? about sharpness

Hello all,
I was taking some pictures of my friends, in raw with my *ist-D and was very disappointed to find they were very soft, and can't get them much sharper in PSE2. When you shoot in raw do the images come out softer than in jpeg? This was only the second time I have shot in raw. The first time was pictures of my children. They were very soft then too, but sharpened nicely in PSE2.

I also wanted to know where does the average person set the sharpness level? I checked my settings after these shots and saw that it was on the softest level. (I think my photography instructor did it when he was fiddling with my camera.) Would this account for images so soft I can't sharpen them in PSE2?

BTW, I posted some questions a couple of years ago when I first got my camera. Matt and George, you were very helpful then and I have gotten better at using the camera. I don't hate my camera nearly so much now! Ha Ha.

Thanks.

Christine

If you are not sure which settings have been altered, you could always reset the factory defaults and start again. I have all my sharpness, saturation, etc., at the mid point in my *istDS.

Starting with a fairly softish image is probably a good thing, because the camera sharpening is not as effective as PS.

To tackle the problem you are getting, I would suggest starting off with an image you know has no camera shake or focusing error - something stationary in bright sunlight would be a good place to start.

The best sharpening tool will be Unsharp Mask, and personally I don't use more than 50% these days, which sharpens enough for me without introducing haloes and other artifacts into the images.

There are other techniques as well, but this is a good place to start. If it solves the problem, then my guess would be the soft images you have been getting could be because of focusing problems, or camera or subject movement.

Thanks for the reply John. I did try Unsharp Mask. Usually, for basic sharpening my manual suggests Amount 85%, Radius 1; Threshold 4. I find this works for most things. This time I used the suggested amounts for protraits - 75%, Radius 2, Threshold 3. I even tried applying it twice. Nothing helped. I used a tripod and my subjects were pretty good at being stationary.

Maybe I just didn't focus on them properly??

Chris

Unless the shutter speed was too slow and there was camera shake, then the only other thing I could think to check would be the focusing. I don't know how experienced a photographer you are, so forgive me if this is pitched at too low a level, but don't forget that as you zoom out to longer focal lengths you will need faster shutter speeds to counteract camera movement.

The traditional guideline is that a 50mm lens should have at least 1/60 sec if hand held, a 100mm would be 1/125 sec (you can see these are rounded up). Using a 28-80mm zoom and having a shutter speed of say 1/30 sec would be OK maybe at 28mm, but a bit doubtful at 80mm.

A good fast standard lens (50mm f2 or faster) is always useful in low light.

Quick question about af
Continuous or single mode?
Your camera may have focused between/behind your main subjects.
try single af mode or mf.
also telephoto setting with wide open aperture may have left you with too shallow depth of field, stop your lens down for groupshots.

Don, you were right to ask me about continuous or single mode. When I first got the camera I would accidently moved that stupid button all the time and forget to check. Actually, I did it in this shoot too, but almost at the end (and those shots weren't the ones I was confused about). I am going to have to learn to check midshoot or somehow to keep my finger off that button!!

But this time my pictures were soft even when I still had the single focus mode on. But I just went back and check the numbers again - John, I think you have solved it for me. I was using the AV mode and the shutter speed was 1/30 of a second. I was thinking I had the camera on the tripod the whole time, but when I went back again, I remembered that I got annoyed and took it off for a while. It was an overcast day - so I thought it would be perfect for pictures, but I guess the camera needed more light than I thought.

Thanks so much for your help. Good news is, I asked my friends to sit for me again, so I can continue to learn.

Chris

Christine,
I have found it useful to disable the "focus on half shutter press". You can find this is the custom menu of the *ist-D.
Then, to consciously focus, hit the AF button on the back. Now you can focus on the eyes (use single point, centre AF point), reframe and shoot away. The camera doesn't "hunt" for focus on every shot.
It's a bit like autofocus-on-demand.
Hope that helps,
Matt

Just a litttle aside about sharpening in Photoshop:

Sharpening is the last thing that should be done, if you use the Unsharp Mask. But there's a trick that adds a little sharpness non-destructively.

Create a duplicate layer of your background. Use Filter>Other>High Pass. Move the slider until you have mostly outlenes. Then change the Blending Mode to Soft Light. Flatten the image, and you can start from a sharper original. Keep the duplicate layer, and you can remove it any time you wish!