8 steps to sharper photos
So you’ve finally graduated from taking photos with a compact, and have your grubby little paws on a fantastic digital single-lens reflex. All good and well, but why don’t your pictures come out as fantastic as some of the ones you see on Flickr? Surely, they’re using the same camera as you - where are you going wrong?
That was essentially what Pieter asked me about this week. So, without further ado, 8 ways to make your photos jump off the screen.
Use low ISO
If you want the highest possible degree of sharpness from your photographs (and if you don’t, you’re reading the wrong article.), you’re going to have to start by removing anything that gets in the way of being able to extract as much detail out of your photos as possible.
Step 1 is to ensure that your pictures at the very least are recorded with the least possible amount of noise. To do this, set your camera to the lowest ISO setting - most cameras have 100, some have 80 as the lowest setting.
How does this help?
At higher ISO, you can get photos with faster shutter times (we’ll get to that in a bit), but the trade-off is extra digital noise. Which we don’t want.
Stop down your lens
Ooh, look at me using all sorts of photography terminology. In more readable English, ’stopping down your lens’ means to not take your photos at wide-open apertures. You don’t have to take photos at f/22, but the sweet spot for most lenses is at between f/8 and f/11.
How does this help?
At a wide aperture (say, f/2.8 or f/3.5), your lens lets as much light into the camera as possible. “That’s good”, I hear you say but that’s not always the case: you’d be surprised how much fuzzier lenses can be fully open compared to being stopped down slightly. This is doubly true for consumer-grade lenses, such as the lenses that are sold in body-and-lens kits.
Stop down your lens to f/8 to get as much sharpness from it as you can.
Get shy of vibrations
Now that the camera itself doesn’t degrade the image quality by adding extra noise, and your lens is operating at its very best, suddenly you, the photographer, are the issue. Try to make your subjects stand as still as possible, and use a good, sturdy tripod. Use as fast a shutter time as you can too - this counteracts the effects of any camera shake
If you’re shooting with particularly low light, you may even consider using a remote control or the self-timer to ensure that you don’t inadvertently shake the camera when you trip the shutter.
How does this help?
Any vibrations that are transferred through you to the camera cause a very slight blur. Some times, you can’t tell it’s actualy blurry, but trust me - it will affect the crispness of your photos (Why do you think that studio photographers use tripods a lot of the time?). Trust me, use a tripod.
Get enough light
All the tips so far are incredibly useful, but you’ll notice that they all ruin your light: The combination of low ISO, small aperture and high shutter speed mean that you need an ungodly amount of light. Shoot out-doors, use studio strobes, invest in a flashgun and a reflector, set off a nuclear bomb - do whatever you have to to get as much light as you can.
Always shoot in RAW
To maximise the amount of data you have to work with later on, when the time comes to edit your photos, shoot in RAW format.
How does this help?
We didn’t just spend all that effort just to let your camera screw up the photos by throwing away a lot of information and compressing it - which is what happens when you shoot in JPG.
RAW format gives you a load more flexibility, more data to work with, and is an overall better way to work with digital photos.
Watch your exposure
It is positively amazing how much data an imaging chip actually captures - there is so much information in a photograph that you’re never likely to even look at. The secret lies in that all this information is in the shadow parties.
Obviously, it is always better to try and expose your photograps perfectly (See ‘how exposure works‘ to find out how to get it right)
If you have to hedge your bets, it’s always better to underexpose slightly than to over-expose: You can work with underexposure in Photoshop, but an over-exposed image (with areas that appear ‘burned out’ or completely white) is a write-off, sadly.
Having said all that, you lose definition if you have to fiddle too much with a photograph - so do your best to get your exposure as good as possible.
Think about your workflow
Ideally, you want to treat your photos in this order:
- Take the photo
- Copy it to your computer
- Make any adjustments to colour and exposure on the RAW file
- Make any other adjustments in Photoshop
- Resize the image for your target medium (a flyer, the web, an e-mail, a photographic print etc)
- Sharpen your photo (but don’t over-do it)
- Save it down at the highest possible quality
Sharpen your photos for the right medium
Now that you’ve done everything right, you can think about sharpening your photos. This is quite an in-depth process - so much so, that I could almost write a separate article about it. Oh, wait, I already did - twice!
Read a lengthy explanation for why you should sharpen your photos, and a separate one which treats the all-important question of how you sharpen photographs in the best way possible.
A final note
Pin-sharp photos are great fun, but it’s not necessarily the be-all and end-all of photography (Don’t believe me? Check out the Lensbaby, for example…), and you don’t have to do all of the above all the time. Pick and choose which techniques are convenient / viable given the circumstances - the more of them you implement, the sharper your photos come out!
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Insights, suggestions and comments
Great article, thanks. Definitely all things to keep in the back of the mind when shooting — I’d say it’s pretty rare to say “damn, that photo was too sharp”.
The only point that might have a caveat is the “stop down your lens” tip. While technically true that lenses are sharpest when stopped down, often images will *appear* sharper when the aperture is wide open enough to throw the background nicely out of focus. The large “sharpness contrast” makes the subject seem sharper than it perhaps is. It’s a psychological/visual thing, rather than a technical thing. This is probably more effective on a naturally sharp lens like a good 50mm prime lens than a softer zoom.
Anyway, just thought that was worth thinking about. Great blog!
You will have to take your screen into account too!
I have too computers, a tower with a CRT monitor, and a laptop (LCD). The CRT displays pictures in a smoother way than the LCD. Sometimes, if I sharpen a picture on my CRT, the result will look bad (too sharp) on the LCD.
I have to disagree with point #6. With digital, it’s much better to overexpose by a stop or two than to underexpose. The argument of losing data applies to both ends of the spectrum. If there’s not enough light in an area because it’s underexposed, it’ll be black no matter what.
However, because of the way light works, there is an advantage to exposing more of your image in the lighter tones. For each stop, your camera can record twice as much information as the stop below it. That means that as long as you’re not all the way to the right of the histogram, you’ll have more levels of light, and thus more detail, in the lighter tones, and less noise. A more detailed explanation is at http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml.
When I started using a tripod, and the camera’s self timer, it made all the difference in the world.
Don’t forget, it’s the Photographer, not the Camera.
Lots of good advice here, some times I find the most difficult aspect can be getting a razor sharp image when you really want one!
A sturdy tripod is essential for me..
I remember the first time I used a remote. I have really shaky hands (lots o’ coffee!) and it was like someone had just given me gold.
Good list. Some of these I’ve not even thought of in a while. I don’t like using a tri-pod, thus giving the other tips more importance. Still have to love “Smart Sharpen” in photoshop.
Rosh
http://www.newmediaphotographer.com
Nice article.
I would add the following:
- Have a good quality lens. Great cameras can produce mush with a poor lens.
truly amazing. i am a complete beginner who is starting out with a 2nd hand EOS 20D just tried raw iso 100 f8 compared to raw iso400 f4.5 massively noticable difference.
i can see me visiting this site more in the future!
In regards to stopping down, the higher you go the more sharpness you will LOSE. Pinhole cameras especially. This is due to diffraction. This is not really relevant for most DSLR sensors up to f/16 or point and shoot sensors up to about f/8. Stopping down past those points results in a noticeable loss of sharpness due to diffraction.
Two additional tips I’d like to add:
1) Focus. If your photos aren’t in focus, they aren’t going to be sharp. If you can, frame you shot before you focus and don’t move the camera after you’re focused. Obviously this won’t work for everybody or everything. If you have to focus and then frame your shot be sure to move the camera as little towards or away from the camera as possible.
2) Lighting. If you light with a softbox from near the camera, you’re not going to introduce very much contrast into the scene. If you light with a bare reflector from 90°, though, you’re going to have a very contrasty shot and the perceived sharpness will increase.
Great article BTW!
Any news guys?
This may be a dumb question, but don’t you usually wind up compressing photos to JPGs on your computer even if you shoot in RAW? So won’t you wind up with noise from compression no matter what?
I guess I’m asking, is there an advantage to making the JPG on your computer vs. letting the camera compress to JPG, aside from the white balance, etc, modifications RAW lets you make after the fact?
I believe smart sharpen only sharpens areas of the photo that are somewhat sharp to begin with. So it won’t try to sharpen the entire image, even blurred backgrounds caused by a shallow DOF. Whereas USM sharpens everything, which can lead to noise, when you sharpen something that is OOF already (blurred background etc).
Personally, my less than sharp photos are always caused by me using too wide of an aperture, in an effort to get that really shallow DOF. I tend to make it too shallow some times. ; )
Good article with some interesting info - added you to my feeds and blogroll..
Great website.
at the risk of duplicating info..
above someone asked if RAW compresses into jpg.. yes it does UNLESS your camera offers the option of saving the picture in RAW file format. Why doesn’t everyone do this? I’m guessing the top reasons are
1) space. a RAW file can take up multiples of the space a jpg file can. If you have little memory, you might be concerned. I use a Canon xsi which at its best offers RAW+.. this saves a RAW file AND a large uncompressed jpg fiile for each shot - about a 15+ meg per shot usage. My solution? Buy a larger SD card! (or whatever memory type you use) My 16 gig card ($35) can save 700+ shots at this highest resolution!
2. Some graphics programs or photo retouch software can’t handle RAW format. This is getting to be less and less of a problem.
So - unless you KNOW you’ll never ever need the higher res, better color, etc of RAW - use RAW (or RAW +) every time.
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