You think something is unsharp?! Please advice.

Hey all of you,

I have a newly purchased 40D and my "old" 17-40L, which I love till death, but recently I kind of think something isn't totally sharp. I don't know whether it has something to do with my change in camera (from 30D), my lens (17-40) is unsharp, or I am simply being too critic. I should not compare to my dad's 1DsMKIII and his impressive lens setup, then I would simply cry.

I have tried shooting some pictures with 2 different lenses on a tripod of a text document with similar apertures. Then imported in Lightroom 1.4.1 and no PP, just export to JPG with 100% quality, 72 ppi and 2048px on the long side (size). First I shot with the 20mm 2.8 with aperture 2.8, 8, 16. Then my 17-40L at 17mm with 4, 8, 16. And then at 40mm with 4, 8, 16.

Focus is on the word "Rolsted", which should be more or less in the perfect center of the image.

http://designforlife.d​k/upload/1.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/2.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/3.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/4.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/5.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/6.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/7.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/8.jpg
http://designforlife.d​k/upload/9.jpg

Am I picky, or do you find anything unsharp, or rather too unsharp for your taste?!
Anything would come in great hand, as I am not 100% convinced!

Thanks a lot and love this forum with the help of people.

And sorry for the bad lightning, but it is kind of dark and I don't have proper lightning here in my girlfriends apartment...

looks fine to me
once you add some USM in photoshop it would look much better.
Does anyone even use their gear anymore but to see if its sharp or not then worry worry worry

I agree. You should apply some USM if you are shooting RAW. I know I always do.

That said, they look fine to me.

The two samples I looked at looked fine. I love that lens ---but I have not put mine on my 40D--- I leave mine on the 5D and love the combo.
I would not hesitate to shoot with your setup at all. Looks good.

Kristian,

Your shots seem to be OK if they are jpegs directly exported from RAW in Lightroom. What you want to realize is that if you're shooting RAW there is not sharpness, contrast, and saturation being applied -- that should be part of your RAW processing.

If you shot in jpeg, you would need to get those settings right "in camera". These shots have the typical flatness that you would expect from a RAW shot or a jpeg with all in-camera processing set to nothing.

I shoot RAW only, and find that in Lightroom I do a generous amount of contrast and a sharpening level of about 80 to just about every shot, along with whatever works for vibrance and/or saturation. These are in addition to whatever other tweaks would replicate whatever "picture style" you might be replicating, as well as some amount of noise reduction might be applied to compensate for low light/high ISO scenes.

Out of curiosity, what USM specs do you guys usually use for web posting?

150
0.3 rad?

scale it to 72dpi, 1000 pixels wide, 0.3 rad, and anywhere 50-150 as needed.

Thanks all of you for the replies. I know that I should add some USM in my RAW PP, but I still jut needed to check whether something was wrong, because as mentioned it kind of looked like something had changed since the change from 30D.

stathunter> give me a 5D and you'll never see the 17-40L leaving that one

In general thanks to all of you again for the much needed opinions.
And of course I will go out and take enormous among of pictures now, don't you worry!

Thanks!!

elader wrote in post #5509438
scale it to 72dpi, 1000 pixels wide, 0.3 rad, and anywhere 50-150 as needed.

Why

krusnof wrote in post #5509110
Hey all of you,

I have tried shooting some pictures with 2 different lenses on a tripod of a text document with similar apertures. Then imported in Lightroom 1.4.1 and no PP, just export to JPG with 100% quality, 72 ppi and 2048px on the long side (size). First I shot with the 20mm 2.8 with aperture 2.8, 8, 16. Then my 17-40L at 17mm with 4, 8, 16. And then at 40mm with 4, 8, 16.

Downsizing (from 3888 to 2048. 0.527%) always causes a loss of sharpness. Not fair to the camera or the lens to judge them this way.

I prefer smart sharpen over USM .
http://www.kenrockwell​.com/tech/photoshop/sh​arpening.htm

There's a possibility that the AA filter affect is different between the 40 and 30D...

Resize before sharpen?

mismis wrote in post #5511857
Resize before sharpen?

Yup...do both and compare and you'll see...USM after resizing will have greater effect...resizing after USM seems to diminish sharpness.