Kit lens softness or Post processing corrections

[ibcrewin]

I took this picture and was pretty unhappy with the sharpness of the

background. I shot it at 21mm f/9 for 1/200 sec. 0 exp compensation. It was a

little underexposed and the sky to the left is pretty much blown out. My

daughter looks reasonably sharp but Mom is way blurry. Is the kit lens this

soft on the edges even at f/9 or is this more of a hyperfocal length issue?

 

Next, I have Photoshop CS. Is the sky in the back tweakable? Can I also fix the

fringing in the trees? I know you are probably going to tell me to shoot raw

but I only have a 1 gig card.

 

Thanks.<div></div>

[ibcrewin]

whoops.. let's try that again..<div></div>

[ibcrewin]

crap 0 for 2.. this has to work..<div></div>

[phule]

Mom is soft because she's not in focus.

 

The sky looks like it was a partly-cloudy day.

 

2GB cards are dirt cheap. Buy one. Shoot RAW. :)

[pjmeade]

Hello Ivan, a simple sharpening in CS will give mum a bit of a lift. The sky is blown and saturating what is there doesn't help much.

 

A 1 G card will hold about 130 RAW files if you use iso-100. If that's not enough, buy more cards (always remembering to look at the postings on ebay fakes).

 

Pete

[fred aspen]

It looks like a depth of field issue to me. With focus on the daughter up close the mom is going to be soft unless you choose a smaller f/stop, i.e., 16 or 22 but then you will be getting softness from the diffraction limit.

[jim_larson1]

21mm, range 3 feet: DOF is just under 1 meter. you need to back up a bit :)

[dcheung]

Things are soft because they are out of focus, not because of a lens issue.

[pico_digoliardi]

Even 1/200th of a second can blur if you don't hold very carefully. But as noted, DOF has its limits.

 

Regarding the background blow-out, you have CS2 you can go to Adjustments - Shadow/Highlight and tweak ranges.

[lovcom_photo]

Soft focus and out of focus are two different things....the later cannot be fixed in post processing.

[lovcom_photo]

Weiyang, you cannot say for sure the there is no lens issue...unless you know for sure where the focus point of AF was made....just looking at a picture of the net prevents anyone from precluding a lens issue.

[ibcrewin]

So if I went wider say 18 and the same distance, would I be able to get mom in focus in the BG? I was sitting down against the fence so moving back wasn't an option. Is there a quick formula or somthing to help me pick out a focal length that will help me catch this shot next time?

[len_kocurek]

"I have Photoshop CS. Is the sky in the back tweakable?" I have tweaked skies in cs2 by using "selective color" and further fine tuning it in "hue/saturation".

[lovcom_photo]

Len, would you be so kind as to give a quick instructing on using CS2's selective color to fix a blown sky especially with tree leaves involved? This is of great interest to me.

 

Thanks,

Dan

[gdanmitchell]

For a casual, hand-held shot I think your main subject (the young girl) is reasonably in

focus for this lens - could have been better, could have been worse.

 

Other elements (woman at left, trees) are out of focus, I would think, simply because they

are further away. The effect is probably increase due to corner softness that _may_ affect

ths lens. (It affects all lenses - the question is just how much it affects them.)

 

You also have a very difficult lighting situation. I looks like you have very flat lighting from

an overcast sky but you also have some of the far brighter clouds in the image in the area

behind the tree. It is very difficult to avoid blowing out those bright areas and/or

underexposing the foreground subject.

 

I think the image could be imprroved in Photoshop and, depending upon what you plan to

do with it, the work could be worthwhile. You aren't going to able to really bring back that

sky and you won't get much more sharpness out of the trees - but, frankly, I'm not sure I'd

want the trees to be sharper. After all, they are not the subject of the shot.

 

I'd probably play some games with saturation - desaturating some of the background

elements and possibly increasing saturation on the girl.

 

Some local contrast enhancement (e.g. unsharp mask) would help the whole image. I

might do a couple passes: one for the image as a whole and another just on the girl.

 

Levels and curves adjustments on portions of the image will also help increase contrast

and deal with brightness issues.

 

And, yeah, shoot RAW.

 

Dan

[phule]

<<unless you know for sure where the focus point of AF was made.>>

 

According to the Canon Zoombrowser software, see attached screen shot.<div></div>

[len_kocurek]

Dan Lovell, I am no authority on ps, but I play with it a little. You may or may not like the result; you will have to do by trail and error and see if it pleases you. Select the color you want to tweak, in the case of a white sky, I would select whites, and then play with the sliders under the various colors, i.e. cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Also flip between Relative and Absolute. Be aware the playing with whites in your photo will not only the change the color of the sky, but all whites in the photo. This isn't going to put detail in the sky, but will put in a little color.

[ibcrewin]

I'm not going to really do anything with this shot..It was more of an example. Here's another one. This is at f/9 18mm 1/250. I think that at f/16 the trees would have been a little sharper, but at f/9 shouldn't granpa at least been in focus?

 

Btw, can you tell I was playing at the playground as much as she was?<div></div>

[phule]

<<but at f/9 shouldn't granpa at least been in focus?>>

 

I rather doubt it, but you can do the calculations yourself here:

 

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

[phule]

<<Can I also fix the fringing in the trees?>>

 

I think it's clear from your second shot that you're not seeing fringing. You're seeing blue sky (during a mostly-cloudy day) that's been exposed for the shadows your subject is in.

[ibcrewin]

Wow! Thanks Rob. I will study that.. thanks!

[lovcom_photo]

Ivan G, I think your images are just fine the way they are. A photo is like a sentence...a sentence should generally have one SUBJECT...a subject can be a person or a group. In the first image, the subject is your daughgter, so the fact that mom is slightly out of focus works...this is fine, this is selective focus....this is how you tell your viewer that the subject of your composition is your daughter.

 

Taking an image where everything or everyone is in focus can often be just as destracting and cumbersome as a sentence that has too many subjects, or is grammatically incorrect, resulting in bad literature, and lost readers.

 

As for grandpa and daughter in the 2nd image, this works fine...DON'T make the mistake of having this mindset that all people in a photo should be sharp...this is wrong thinking...the subject is your daughter, and grandpa is just secondary, so therefore he is in soft-focus.

 

If you want everything to be sharp, then get a point & shoot. ;-)

 

Use the selective focus capabilities of your dslr often and play with it.....make complete grammatically correct pictures.

 

Use selective focus to tell a short story, tie relations between a subject and something secondary, be it a building, a car, a bridge, another person, something that poses as a symbol for example.

 

Selective focus makes for very interesting pictures....when everything is in focus the views will often get bored, or wonder what the hell the point of the image is.....keep the all in focus mindset to landscapes.

 

By the way I love both your photos the way they are....you'll ruin them if you make all elements in the composition sharp or too sharp.

[jimstrutz]

It looks like your second shot was actually focused slighty in front of your daughter. Could be the same for the first shot, but you can't tell from the image posted. If you want both to be sharp, you would at least need to focus (manually) slighty behind her. Also use a smaller aperture.

[mars c]

There is nothing you can do about the blown highlights of the sky, The sensors of today is a little limited in dynamic range.

 

Just post process your image so that it will not look under exposed, I enhanced your example below.<div></div>

[lovcom_photo]

Mars C is right, the data in the sky is blown...but, if you have time to invest, you could re-color the sky a nice blue....those pesky trees will bog your progress down, but you could give this image a new sky, and there are several methods to doing this. You can fix the fringed leaves in RAW converter too.