What suddenly happened to image quality?

Here is a camera raw dialog for a photo, it's displayed at 100%:

https://imgur.com/a/pc​401Jk

5D Mark IV and I shot both 70-200 F4L IS and 100-400 F4L IS today. Both are showing this weird look, which makes me question my camera?

The details like all smudgy / slightly out of focus. Hard to describe but hopefully very obvious?

Never seen something like this before with my photos

Exif might be helpful.

Jethr0 wrote in post #18716143
Exif might be helpful.

There are some in the photo - f/8, ISO 200, 1/800s, 200mm. Should be plenty sufficient for a sharp shot. But it's hard to judge things based on a zoomed in photo editor shot. Can you post the RAW?

Was it on a tripod with IS on/off? Handheld with IS on/off?

Easy.... atmospheric haze/convection currents... Give us something harder!

If I am wrong, and I doubt I am (and I am rarely ), then my next guess is filters, but you would have seen this on all photos. My 3rd guess is that you used olive oil to clean and lube your lenses, but I highly suspect that just isn't the case. I can tell you that doesn't work. The lenses turn easier, but the IQ is never the same.

TeamSpeed wrote in post #18716156
Easy.... atmospheric haze/convection currents... Give us something harder!

If I am wrong, and I doubt I am (and I am rarely ), then my next guess is filters, but you would have seen this on all photos. My 3rd guess is that you used olive oil to clean and lube your lenses, but I highly suspect that just isn't the case. I can tell you that doesn't work. The lenses turn easier, but the IQ is never the same.

My fist thought was atmospheric distortion/haze as well, but I've only experienced that in HOT weather.

It was 10c/50f and although the morning was cloudy/cold and then the sun came out... I didn't think there would be enough warmth to cause that hazy distortion?

I guess that's what it was though... annoying! Can't use the photos now

kaitlyn2004 wrote in post #18716212
My fist thought was atmospheric distortion/haze as well, but I've only experienced that in HOT weather.

Oh, it happens in moderate and cold temperatures, too.

When photographing deer in Montana in November, it is frequently well below freezing - often down into the teens and sometimes down into the single digits. Yet if it's a clear day, the heat distortion is so bad that it's often impossible to get a decent shot between 10 AM and 3 o'clock PM. There's nothing a photographer can do except wait for the onset of the evening golden hour. Either that or try to get really close to the deer, so that there isn't much air between the camera and the subject.

Even though we call it heat distortion, it has little to nothing to do with the air temperature.

There are some Adobe Photoshop/LR filters that help with some of that distortion. I haven't used them, but there are several google results when researching how to combat this.

It is definitely distortion though.

Oh yeah; heat distortion hardcore...unfortunate​ly, as the others have said, it’s better to try and plan a reshoot or accept that nature’s fickle fingers weren’t working in your favor that day. There may be filters that help mitigate it, but I imagine they’ll only nuke any fine details that you may want to try and retain.

Soon as I clicked on the first post you could see it.

Is that 100% zoom, or 100% fit-to-screen?

It looks like heat differential haze, but it may also be made worse by how the data is being processed to fit to screen.

And remember that heat haze is based on temperature differential, not temperature itself. If you have a box that is full of 400 degree still air, then you are unlikely to notice any effect while looking through a properly insulated window. However if you have the same box where one part of the air is -100 degrees, and another part is -20 degrees, then you'll get lots of seeing issues. - This is part of why conditions can actually get worse in cooler weather, as the 'hot spots' warmed by the sun can be that much more different from the cold spots while things warm up in the morning.

That's haze. What was the humidity on that day? Were the winds blowing smoke or particulates from forest fires?

Here is a nifty article.

http://arihazeghiphoto​graphy.com …ment-is-it-always-needed/

As a competitive match rifle shooter, and NRA GB qualified Club Instructor dealing with these mirage effects has been a constant challenge for almost 40 years. In that time one of the unfortunate things that I have discovered is that the better the quality of the optics used, the worse the mirage looks. On one occasion where though a reasonable quality spotting scope, one that would be in the £/$500 or so price range, you could see no mirage at all. I was able to have a look through the Zeiss scope used by the Chief Wind Coach of the World Championship winning GB long range Palma Match team. All in all this was about a £5000 scope by the time you got both the scope and the eyepiece. At 600 yards when using this scope there was a very clear mirage running, contrary to what most other scopes were showing.

Mirage effects can also be amplified by the surface over which you are observing. Although surfaces like tarmac will show very strong effects, simply because it can absorb a lot of heat quickly other less likely looking surfaces can also amplify mirage. Large areas of standing water will have a lot of mirage, but so will waterlogged and wet ground. This is because the extra water vapour that is being evaporated into the air also helps to change the local refractive index. There is an awful lot of potentially damp grass out there. In the example above it was partly the fact that the rifle range in question is actually part of a peat bog, with a lot of water locked up in it that meant that there really was some mirage to see, even on a cold early spring day.

Alan

digital paradise wrote in post #18716861
Here is a nifty article.

arihazeghiphotography

Pardon your pun.