Always learning something new.

Although I love my macro lens I have often been frustrated that my images are not as sharp as I would like them to be.  I know this can be fixed in Photoshop and Lightroom, although I have still to master this technique, but it still felt as though something was not right.  This weekend I accidentally found the reason.

I was looking at some reviews for compact cameras and found one comparing the Canon Powershot S90 and the Panasonic Lumix.  Within the review they compared the sharpness of the two images at various ISO settings.  It turns out that Canon set their images to be softer so that there is less noise at higher ISO settings, Panasonic choose sharpness over noise.  That was a bit of an A-ha moment.  It turns out that you can change the sharpness settings in the camera.  So I did – the EOS400D has a number of different settings, standard, faithful, portrait etc which set the emphasis on different sets of colours as well as the sharpness.  I have my settings on Faithful which has a level of 0 for everything.

A brief glimmer of Spring sunshine this lunchtime sent me hotfooting into the garden with camera in hand to photograph the crocus that are surviving being trampled by pigeons.  As I can be a bit dim sometimes, it did not occur straight away to change the settings.  However, I got there eventually and I upped the sharpness to 4 (from a maximum of 7) and these are the results.

The one on the left is before I made the sharpening adjustments.  Whilst it is not immediately obvious that there is a difference, it is very evident once you zoom in.  I much prefer the sharpened image, so will keep the levels higher, unless I am shooting at a higher ISO setting.

Oh, and I opted to buy the Powershot S90 – I will let you know how it works out.