Sharpness

Esseff, while I am not a "pro" or "expert" I owned a canon 300d and a 7d so I have some experience with Canon crop sensor cameras. So in an effort to help you solve what you believe to be a problem,  the reason I ask for a jpg and raw is I don't know if you shoot raw or jpg. But a jpg is cooked.

In JPG, Canon takes the raw data off the sensor and it applies a picture style which is color, saturation, contrast, noise reduction and sharpness. The jpg image looks good because Canon has baked it. But if you shoot raw, you must do all these edits or else the image will not look good, you need to apply sharpening and noise reduction or you can get soft images.
If both JPG and RAW are posted it allows me compare what the camera says the image should look like wit the raw image.

Are you shooting hand held or tripod? Hand held without a fast enough shutter speed can cause soft images. Automatic modes can be set to auto ISO. High ISO can lead to noise and image not as sharp.

Are you using a preset for sharpening? What image editor are you using? In most editors when you go to export the image after editing and or size reduction, it will ask you if you want to sharpen the image and will have presets like the ones below.
Sharpen for Matte paper High/medium/ low
Sharpen for Gloss paper High/ Medium/low
Sharpen for screen High/ medium/Low
Have you tried screen?

There are other reasons for low sharpness. I can because of AF not being celebrated, problem lens but those issues are a lot less likely.

Woah... what did I start...  

Let me go through the posts one by one.

r1ch wrote: You would need to post a raw+jpg un edited. Without it we cannot tell if it is normal, a settings issue, a lens issue or something else. You cannot compare your image to someone else's. They could have a sharper lens than you. They could edit it an run it through an AI sharpening program.

I will post something. Usually I just shoot in raw although after my camera reset I forgot to switch back to raw and did a day's shooting in jpg...

I will take another photo in raw and jpg and post/link them here so youall can have a look...

Ozzie_Traveller wrote: G'day mate

can I invite you to send me one of your ex-camera images - JPG is fine - so that I can look at it on my screen
<Ozzie_Traveller @ Yahoo.com> after you remove the spaces

Phil

Cheers I appreciate that.

r1ch wrote: If you have a sharper lens than someone else, no matter what Essef does, his image will never be as sharp as your or if he doesn't know the best settings for sharpening images for the web, his images will not be as sharp as yours.

This is a good point. I typically don't want to blame the hardware (because good sportsmanship and all that) but it is possible that my lens or camera or both just not very good. I doubt that's the case as I've seen images taken by the 600D that look stunning so...

r1ch wrote: In JPG, Canon takes the raw data off the sensor and it applies a picture style which is color, saturation, contrast, noise reduction and sharpness. The jpg image looks good because Canon has baked it. But if you shoot raw, you must do all these edits or else the image will not look good, you need to apply sharpening and noise reduction or you can get soft images.

I play around with colours and various tonal highlights... that sort of thing. Didn't know about sharpening and NR...

r1ch wrote: Are you shooting hand held or tripod? Always tripod. Rollei C5i.
Hand held without a fast enough shutter speed can cause soft images.
Automatic modes can be set to auto ISO.  ISO set at 100 99.9% of the time.

Are you using a preset for sharpening? On the camera? I have it on manual.
What image editor are you using? Cyberlink Photo Director
In most editors when you go to export the image after editing and or size reduction, it will ask you if you want to sharpen the image and will have presets like the ones below.
Sharpen for Matte paper High/medium/ low
Sharpen for Gloss paper High/ Medium/low
Sharpen for screen High/ medium/Low
There is a check box for 'sharpen after resizing'. Never took notice of it tbh. I seldom resize. Is that wrong?
Have you tried screen? Not not sure what you mean

There are other reasons for low sharpness. I can because of AF not being
celebrated, problem lens but those issues are a lot less likely.

Here is a link to Dropbox folder:

www.dropbox.com/sh/l7xuy4n24s3p9r0/AAB-s...6NGlENYDW-_62Ua?dl=0

In it are two photos (4 actually but raw and jpg of each)

Nothing special, just a quick snap of the garden. This is really just about settings and/or hardware issues. Looking forward to feedback!!

Esseff wrote: Here is a link to Dropbox folder… Looking forward to feedback!!

I downloaded the folder, Sebastian, and there are my observations:

No sign of blur for one thing but, in terms of sharpness, not there yet.
Considering the very short focal length, the tolerance to OoF areas is
included in the greater DoF wide angles provide but still, not there yet
no matter the file format.

Given the camera is not faulty — because the sensor's position is fix-
ed to the motherboard — the lens may be, though, and the only way I
would go is a fine tune procedure (if at all possible with your model.

Esseff wrote: Nothing special, just a quick snap of the garden. This is really just about settings and/or hardware issues. Looking forward to feedback!!

Hi Sebastian, so first, I noticed that this lens has image stabilization. You may already do this but make SURE it is turned off when you are using a tripod. Also if you have any filters like circular polarizer or lens protector (UV Filter) take them off.

Second. I cannot stress enough how important exposure is. I have only looked at your first image because that is all the time for now perhaps tonight I will get to the second one.

The first image is overexposed. If you are going to use manual mode, You must check the histogram in the back of your camera EVERYTIME you take a picture and make sure you are not over exposed

In the first image. The histogram hugs and has a big spike on the right hand side. This is bad, you will see why below. In the firsts crop of the first image... look at the house exterior wall. There is no detail in it. , look at the flowers in the top right hand corner, they are a blurry mess. Over exposure can add to blurriness. In the image below that. I moved the highlight recovery which brought back detail. Then I sharpened it. Big difference.

In this second crop. Look at the little bush in the planter up against the wall, You cannot see the branches. Compare that to the second image that recovered highlights and was sharpened. You can see the bush now. Look at the 2 bags of potting soil, and at tall the plants in general. Between recovering highlights and sharpening, the image is much better now. I used Topaz Sharpen AI for sharpening. I used On1 Photo raw editor to recover highlights.

You will have to forgive me when I get grumpy when people criticize others images but don't lift a finger to help them figure it out. I may not be an expert or a pro, but I will try and help you figure it out.

Here is the final image. I have done no other adjustments or editing for color/contrast. Only highlight recovery, raise the black level a little and sharpening. If you don't like the sharpening. Remember you can always crank it up or lessen it to taste.

G'day SF

While r1ch has provided a very detailed response and suggestions re- sharpening in PP, your original question relates to your concerns about the perceived 'lack of sharpness of the lens'

I have downloaded image-749 and looked at it at 100% on the screen and I cannot find a 'perfect' point of focus anywhere across the image - I then noted that the image was shot 'at 10mm focal length' - I am unable to find the complete exif data to ascertain much more than this basic setting


.

.

these 3 images are direct copies / pixel-peeping if you prefer to call it at 100% image viewing

From many years of traversing various wide angle lenses, both prime and wide angle zoom lenses, I would say that this level of sharpness / unsharpness is pretty typical of a super-wide, probably in this case, zoom lens.  The optical designers need to juggle a tiny bit of sharpness in order to enhance the rectilinear framing of the image within the sensor format.  ie- to avoid and fix curvature at the edges, the maximum sharpness suffers a bit

It would seem to me that a) the camera/lens is doing its best.  If you were in this commercially, then -maybe- a 10mm non-zoom would be a tad sharper.  Otherwise, it's back to PP sharpening as described above

Hope this helps
Phil

So Ozzy Traveler made a good point. There is no point of focus. This is because you are also in manual focus. Canon Digital Photo Professional will show the focus point.. but not in manual mode. I would suggest using one shot auto focus so we can see were you are focusing. Also, it looks like the wind was blowing, the trees in the background are unusually soft.

The Photography Talk website did something strange with my images, you click on them then you have to use the left and right arrow. I have placed direct links to the images... first 2 are first image raw unedited, and raw edited and sharpened, the second 2 are the first image second crop unedited and edited..
http://motox.org/1/pt/1.png
http://motox.org/1/pt/2.png
http://motox.org/1/pt/3.png
http://motox.org/1/pt/4.png
The final image.
https://motox.org/1/pt/pt1.jpg

The second image was still over exposed but a little sharper. I suggest you try using Aperture mode and see if the camera will prevent over exposure. Are their any firmware updates for this camera? If so install them. Also try auto focus mode which DPP will show you where you focused. DPP is a free canon produce and you can download it from their website if you haven't already done so.

I used a little less sharpening on this one so it is a little less crunchy. Like Ozzie Traveler said. It does not appear to be an issue with the lens.

Unedited and edited.
http://motox.org/1/pt/5.png
http://motox.org/1/pt/6.png

Final image

http://motox.org/1/pt/7.jpg

A lot of helpful tips here. Let me try to address certain points...

r1ch wrote: Hi Sebastian, so first, I noticed that this lens has image stabilization. You may already do this but make SURE it is turned off when you are using a tripod. Also if you have any filters like circular polarizer or lens protector (UV Filter) take them off.

Actually I didn't know this. It was on so I will try again with it off. And no, I have no filters.

r1ch wrote: Second. I cannot stress enough how important exposure is. I have only looked at your first
image because that is all the time for now perhaps tonight I will get to
the second one.

The first image is overexposed. If you are going to use manual mode, You must check the histogram in the back of your
camera EVERYTIME you take a picture and make sure you are not over
exposed

I always use the histogram. But this comes back to not being able to tame light and overexposure. It's either not over-exposed leaving dark/shadows areas indistinguishable or over-exposed leaving the dark/shadowy areas better defined. This is something I've mentioned several times here. Thats why the wall is over exposed, so that details in the garden aren't just blacked out. I don't know how to do it. That's why I prefer to go out on overcast days, grey skies give me that middle ground...

r1ch wrote: I used Topaz Sharpen AI for sharpening. I used On1 Photo raw editor
to recover highlights.

I will check both of these out, although I will need to dig deeper into Photodirector and see what it can do since I've only really scratched the surface. PD does have sharpening, been playing around with it. Got this result:



It's still not perfect but that might also be because this was shot (accidentally) in jpg, not raw and IS was on. I think its looks a lot sharper though.

And once again PT has mangled that upload. Looks great here on my side.