The Moon: Canon 55-250 IS vs. Tamron 18-270 VC

Here's the maximum I could wring out of these two lenses on my 40D shooting the moon. These are 100% full frame crops from 10 mp image, sharpened.

gabebalazs wrote in post #7110665
Here's the maximum I could wring out of these two lenses on my 40D shooting the moon. These are 100% full frame crops from 10 mp image, sharpened.

Your avatar looks like it's about to Short Circuit.

The timing and exposure look good (seems best to me on the right hand image). I've not figured out how to deal with pixelation on the edges of my moon shots either. The sharpening is apparent in your shots. Some parts of the image look good and some show oversharpening, the left image most of all. I wonder if they would look soft if that was reduced to where the sharpening wasn't apparent...

I actually get better moon pics from my 55-250 then i do my 100-400 Hows that for disappointing.. although i think its my technique vs the equipment. a little to sharp but effective none the less.

jgoodstein wrote in post #7111411
I actually get better moon pics from my 55-250 then i do my 100-400 Hows that for disappointing.. although i think its my technique vs the equipment. a little to sharp but effective none the less.

Some of those things aren't actually features of the moon though, they're purely sharpening artifacts. If someone who couldn't view the moon for themselves were to look at this they would have a misconception about the surface of the moon; so in it's present form I don't think I could describe it as being effective. I might agree with further editing, but what I'm really curious about is if the lenses (esp. the 55-250) are soft when properly sharpened. The moon is an interesting "real world" subject for that kind of test. I've seen the reviews already, those look good (at least on Photozone - for the 55-250).

If you really want to compare them, show some 100% crops with no sharpening.

It may be oversharpened but it does not contain much artifacts I think. I will post unsharpened pics later. These images above just sharpen what's already there, if a little too aggressively

Now here's a more "natural" looking one:

It was shot in Raw, I did adjust levels a bit.

Don't think I'm against sharpening, nothing leaves my computer without at least a little.

For full-frame shots of the moon, I use 200% with a radius of 4 pixels and 0 threshold. Since these images have high pixel count, I up the radius from what I would use with a smaller image. This gives good sharpening without much in the way of artifacts.

Probably both lenses will perform about the same, and that is very well. These are both good images. You could show some 100% crops to be sure, but there is probably little difference.

These are 100% crops. No resize, just cropped out from the original 10mp image.

gabebalazs wrote in post #7116627
Now here's a more "natural" looking one:

It was shot in Raw, I did adjust levels a bit.

Looks really good and natural!

Do you know about the High Pass sharpening method that gets passed around on the forums from time to time? It pretty resistant to creating artifacts. A small amount of USM is good sometimes, but for laying the ground work the High Pass method is a good place to start.

uuh! Please tell me about it! I'm interested.

Here you go. It's the POTN sharpening Sticky!

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=466333

thank you!

Care to share your setting for the 55-250 shot?

let's see...
For the Canon it was
- tripod
- Manual mode
- IS off
- Live view manual focus at 10x magnification
- f/8
- ISO 100
- 1/25 sec
- Metering mode: Pattern
- Auto white balance

Tamron shot was the same except 1/30 sec.

PP: levels, sharpening in ACR, and maybe shadow/highlight correction. I don't remember precisely.