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What am I doing wrong?

E

elchorizo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 26, 2004
Messages
234
Hi everyone,
I recently got a new Canon A95 to replace my old 2MP. I really like the camera so far but I'm having some trouble getting sharp clean pictures. Because I read so much about how good the camera is I'm assuming the poor image quality is something that I can remedy by learing how to use the various manual settings.

The biggest problem I have is that my picures still have a very "taken with a digital camera" look to them. Its kind of hard to explain what I mean so here is a bad pic that quite vividly explains what I mean. I did NOT take that pic but it really shows what I'm talking about. You can tell that pic was taken with a digi.

Here is a pic I took that shows similar poor quality but not nearly as exagerated as the example above. My pic has obvious blue on some of the vine pieces that stick into the sky as well as a general fuzzy non sharp look. Btw, this pic was taken on a cloudy and rainy day. It has been resized from the original which was taken at full resolution with the minimum compression. The camera was set to the auto setting.

I was really hoping to obtain sharp clear pics like this one. I'm assuming I can take better pictures by learning about how to use my camera but I'm not sure where to start. I've read a lot of stuff recommended on this awesome forum (thx guys!) but I cant seem to figure out what to do to remove this certain "digital" look I seem to be getting.

What do you guys think?

Here are full size version of my pic and the pic I used as an example of the "digital" look:
my pic (2.8MB)
example pic (700KB)
 
What your describing seems to be some fairly bad (but by no means terrible) chromatic aberration. Lenses that display almost no CA toward the edges at full resolution and in a high-contrast setting are extremely expensive. The results you're getting are pretty typical of that range of camera, and I think your vineyard shot is definitely acceptable. (This example from DPReview shows exactly the same CA; browse their gallery for more examples.)

The "bad" example you linked to is totally unacceptable (unless it was intentionally post-processed to make it blurry and over-saturated), but your photo doesn't suffer from CA nearly that much.

I don't think there's really all that much you can do to sharpen up the shots. One thing you might try is getting a tripod and retaking that vineyard shot at a much smaller aperture. I can't seem to find what the minimum aperture is, but put the camera in aperture priority mode and try to get it down to f/11 or thereabouts.
 
I don't know if you can do much to help the CA that HorsePunchKid talked about, but I took your picture and adjusted the contrast in PS +30 and it really makes the picture a lot sharper. It helps provide a much clearer demarkation between the darker areas and the lighter sky, exactly the same areas that the CA is effecting. Almost all Digital picture require a little post-processing to reach theor full potential.

Just a thought.
 
Yeah, the CA on the A95 is rather bad comparatively to some of the other compacts. I borrowed one a few weeks ago because I had left my camera with a friend for vacation. The shot itself would have been rather nice, if the CA wasn't so evident. You're working on a good eye.
 
Chromatic Aberrations, and other image aberrations, are caused from lens design. Basically what you have here is a lens that focuses the red/green/blue photons of light in slightly different places on the sensor. It is a physical thing that lens designers try to stamp out, but you can also see similar things with a prism...

Anyways, most people correct CA by shrinking one of the color channels in relation to the green channel. IE, they may shrink the blue channel, and then it lines up correctly and the issue of fringing is much less noticeable.

Unfortunately none of the software I have supports doing this (except for PanoTools, but I don't even want to think of writing the scripts to do this stuff). So I don't have much experience in it and I can't show you what the results could look like... :(
 
Cool, thanks everyone. Looks like the problem is definatly CA. I didn't realize digital photos needed postprocessing so much :( but I get its a good excuse to learn photoshop.

Hypothetical question: How high end of digital camera would you need to escape these problems? Do DSLRs have this problem too?

Thanks again for the help guys
-Marshall
 
I can't help you much with your picture or add to anything tim and the others where talking about but here is some of my input on PostProcessing.

After I got my Rebel I noticed that the images are 10x more clear than any other digi-cam i've ever used/seen. I became very frustrated because there was no kick to the photo's I was taking, not that they where the best anyway but they just didn't look as vivid/original as others. Post Processing is very important. I usually just do Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Auto Colors in PS and it helps tons!! I've saturated some sunset pictures and it gives them more of a vivid look as well. My advice, Learn PS and play with Post Processing all of your photos. Sometimes when you get the over-exposure it looks better than post processing the photo and taking it out. Its really a trade you need to play with in order to get your images looking better. Just my .02 from a n00b with an expensive camera.
 
One way of getting rid of the CA is to go into the hue/saturation controls and desaturate the magenta chanel. You might have to expand it into the blue range. Here's an example with your image (cropped it a little and did some contrast/saturation tweaks also)

mine.jpg
 
I'm pretty sure that CA didn't come along after the invention of digital cameras. It is a lens thing. It's just that pictures that come out of poor lenses need lots of post processing, not just pictures that come out of digital cameras. Pictures that come out of good lenses need less post processing.
 
mdude85 said:
I'm pretty sure that CA didn't come along after the invention of digital cameras. It is a lens thing. It's just that pictures that come out of poor lenses need lots of post processing, not just pictures that come out of digital cameras. Pictures that come out of good lenses need less post processing.
Click to expand...


Not sure if I agree with that 100%. A good friend of mine is a editorial photographer for Road and Track, alot of his shots are quick and to the point, with out alot of post processing. Others shots, ones for literature are shot over periods of days, background images mostly, then a CGI image of the car is implanted into the perfect background and post processed to hell.

I would of never of thought it happened this way untill you talked to someone in the business. I figured they where all just shot with $50k hasslebags (sp?)

But like i said, i agree with you for the most part. A good lense makes half the picture. (comparing a cheap EF lense to a L lense.)
 
But like i said, i agree with you for the most part. A good lense makes half the picture. (comparing a cheap EF lense to a L lense.)
Click to expand...

I disagree with you 100%. My uncle, whose an amature photographer, has a $15 Holga camera (mass procduced, cheap, plastic things) and takes AMAZING photos with it. I take good photos with the kit lens on my Rebel. A nice lens will certianly make things easier, but they're not a nesscity for taking good photos.
 
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