EOS 70D soft images

[drrhein]

Hello Everybody.  My name is Dennis and I'm a newb, not to dslr's but to this model, so please have mercy on me.

First question: When using the image processing software, PF 4  should I be able to go to 100% and still have a sharp image?

Every image I take, with any lens, whether I focus manually or with AF, seems soft to me and I can't often make it sharper in post. I use raw.

MY Iphone 8+ does fine at 100% and is razor sharp.

Next: How in the world do you get good focus on water fountains? I can't get any kind of decent focus with MF or AF.

The attached examples are resized to make size limit but to get the size limit I'm afraid I lost resolution, so there's another question.

BTW, my 10D does same thing

Dennis

[drrhein]

Yes, One shot center focus point, Raw. Yep I did tweak sat up a bit. Use M or Av mode. Auto is awful.

Here are a few more maybe you can see the focus issue on them all. Exif Jpeg, I use canon DPP 4

Flower is f8 1/10 iso 200, Water is f4 1/160 iso 200, Turtle isf14 1/100 iso 640

[ebiggs1]

You used manual focus and you missed it. Simple. Plus I suspect you cropped heavily.

Photo number 2 is probably too close.

Question, on the turtle you selected f14?  That seems odd and makes me think there could be other 'odd' things going on?

A SS of 1/10 even on a tripod requires careful attention.

First I want you to do a full factory reset of the camera.  Menus, tools, clear all setting and clear all custom settings, too. 

OK, back to square one.

Set your camera back to P mode. Set ISO to 200.  WB on auto or daylight. Put your 17-55mm f2.8 lens on AF. Go outside on a nice bright day and take a few shots, a dozen or so, that have good contrast in them.  A fence, play set, or trees, etc., in a park for instance with nice blue sky. No excessive editing or cropping allowed!  Lens correction only. If these shots look nice and OK, there is nothing wrong with the camera/lens. The issue lies elsewhere.

Get back when you do this and report. We have to eliminate the gear and this is how.

[Waddizzle]

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@ebiggs1 wrote:

Question, on the turtle you selected f14?  

A SS of 1/10 even on a tripod requires careful attention.

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A macro shot using shutter speed of 1/10 on a tripod almost requires a remote shutter release, or the shutter delay.  Shutter lockup can help sharpness.   You also need to have a fairly decent tripod, too.  Inexpensive tripods can shake and vibrate in a gentle breeze like a tuning fork.

[drrhein]

The 1/10 shot was MF using live view X10. inside with bright  defused white lights,  on tripod and released with external release. If there was shake in the system I don't know where it came from.

The focus on the flower was dead on but clearly not. I have no earthly idea how I could get it focused better as AF was worse.

they were all cropped to get the size down for the 10mb limit here.

The turtle popped up while I was shooting landscape using f14 for DOF and all I did was refocus quickly. Idealy I would have used maybe f4 for that shot. The landscapes seemed fine although any blowup at all in post shows soft to me.

I'll try resetting and shooting some stuff in the AM.

I just read a review of these xxD camerias and it found the image quality and sharpness no better than an 8 out of 10.

Maybe what I'm fighting with by expecting more but you'd think at this price I'd get something at least as good as an iphone.

Dennis

[Waddizzle]

Is this shot in focus to you?

The DoF is blurring the background.  The closer you are to a subject, the longer the focal length, the narrower the DoF.

[drrhein]

Of course.

[ebiggs1]

"I just read a review of these xxD camerias and it found the image quality and sharpness no better than an 8 out of 10."

This is bogus and a good reason to mot randomly read reviews on the ole inner web. Cameras are not sharp. lenses are sharp.

Stop everything you are doing until you do this......

"First I want you to do a full factory reset of the camera.  Menus, tools, clear all setting and clear all custom settings, too. 

OK, back to square one.

Set your camera back to P mode. Set ISO to 200.  WB on auto or daylight. Put your 17-55mm f2.8 lens on AF. Go outside on a nice bright day and take a few shots, a dozen or so, that have good contrast in them.  A fence, play set, or trees, etc., in a park for instance with nice blue sky. No excessive editing or cropping allowed!  Lens correction only. If these shots look nice and OK, there is nothing wrong with the camera/lens."

You and none of us know what is going on or what you might be doing wrong.  This is eliminates the gear.

[ebiggs1]

Dennis the reason you need to do the reset and the test is some of your settings and procedure is suspect.

People don't regularly select f14 for instance.

[drrhein]

f22 gave me a nice DOF but with too slow a shutter speed. While f8 gave good speed but less DOF than I wanted so why not use f14?

[ebiggs1]

Oh, no real reason. It is just not a standard stop like f16 or f22.  It is just a tad bit faster than f16 but not really enough to make a substantial effect on your photo. Most people could not see the difference between f14 and f16 !

Do my test, please.   ......and reset.