EOS R6 Mark II - Noisy / Lack of Sharpness help (not ISO related)

[tmoney275]

I have been shooting with a R6ii w/ rf 35mm 1.8 lense. All was good first day out and got some great shots. Shooting at F2.0 / auto iso / 1/1000th shutter. Photos were pretty sharp and no real issues.

I went out today and shot some photos. Very bright conditions out so i stopped down to f5.6 / 250 iso / 1/1000th shutter. I had some crazy issues with my photos looking very grainy and noisy. No idea what the issue is. Seems that if i shoot at wider aperture around 2.0 I am getting way sharper results, even with higher ISO. 

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! 

[tmoney275]

Ok, not sure what your point is with regards to my original post? I import from SD to Lightroom. I am only using google to share my examples here to help identify my problem.......

[Peter]

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@tmoney275 wrote:

I have been shooting with a R6ii w/ rf 35mm 1.8 lense. All was good first day out and got some great shots. Shooting at F2.0 / auto iso / 1/1000th shutter. Photos were pretty sharp and no real issues.

I went out today and shot some photos. Very bright conditions out so i stopped down to f5.6 / 250 iso / 1/1000th shutter. I had some crazy issues with my photos looking very grainy and noisy. No idea what the issue is. Seems that if i shoot at wider aperture around 2.0 I am getting way sharper results, even with higher ISO. 

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! 

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The only thing I see in your pictures are 8x8 px compression artifacts. No noise at all actually. Very sharp all of them too.

[tmoney275]

That’s super helpful! Can you expans on what that means? Curious to learn more on that. 

[johnrmoyer]

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@tmoney275 wrote:

That’s super helpful! Can you expans on what that means? Curious to learn more on that. 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Effects_of_JPEG_compression

JPEG standard specifies quality settings from 1 to 100. Some software labels "quality" with a different word than the standard.

In addition to compression artifacts, I also see artifacts from less than optimal unsharp masking parameters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking

The source of the artifacts might have been processing by Google photos.

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm also has explanations that I found easy to read. https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/sharpness.htm

There is often a tradeoff between resolution and contrast. Unsharp masking can increase the appearance of contrast with a result of viewers perceive the image is sharper.

[Peter]

Johnrmoyer gave a good explanation. It means that the files you shared are not the files you see in Lightroom. You raw files will not have any 8x8 px JPEG compression artifacts like the shared ones, and therefore we can only guess what the problem is.

You wrote that you use Lightroom. A common Lightroom mistake that I see from time to time https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/EOS-DSLR-Mirrorless-Cameras/EOS-R5-Noisy-Photos/m-p/458160/highli...

That user shared raw files and a print screen how it looked like in Lightroom, so it was pretty easy to find out what the problem was.