K5 soft focus, poor colour contrast and detail

I was saving some photos from a recent holiday in Sussex and noticed the ones taken with my old K10D & 50-200mm were sharper and more detailed than those with the K5 & 16-45 which seem to be soft-focus most of the time. I tried to do a better comparison around the garden at home this evening by using the K10D lens at 50mm and the K5 at 45mm and the K10D was still better. I thought it might have been a problem with the 16-45 lens so I put my hardly used 18-55 on the K5 and did comparisons with the cameras set up as similar as possible and both lenses at 50mm but it made no difference because the K10D was again better with detail and contrast, whatever the distance. In fact when I look back at old pictures, the K10D did better with the 16-45 than the K5 is doing now. Does anyone have any ideas why my K5 is doing soft focus and what I can do to resolve this because I will have to put it away and use the K10D for now. Thanks.

Other than making sure you've checked the AF calibration for your lenses ( custom menu #26 ) I've no idea.

I upgraded from a K10D and K20D to two K-5s and was more than happy with the improved IQ

Please post some shots to illustrate the problem, complete with exif data.

Just had a go at taking similar shots with both cameras but unfortunately the K10D battery died after just two and the spare was also dead! It does give me a chance though to ask something I would have to have asked anyway: how do I put photos on a site? It's not something I ever do, I just save them for myself & maybe reduce to screen size to email to friends. Also exif info: how do I show this or can I just quote shutter speed, aperture, iso & focal length?

In this forum, just click the button marked Image and then search your PC for the picture you want. The dialog box provided is self explanatory.

It's best if images are not too large, otherwise the forum software may try to resize them, with less than optimum results.

Its also important to ensure the shots are being viewed with 'all things equal'. You don't say what format they are, or if you are opening them in a particular editing programme.

But if they are straight from the camera (eg camera JPEGs) then it could be custom image settings - both contrast and sharpness are controlled with these. Maybe the K5 defaults are different?

OK, here goes. These are nothing serious, just ones I took today hand-held on a short stroll with settings on both cameras the same. I sat on the grass with both cameras on my lap to get one picture then the other asap so images aren't always straight. White balance is daylight, image tone is natural, iso 200, shutter speed 1/100, no sharpening.
The K5 is brighter here with less shadow in the greenery. Colour tones too similar whereas K10D differentiates better.


Above: K5 & 18-55, 45mm @ f14



Above: K10D & 16-45, 45mm @ f16



Above: K5 & 18-55, 18mm & f14



Above: K10D & 16-45, 18mm @ f18

And these are just junk in next door's back garden. I aimed at the hole halfway up the concrete post. My own saved pictures show it is in focus with the K10D and there is far better detail whereas with the K5 it is definitely not in focus. When viewed at 100% size the air holes in the concrete and the hexagonal nut at the top are nice and clear with the K10D but the K5 has given a blurred image.


Above: K5 & 18-55, 35mm @ f7.1



Above: K10D & 16-45, 34mm & f7.1

I've now tried the 16-45 & 18-55 on the K5 and there is no difference. Images seem too bright and lack detail.

Just looks to me like the K5 is over exposing a stop for some reason.

Re the colour and contrast, have you tried a different picture setting or adjusted the contrast / colour in the one you are using? It could be that the K5 has a different look in 'Natural'.

Have you got highlight/shadow compensation on? Those will reduce contrast.

I've applied some curves and warming filter in PS to make the image look a little closer to the K10 image:




Re sharpness, the images shot over f11 will be softened due to diffraction. In the f7.1 image, I notice that the K5 photo is focussed slightly behind the K10 image (look at the fence in both shots - it's still in focus on the extreme right hand side on the K5 shot, whereas in th eK10 shot it starts to drift out of focus)... You may have focussed imprecisely, or your lens focus settings may need adjusting.

I went from a K10 to a K30, and intitially images with my Tamron 17-50mm were slightly backfocussed.

Also, the K5 is 16MP and the K10 is 10MP... you may need to apply a different amount of sharpening to your resized shots.

Just apply some minus exposure compensation to the K-5 shots and you should be fine. The K10D under-exposes compared to the K-5, or, conversely, the K-5 over-exposes compared to the K10D.

The K-5 images seem a tad over exposed here, but it's not something I've consistently had from either of my two K-5s

Thanks for the comments. I was doing the same images with the post last week and again yesterday and got the same results so I know I wasn't focusing incorrectly. Both cameras have had both lenses and it hasn't made a difference. I should point out the K5 was on 10M size as it always is so there's little difference in the real size. Both are usually set to bright but yesterday I changed it to natural. K5 had been on lowest level shadow correction when I noticed the difference between it & K10D so I took that off before doing these photos but didn't see an improvement. Maybe K5 is over-exposing but there's also the colour, sharpness and detail which I have seen compacts do better at and I should not be trying to get a K5 to be as good as them! I don't have Photoshop anyway. I will have to decide what to do with the K5 because knowing that the K10D can take better pictures, it will be the one I take out.

If you set them both to 10MP you might as well use the K10D if you're happier with it. Maybe even keep a look out for another?

1. Check your camera/lens for backfocussing and make the required adjustement.

2. Perhaps try dialing in some - exposure compensation and adapt your practise to a metering system which is less prone to underexpose than the K10D (I found it took a while to get out of habits I had got into with the K10D because of that camera's propensity to be fooled into underexposing by bright skies etc).

3. Try out the different image tone settings or adjust the one you have (+sharpening +contrast +saturation perhaps?) These settings are almost infinitely tweakable!

4. Shoot at native 16MP not 10MP otherwise you aren't getting the best detail out of the camera. I'm not sure, but perhaps the in-camera resizing is softening your images? Certainly you are ditching a lot of detail.


As I said I switched from a K10 to a K30 (similar to the K5) recently. For a while it took a while to get used to the K30's output. I tweaked about with the image tone settings and am now happy with it, and after using it for 'serious shooting', rather than 'test shots', much prefer it to the K10D.

All these cameras benefit from using some sort of post processing software to tweak the images, they do not produce the sort of oversharpened, oversaturated 'Facebook ready' shots you will get from most compacts. You certainly ought to resize your images and then sharpen them yourself, rather than let websites resize them for you.

Why?

It's kind of like using only half of the camera.

You can't get the best out of the camera at 10M.