the right side is 255.

On the 0-255 8 bit scale a medium grey, the famous 18% grey, is 118/118/118. The difference from that to a very bright white just short of clipping, like 250/250/250 is a little bit more than two stops. But Caucasian skin is only one to one and a third stop brighter than medium (in the case of a baby who hasn't had much exposure to the sun, a bit more). In a black and white photo you would want the skin to be around 165-175. Personally, for a mature male in a color photo I use 200/170/150 as a rough guide.

How do you decide on which area to take your RGB output from because when I sample er forehead for various areas I get different numbers.

hvaught32 wrote in post #15100093
How do you decide on which area to take your RGB output from because when I sample er forehead for various areas I get different numbers.

Yes, there is always a lot of variation, even of something that you would expect to be a solid color. It's just an inevitable characteristic of the nature of light (random variations in the strength of photons) and of digital processing (Bayer demosaicing), but if you move the probe around and take several readings you can get a feeling of what the general level is.

hvaught32 wrote in post #15100005
Ok. Check this photo out.

How does it look to you?

better, still looks "reddish" or too red on my monitor

hvaught32 wrote in post #15100005
Ok. Check this photo out.

Hosted photo: posted by hvaught32 in
./showthread.php?p=151​00005&i=i231397932
forum: General Photography Talk

How does it look to you?

I sent it to a friend who uses a mac and is calibrated. She hated it said too dark and too red. She sent over to her husband who also runs a mac and they put their computers side by side and compared this same image. It looked great on his computer. On mine it looks a dark.

And now you understand the rationale of photographing a standard 18% grey card, balancing to that, and then making all the others in the series match the same WB value!...at least then you know with certainty that you have achieved neutral color balance for the lighting. And if you want shots to be a bit warmer (artistic interpretation), you can adjust from the neutral baseline. And then, when you have folks who have misadjusted monitors, you can tell them that the grey card frame needs to precisely neutral and midtone, or else you know with certainty that their monitor needs to be adjusted.

You have stumbled across one of the biggest problems in modern photography - that everybody has a different monitor and sometimes the differences between them can be pretty great. Plus there is the fact that almost all monitors come from the store set way too bright for proper photo viewing. And the problem is made even greater because different browsers or viewing apps display the same image colors differently. And then there is the question of calibrating - we calibrate in order to get a monitor display which will enable us to predict the appearance of our prints, but by so doing we often make our monitors even more different from the average person's. If we are posting work for the general public we can only cross our fingers and hope that the average deviation isn't too horrible, but if we are sending work to a client who may be clueless about proper viewing levels and color managed viewers, the problem can be very serious indeed.

tzalman wrote in post #15100671
You have stumbled across one of the biggest problems in modern photography - that everybody has a different monitor and sometimes the differences between them can be pretty great. Plus there is the fact that almost all monitors come from the store set way too bright for proper photo viewing. And the problem is made even greater because different browsers or viewing apps display the same image colors differently.

good point, I just realized the differences between Google's Chrome browser and Firefox - the pics can look very different !

i'm thinking part of your challenge may be how your lighting the subject as well as lighting the backdrop. your going to have some spill from the blue backdrop that is going to have a tendency to 'cool' the color of the light down coming back the other way.

thats going to make it even more challenging to get the color on the baby right

I would also concentrate on composition. These 2 photos leave much to be desired as far as composition.

HappySnapper90 wrote in post #15115429
I would also concentrate on composition. These 2 photos leave much to be desired as far as composition.

valid point but maybe the OP was going to crop it later or just offered those pics to point out the discrepancy in perceived sharpness