Camera discussion ex 60009 thread

How do you get your photos so enviably sharp? There's an uncanny amount of sharpness that surely isn't down to just optics alone, or is it?

 

Good optics, high quality sensor, getting the subject in focus and a sufficiently fast shutter speed to prevent blur and uploading a sufficiently hi-res image.

 

What about post-processing? I think it shows the limitations of my 11 year old Pentax DSLR now.

One thing I have to say I really don't like is over-emphasised HDR - it grates on my eyes.

 

A bit of unsharp mask can help but if it ain't sharp in the first place, you can't create a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

 

That's very true and I've got back home to discover many a sows ear believe me! Of course, nobody get's to see those online!

 

Where you will see the limitations of your 11 year old camera is low light high ISO performance, sharpness is more down to either, using a slow shutter speed introducing motion blur or camera shake, not getting it in focus in the first place or not using sharpening in the processing. As Ian has said if it's not sharp in the first place it never will be, although you can improve it a bit

 

Very true - at ISO3200 (the fastest on offer) it looks like HP4 for grain, 800 is as far as I dare go.

I also wonder how many people on here have cameras with 35mm sensors rather than APS-size sensors and indeed, without starting a tribal war, what cameras are in use?

 

Perhaps that s better for a separate thread? It could run and run!

 

Nope, appreciate that - aperture losses and all that. (Aperture as in sampling aperture, not the hole in the lens although that can play a part too)

Oh yes indeed - but what I wouldn't want to start is the seemingly inevitable Canon/Nikon sniping!

 

Another factor is your on line hosting site. Some squeeze all the sharpness out of your images with their compression system and that's another thing to consider when saving as a jpeg. The higher the compression factor, the lower the sharpness.

 

The technology has moved on no end in the last 11 years as evidenced by your highest ISO and the noise problem. I think manufacturers used to market new cameras on the 'I've got more pixels than you' basis but them switched to higher and higher ISO. Nikon seem to have won that race with an insane 3.28m ISO on the D5. Im not sure how workable an image at that level is but if you specialise in taking pictures of black cats in coal cellars it could be useful but it's the wrong side of £5k for the privilege. Incidenly, I've never been impressed with Photoshop noise reduction and I use Neat Image plugin which much better results without loss of definition ( other plugins are available).
I think we have now come to a plateau in development and new cameras now just seem to consist of a couple of extra buttons and a few more pixels to justify a hike in the price. My upgrade from a Nikon D200 to a D800 put me in a different league with unbelievable dymamic range, definition and a full frame sensor. It was tweaked a bit with the D810 and now the D850 with 45m pixels instead of 36m and a supposed better sensor but at £1500 more than the D810 it replaced!
Canon/Nikon are the market leaders and at present Nikon seem to be in the lead but that could change. I don't think there is any point in either trying eat into the existing user market as changing lenses in addition to camera bodies would be at an enormous financial cost although I know of two who switched to Nikon when the D800 came out.

 

More and more pixels bring there own challenges. My 8Mp Canon 20D delivered cracking airshow shots with my 100-400L. Tack sharp throughout the range, even on fast moving subjects when panning
Now I've got three times as many pixels to play with, success rate is not so high. Shooting fast moving aircraft is the challenge. Panning has to be even more accurate as there
are more pixels for your subject to move across during the exposure. Can use faster shutter speeds with jets but not so with propeller driven stuff as prop blur needs slower speeds.
Same with landscapes. 45Mp+ gives superb detail as long as everything remains still. Slight movement of the grass, leaves etc. will soften the image. A faster shutter speed will help but landscapes need great depth of field so to maintains that, up goes the ISO.

 

Agree that all those pixels can be a bit unforgiving but on the D800 there are two DX crop modes which cut the pixel count down to 12m or 9m. I don't know if Canon have the same facility.

 

The other thing that goes hand-in-hand with all those pixels is the sheer amount of data storage required, unless you're as selective over what you retain as you would have been before shooting in the days of film.

 

The unasked question in any discussion should be "what will you do with the images ?". If that need is satisfied by a 12 MP sensor then why pay for a 20+ Mp sensor ? In an oft-asked question "Why use a Rolls Royce for a Mini job ?" allegory only buy the kit you YOU need rather than the kit that makes other jealous.

In my case the combination of getting images for publication hence needing higher ISO to cope with poor light is the major factor in camera purchase; since that currently comes with with a larger sensor I have settled for the Nikon D610 with its 24.3 Mp sensor as I cannot see me requiring owt larger. I know some magazine editors who have 36 Mp sensor bodies whilst one recently tested a 45 Mp sensor bodies with an extremely high ISO range. Accepting their need for material I presume they consider the higher sensor size / higher ISO range worth paying the high price charged. Again my smaller sensor still allows me to create different photographs (e.g. heavily cropped; create 2 separate photographs from one image) but at a price that I can afford.

Given the point raised by the OP, however, some cameras can be set to sharpen images as they are taken whilst photographers such as Spamcan81 and myself are happy to take an image without sharpening and use the sharpening tool in the post-image processing (PIP) software as a final stage in the editing process. It may be this area of selection where the problem of sharpness becomes apparent.

 

My Nikon D610 is matched with a 32 Gb memory card that provides 900 full size (20" x 13") images and even in London that took 2-3 days of 12 hour photting sessions to fill.

 

I would almost agree with that but say you should buy the best you can afford. More pixels means more scope for cropping. There are additional cost though, a high definition camera will be a complete waste unless it has decent glass on the front and in my case I also had to buy a new computer, a 76 meg raw file needs a lot of RAM and a lot of hard drive.

To keep control I have switched off the camera processing facilities both sharpening and noise reduction, its best to keep control over this and PS or over software will probably make a better job of it. The only thing I have left on is the automatic D lighting. The one thing I can't understand are those who pay a lot of money for a good DLSR and then just shoot jpegs, throwing away 30% or more of the data and not being able to recover blown highlights or alter the white balance in subsequent processing.

 

If we go back to the original question it is important to remember all digital images need sharpening because they are by the nature of the sensors limitations fuzzy.
There are all manner of explanations for this on line - this one as good as most - https://www.howtogeek.com/215920/ht...sharpening-is-and-why-you-should-be-doing-it/ and worth reading through.
Also remember that if you have a workflow - say RAW to .tif to.jpg then sharpening will be required at each stage of processing.

Like Johnb I shoot in RAW, the selected originals saved from the camera are never edited directly (digital originals need to be regarded in the same way as a negative or transparency on film and kept securely) , the processed version from Lightroom / Photoshop are saved as .tif and for viewing on email or forums etc a smaller .jpg is created. I wouldn't use .jpg as a master copy of a photo as saving a .jpg compresses the image and loses data in the process and will therefore degrade over repeated edit / save cycles, and to emphasis the obvious is why if you do shoot .jpg the original version should always be backed up before processing.

Also like John my D800 has had few changes to how it arrived from Nikon, Active D lighting is Auto and White balance set to Auto and retain warm colours; other than that all manipulation is done in Lightroom and Photoshop with a few plug in additions such as Dfine2 to manage noise, such as in yesterdays shot of 70013 at Church Stretton. I haven't actually found much the D800 can't do and I use it for railways, landscape and wildlife.

Scott

 

Agree with all that Scott, was it not me who decided you on switching from Canon? I can't really remember now. To save storage I do save the edited image as a jpeg as, if it's done properly, it shouldn't need saving again and if I'm not satisfied with any of the earlier images I go back to the raw and start again. In case anyone doesn't know a Raw is 'lossless' and doesn't degrade no matter how many times you use it.
One question I haven't got an abpnswer to is that I have two raw settings, full about 76 meg or lossless compressed, about 46 meg. If the latter is really as it says then what's the point of using all that extra storage space. I've used both on the same subject in the same lighting and I can't see any difference.
One other tip while I think of it. Never ever change a lens with the camera switched on. A charged sensor is a magnet for dust.

 

A similar facility does exist on Canon DSLRs, not sure if all models though.