Not doing so well new D700 and old lenses. Help!

<p>12 bit without and with white balance corrections in CNX2 on raw</p><div></div>

<p>For reference, 12bit wb corrected in standard and neutral picture control modes. This is a 100% crop. The ones above are resized in CS2.</p><div></div>

<p>Here is a shot with the 28-105 I just took. Finally we had a cloudy morning so I went outside and took a shot of palm trees. This is on a tripod, f11, with a polarizer - trying to duplicate the situations I will find in Pennsylvania. The focal length is 55 mm, shot a RAW, processed using ACR landscape curves and smart sharpening in Photoshop. I do think the images look soft - the first is the whole scene, the second is a crop at 100%.</p><div></div>

<p>And here is the central crop at 100%.</p><div></div>

<p>Does not look too soft to me, for a zoom lens. Your focal plane seems to be on the wheel of the black sedan. Mostly, only the leaves look fuzzy. You can try the AF fine tune anyway, although I'm not sure if it'll be any better with a zoom lens (and may even be worse). In my experience (oh, again!) the fine tune works better if calibrated for a distance that you'll be shooting at (say if you'll be shooting birds mostly 30ft away). Also at F11 there may be diffraction effects for a non macro lens.</p>

<p>Gene - I agree with Indraneel's comment that your image does not look unusually / unacceptably soft. One question, two suggestions: </p>

<p>1. Did you do intake sharpening (ie, on the full rez file), AND separate output sharpening (ie, after down-rez'ing for posting on photo.net) at each of the two resolutions that you posted? If not, give that a try.</p>

<p>2. You shot at 1/80th sec. When pixel peeping (ie, 100% crops), one can often still see traces of camera movement, even when the camera is on a tripod, but fired without using a remote release. With a d700, you could easily go up to ISO 400 or 800 with almost no loss of quality. Why don't you give that a try and see if that sharpens things up. If it does, buy yourself a cable release or a better tripod. </p>

<p>3. With the click of a button, one can now zoom in to an extent that was hardly ever done before the advent of digital photography. Because of this, it's now vastly easier to see sharpness issues at the level of individual pixels. Consider carefully the intended final image / print size and viewing distance before one is too hard on a lens or body.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - I'm not at my Photoshop computer, so I don't have all my usual sharpening tools available, but I just did the equivalent to an output sharpening pass on your 100% crop using a freeware program called XnView, and it sharpened up nicely, so I take back my earlier comment about the possibility of camera movement.</p>

<p>Tom M</p><div></div>

<p>Gene, your EXIF indicates inifinity focus on this shot! Even though it's a small distance on the focus scale from 50ft to infinity, it is a long way. You might try to fine tune your focus with live view, just to see how much you can nail it. Then we'll have a better idea of whether your lens is to blame.</p>

<p>Luke, my god, he shot it at f/11. We are not talking about tweaking the focus on a 1.4 lens. His focus could have been off by a country mile and he would still have been within the Depth of Field for a 55 mm FL focused at infinity. Specifically, DoFmaster.com shows that everything from 44 feet to infinity will be in focus. Worrying about focus is a red herring unless his lens or mount is damaged.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>Tom, and deities -- If someone is running a test of the sharpness of their lens, and they want to do it right, the best thing to do is to use live view and focus on an object in the scene critically, and evaluate that part of the image after capture. Whether Gene used f/11 or not, I think it still makes some difference. I might have recommended f/8 BTW. These lenses do focus beyond infinity, so the depth of field may or may not be adequate for a critical evaluation. </p>

I had a similar problem very recently. Agree with most comments here but try this;

Picture Control Vivid. + 2 saturation save and snd then adjust your white balance on auto to "A5" by holding the WB button and turning the front wheel to "A5". In fine jpeg mode this should give results similar to your previous "prosumer" Nikons with all the benefits of the brilliant D700.....I know we should all really be using the D700 like a pro in RAW mode but these settings certainly make the D700 better for more every day use.....

Errr, I think the OP might have worked something out for themselves in the intervening 8 years!

 

And if your D700 needs A5 colour correction, then there's either something wrong with the camera, or the apparatus you're viewing the images on. My D700 had, and still has, excellent colour accuracy. Even by today's criteria.

All I have are AIS Nikkors, from 8mm to 600mm and I never had a problem with softness on my D700. And now that I also have a D850 I can appreciate just how sharp that "old glass" really is.

Hi again,

 

Another one of my old threads that someone resurrected! In the ensuing eight years from the original post the 28-105 has been replaced by a 24-120 f4, I shoot mainly in RAW, and make extensive use of the Photoshop curves in ACR. The most used AI lens is the 35 f2.0. Needless to say, except for the weight, the D700 has turned out to be a fine camera. No longer any complaints re. sharpness and color. As explained in the tripod thread, in between the original post and now, I managed to fracture my hip on black ice under 6" of snow in Pennsylvania, March 2018 while trying to get a photograph of a waterfall encased in snow and ice. I'm from the sub-tropics, Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, so what did I know about black ice. I'm fine now, but it does mean the D700 may have to go for something a lot less in the mass department for travel.

 

Gene

IQ wise it's time to retire the D700 anyway...;)

 

It's AA filter is pretty coarse compared to those more modern ones and, obviously, those with none at all. :D

 

Maybe pick up a used D750?

Ye olde creaky D700 still has its unique charms, even in 2019. ;)

 

That crude clunky bottom-of-Coke-bottle show-stopping dealbreaker of an AA filter, slapped in front of a meager 12MP full frame sensor, remains one of the best digital platforms for old non-super-premium film-era glass. Once-legendary Nikkors that everyone craps all over as "garbage" on the D750, D810, or Sony A7R still make beautiful music with the D700. Resolution isn't everything: deployed appropriately, the now dirt-cheap D700 with its fat pixels is a nice additional tool to have around. Its one of the few full-frame Nikons that can be modified (with an authorized update) to emulate the color response of the D2X on demand. For some subjects, the original D700/D3 color flavor or the D2X option offer something the later bodies don't.

 

Probably not the ideal "only DSLR" to own today, but at the going rate of $450 its an unbeatable value as a "starter" FX body, or supplementary body for old-glass fun. In a pinch, you can hammer nails with it (or knock a thief unconscious).

Edited September 27, 2019 by orsetto

Probably not the ideal "only DSLR" to own today, but at the going rate of $450 its an unbeatable value as a "starter" FX body, or supplementary body for old-glass fun. In a pinch, you can hammer nails with it (or knock a thief unconscious).

 

As someone who kept his D700 when he got a D800e (in the incorrect expectation that the D800e might be worse in low light due to the increased pixel count - it's actually about a stop better), I will say that there are a couple of disadvantages in a D700 as a backup. The main one that got me was the swapped +/- buttons for image review - unlike things like dial direction, you can't swap them, and it drove me nuts hopping between bodies. Also the old style batteries, but fortunately my ineptitude at getting rid of my spares when I traded my D800 and D700 for a D810 meant that my recently-acquired D90 IR body has power. YMMV.

 

Otherwise, I'm very fond of my D700 memories - it was my first Nikon, and seemed to meter and focus better than my D8x0 series bodies (possibly because everything was so soft you couldn't tell).