 Ellen L. Zaslaw |
Not so sharp images I had a Nikon Coolpix 990 which I consider a toy, but I loved it and got some nice stuff. Recently I "upgraded" so I thought, to an Olympus C 5050 zoom because I was impressed with the growth in pixel value. Now I'm sorry I did that. I recently went on a trip to Menton and got what I expected to be outstanding photos. Too bad most of them came out fuzzy. I freaked. I have shot manually with the best equipment for years and almost never get fuzzy images, with or without a tripod. Why now? Is it me or am I busted with a crappy digital camera? Thanks, Ellen Zaslaw
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- Gregory LaGrange Contact Gregory LaGrange Gregory LaGrange's Gallery |
Hard to say. Where did the look fuzzy? Where they sharp in the view finder, but fuzzy on the computer screen? Maybe you used the smallest file setting and when you made them bigger on the screen, they don't look right. You said most came out fuzzy, so is there any major difference in how you took the sharp ones compared to how you took the fuzzy ones?
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Tim Devick |
Gregory's answer seems like the best suspect here. Maybe you had your camera set to take VGA (640x480) size pictures and you had compression set to the highest setting (most compression). That could cause your pictures to look kind of crummy. If you're shooting in automatic or program mode, maybe the camera chose too slow a shutter speed? Also, are you using the digital zoom at all? Many digital cameras have both a optical zoom as well as a digital zoom. The optical zoom actually magnifies the image coming into the camera, while the digital zoom simply crops the image in the camera to make it look "zoomed". I had a Nikon Coolpix 800 before my current camera, and I took a few pictures with the digital zoom to see how they turned out and I was disappointed to say the least. They were pretty crummy. Another possibility is that you have a camera that can automatically change the ISO setting based on the amount of available light. With most digital cameras, as the ISO speed setting goes up, the image quality degrades pretty noticeably. If you are running Windows on your computer, right-click on a picture you uploaded from camera that looks bad and select "PROPERTIES" from the menu that comes up. Next, select the SUMMARY tab. This will show you information about the image - shutter speed, aperature, compression settings, image size, ISO speed, etc., etc. Find the Exposure Time setting. The exposure time should be greater than 1/30 of a second to get sharp images without a tripod(as a general rule anyway). Also look for the ISO-Speed value - is it ISO-80 or ISO-100, or is it ISO-200 or ISO-400? The higher ISO speeds will result in noticeably grainy photos. Finally (and this probably should have been first), is your lens clean? Are there fingerprints or dirt or other "crud" on the lens?
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Ellen L. Zaslaw |
Tim Well I know the lens was clean. I'm no maven about digital but I've been using Leica and Nikon for 35 years. I have good habits. I don't think it had anything to do with the size. I shot in RAW format 2660x1920 and when I brought them into Photoshop I used 300 and 310 resolution and when I saved them in Tiff files I choose compression (none). Now the ISO setting, that could be the culprit and I wondered about that all along as I saw the fuzzy prints coming out. I'm going to look into that. I use a Mac Powerbook G4 for all my artwork but I'm going to translate what you're telling me to see if I'm missing something there. It was my own fault for bringing the digital on a trip like that. Really dumb. Next time I take my real cameras. Thanks Tim.
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- Gregory LaGrange Contact Gregory LaGrange Gregory LaGrange's Gallery |
since you shot them in RAW, maybe you need a different program to process RAW images besides photoshop. If I shoot RAW, and them take them directly to photoshop, they look much darker and have no detail. I have to use RAW image converter in canon utilities program. And then I can save them as a tiff file. And then it looks good in photoshop. Now I can extract a jpeg from a RAW image with photoshop and it will look right. How do your jpeg pictures look? And did you get any other software with the camera besides photoshop?
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Ellen L. Zaslaw |
Well I have Photoshop CS which has the plug-in for RAW and that works good for me. Some of the pictures were really sharp and nice and some of them looked like I took them with a disposable camera at 4 a.m. after a hard night of drinking and drugging. The good ones I also saved in jpeg and they looked good both ways. I do have some rinky dink software that came with the Olympus. I use it sometimes but prefer Photoshop for the obvious reasons. I am going to think about what you said here though and look into the image converter in any case. Thanks for your help Gregory. Ellen
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