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Sharpness setting on XTi

RumpRoast

Gawd
Joined
Sep 13, 2005
Messages
633
Hello,

I just recently picked up a XTi a few weeks ago and while fooling around with the settings I saw that I can adjust the sharpness under the picture settings. Has anyone fooled around with this? I bought the Understanding Exposure and my inlaws got me XTI/400D for Dummies (extremely useful btw) and shot over 2500 pictures in the last 2 weeks but found that the pictures are not as sharp like some of the sample pics on another forum. I know some of those are due to handshake and user error.
In the XTi for Dummies book, they mentioned something about the Picture styles in the menu options that people can tweak their settings like sharpness, contrast, color tone and saturation. I looked this morning and the settings goes from 1-7 with 7 being the highest in sharpness and the default setting is set to 3 and 4 depending on the picture style. Is this considered cheating if I bump it up a few notches? Will this degrade the picture quality like the sharpen feature on Photoshop if overdone?
I won't be able to test it out until after work but I wanted to know if anyone here has messed around with these settings. I'm still a beginner in the SLR field so please be gentle if the question sounds noobish. Thanks
 
Hello,
Will this degrade the picture quality like the sharpen feature on Photoshop if overdone?

Yes. Along with saturation, contrast et al, the sharpness setting on your camera is processed after the photo is taken. Note that if you shoot in RAW, these settings are generally ignored (though there are ways to maintain them).
 
Any samples? Post a resized image and a 100% crop along with exif, then we'll have a better idea if your lack of sharpness is due to camera motion, subject motion, or lens softness, or if it's something that can be tweaked in postprocessing.
 
You can bump it up a notch or two. But when you max it out artifacts will appear. Using 5 or 6 may not be too bad but, I think 5 should be max. Are you seeing the pics as soft then what was the aperture when you shot it. If it was wide open on the kit lens then that would soften the image. Both Nikon and Canon kit lenses tend to be soft below f/8, from my experiece.
 
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