help please

I can't seem to get good sharp images, they always seem 'soft'. I've been putting it down to my poor technique, bad light, camera shake, etc.

Compared to the images I've obtained with my fuji s5000, I'm not impressed.

Can you peeps take a look at some images and let me know if it's me, the camera or are my expectations too high.

Images are here:

www.ba-joseph.co.uk/small-2449.jpg
www.ba-joseph.co.uk/orig-2449.DNG
www.ba-joseph.co.uk/small-2158.jpg
www.ba-joseph.co.uk/orig-2158.DNG

the small images are 2and 4mb, the orig are 16 mb


Exif info file orig-2158.dng

Camera: pentax k10d
lens: 18-55 @ 55mm zoom
Mode: Av
shutter: 1/25 (handheld)
aperture: f11
sensitivity: 1250

Exif info orig-2449.dng

Camera: pentax k10d
lens: 18-55 @ 18mm zoom
Mode: Manual
shutter: 1/6 (resting on picnic table, 2 sec timer, mirror up)
aperture: f22
sensitivity: 100
Filter: cokin ND

There are a few factors involved here. First, the camera - the fuji models have quite aggressive in-camera sharpening and hence tend to look quite punchy. They are also quite noisy and rather "ragged" in some ways. I use a S7000 for pictures for eBay. It's great for that, but I wouldn't use it generally by choice.

The K10D is more conservative regarding sharpening, leaving it to the photographer to sort that out in Photoshop. This is better for quality work as no artifacts are introduced in camera. You will need more Unsharp Mask. I use a radius of around 1.9-2.0 and a value of 100 - 150%. Threshold low, maybe 1-3. Then the pictures are sharp.

You can't test sharpness using a camera handheld. 1/25 sec is too slow to do this, f11 is fine, but 1250 ISO sensitivity a little unrealistic. Try a tripod, f8-f16, ISO 100 and then we'll be talking sharpness.

The second picture isn't helped by the slow shutter speed (did it move slightly on the table?) but certainly not with an aperture of f22, by which time difraction effects will be reducing resolution significantly.

In summary, try a more consistent technique, with a sturdy tripod ( a flimsy one is no good) and with more sharpening in Photoshop. Then there should be no problem and you can start to enjoy the more subtle, higher quality of the pentax K10D.

Hope that helps!

thanks john,

I don't have a tripod, yet. I don't have photoshop (nor intend to get it) or use much sharpening software in LR or Seashore.

The camera was on the table for the landscape shot, but it was very windy. So the f22 may have been causing difraction blurring? i used F22 to make sure I had good DoF.

OK, in the absence of Photoshop, try upping the in-camera sharpening and maybe the contrast as well as this will increase apparent sharpness.

As regards the lens, using medium apertures will give the best results. So f8 to f16 will typically be optimum on that type of zoom, with f22 tailing off. The better the lens the more you will notice the drop in quality. It is true that f22 will give more DOF, but it's at a price and going too far for top quality results. If it was windy, your subject was moving as well and that will also induce blurring at such slow shutter speeds.

If no tripod, then use a high shutter speed in good light and make your comparisons there.

However, without getting to grips with Photoshop or some other image editing program I can't see you'll get the best out of the K10D.

I do tire of this blinkered view of the image processing world that has Photoshop in clear view and bugger all else around it.

There are many options for processing images that do not cost a fortune and are just as effective. The GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ is a good example. It is free and can do all the cropping, sharpening, scaling and editing you're likely to need.

There is also the incredibly powerful Image Magick for batch processing and dcraw and ufraw for raw manipulation. As far as I know, they all run on Windows as well as Linux.

Photoshop is not the only answer and isn't even the first answer.

Just had a quick look at the images.

The second one at ISO100 has plenty of detail in it, although it's so slow that the foliage has blurred because there was some wind

Don't forget there is a difference between the inherent level of detail and perceived sharpness. Perceived sharpness does depend on contrast, and both the images are fairly low contrast.

As John says, they expect you to do minor adjustments after (which are not difficult). I would suggest you get a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 or greater - should cost no more than £20 as it's quite old. If you want an immediate start, then Irfanview or Google's Picasa can both do levels, contrast, and sharpness adjustments (and they are both free )

http://www.irfanview.com/
http://picasa.google.com/

Additionally, don't forget that the S7000 and the K10D at 100% view is not the same! The K10D has more pixels.

Matt

I'm positive that wasn't John's view... it's merely that Photoshop is the defacto standard for anyone in the industry. If you're a hobbyist, then Elements is a fine tool too - at least if you move into the industry and use full Photoshop you don't have to relearn it all. But, yes, Gimp, IrfanView, etc, etc, etc all will do the job very well - assuming you have time to learn, or someone who can teach you

BTW, for processing DNG & RAW, do try Silkypix - it'll give you very sharp results out of the box without Photoshop (I'll try and process your examples to show you what I mean...)

Matt

thanks for all the advice guys, I'm taking it all in.

as regards to photoshop, I have seashore, a mac clone of GIMP. it probably does all I need to do.

I mostly use Lightroom for tweaking an image, enhance contrast, change to mono, slightly adjust colours. But that's all i want software to do, to help boost a good image.

i am however suprised that people are saying that i won't get the best out of an expensive camera without resorting to photo enhancing software.

One of the reasons I bought a decent DSLR is so that the NEED for editing would be less.... or so I assumed.

it seems that i need software to bring up an image to 'good'.

This learning curve is steep, pass me my cimbing gear!

I've tried the software that came with the camera, PhotoLab, it's crashed several times when trying to work with images, losing the adjustments I was trying to make. it does show the images straight off the camera better than LR does though, I just don't trust it anymore.

Just discovered seashore doesn't like .pef or .dng files..

Serious DSLRs, and Pentax ones in particular, aim for a file that can be post-processed effectively. If the camera applied sharpening and other algorithms then it's a real pain to "undo" that, and if you do edit the file, then the artifacts of sharpening get amplified by the post processing and you end up with a mess.

The K10D gives wonderfully clean output that is a cinch to resolve.

But then, if you shoot RAW, then the camera is doing nothing except saving the CCD data - it's all down to your RAW convertor on the Mac and the settings you use

...and yes, it's a learning curve, but once you've got it sorted it's extremely quick

EDIT: Pentax Photolab uses the Silkypix engine, and version 2 at that. The full version (or even the free version) of Silkypix Developer Studio 3 is a completely different beast

Matt

I think we're getting to another issue.....
what are you using for a computer?

the oft forgotten camera acessory is a computer with enough RAM, hd space and a stable os to process those ever bigger image files.....

I'll take a look, LR sharpening is .... um.... non-existant!

[quote="Don"]An old shoe box with some silicon polish inside, that's all i need isn't it?



I'm using a macbook 13", 512 mb ram, 60gb hd.

I know I need more ram to work faster, but I'm not in a rush.

I've just processed the files in Silkypix DS3 (nothing else). Less than a minute each shot.

The foliage shot is super sharp.

The landscape is blurred - you needed a tripod, and a lower f-number. An aperture smaller than f16 starts to get odd with digital (diffraction effects). As there is no real near-field, even f8 would have been adequate. The movement in the trees has also affected perceived sharpness at this slow shutter speed. It is also a good 1-stop underexposed.

But, I think you'll see that there's plenty of detail in there!
Foliage (8.2Mb JPG in sRGB)

Landscape (3Mb JPG in sRGB)

Landscape (3.4Mb JPG in sRGB) - more aggressive Silkypix sharpening

(Click on the "original" link at the bottom for the full sized!)

It's not the camera
Matt

That's a relief!!

Thanks for your time everyone. I've just downloaded silkypix free to see what I can do with it.