Pictures not coming sharp with T3i

[JayS]

Hi all,

I am a newbie with SLRs. The pictures from my Canon Rebel T3i is not coming sharp. I have tried both Aperture priority as well as Shutter priority modes. I am not sure if my settings are not right or if i am not focusing right. I have attached a pic that i took recently. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jay

[jrhoffman75]

I looked at both images in DPP at 1:1 zoom and I think they are fine. What do you feel is unsharp about them?

[JayS]

Thanks for the reply John. If you look at the details (the leaves on the tree in first pic and the grass in the second pic) they don't appear to be clear. Also the color in the pictures doesn't look sharp. I have seen pics from other SLRs and they look pretty clear and sharp. 

[jrhoffman75]

Hi Jay. I should have been more clear in my response. I don't see anything in the image files that would indicate there is a camera problem.

Your Photo 2 was taken using Faithful Picture Style, which is intended for post processing. The sharpness in the file is "0". Adding some sharpness in DPP and a slight twaek to saturation gives more snap to the actual image.

Your Photo 1 was taken usinging Landscape PS; which applies a sharpness of 4.

Its hard to see exactly where the camera was focusing, but its somehwere behind the couple. Looks like it was in the trees.

The pine needles seem sharp.

It also looks like you are shooting a small file size (3.6MB) (Must be Small-Fine)

I suggest setting camera to One Shot, Program, Standard Picture Style and Large-Fine jpeg (or even RAW if you can process it) and get a subject with good detail and have it fill the frame and then judge the image.

[JayS]

Thanks John. Will try with your recommended settings.

[ebiggs1]

"I suggest setting camera to One Shot, Program, Standard Picture Style and Large-Fine jpeg (or even RAW if you can process it) and ..."

This is good and I also recommend you use these settings for the type pf photos you are/were taking.  One step futher, I would use just the center focus spot.  Turn the others off.  Than focus on a specific place and not randonly like it looks you did.

I also recommend you use RAW files.  They are not that much more involved as they used to be.  In fact it is almost seamlessly done by the free DPP software than Canon provides.  Plus there are some others that are better but they are not free.

However, RAW dose not guarrantee a sharper picture.  In fact a RAW can be worse.  Sometimes for what you are shooting, your examples, RAW will not provide a sharper image.  It can and ultimately will but does require more post editing.

And lastly the kit lens supplied with the T3i is a beginner lens.  It is thus so designed.  And upgraded lens can really show off what the T3i is capable of.

All photography is what you want and expect.  Your pictures do look OK to me. Pretty nice actually.

[ScottyP]

Agree with Ebiggs and others.

You can't expect everything in the shot to be in focus. Take the camera off of auto selecting the focus points and use just the center focus point. Put that over the most important thing in the photo and that thing will be in sharp focus, along with everything within the same approximate distance as the subject. If you have enough light you can narrow the aperture, as you did, to f/11, to get a thicker slice of depth of field in focus. . Narrower than that and you may lose a little sharpness to diffraction. If you had no particular subject but wanted as much as possible in focus you could approximate the hyper focal distance by focusing on something "1/3 of the way into the image" which will hurt your brain if you think too much about where that point is.

And a lens upgrade would add sharpness. Lens upgrades will almost always give much more benefit than body upgrades, especially with unchallenging slow-moving subjects like this that don't need bleeding edge sports autofocus.

You have people in the shot, so if their moving hands being blurred bothers you at all you could speed up the shutter faster than 1/60th of a second.