Tips + Tricks introduction:
The internet is awash with tutorials on various subjects and software. However, I have found that as good as these step by step guides are, they are often very esoteric and therefore inapplicable to most people. Throughout the past 10 years I have been developing my skills in photography and various design software, the same goes for Rich and illustration; so we have decided to collate our favourite, and most used, tips and tricks. We’ll be posting them under the category ‘Tips + Tricks’ on a weekly basis.
In this post I will look at how you can achieve maximum sharpness in photographs and also show you a neat trick to sharpen an image in post production:
Let there be light:
As a photographer, your best friend isn’t your brand new 1DS MK III, or your 50 mm f1.2 lens; it isn’t even your 128 GB Compact Flash card ;) …it’s light.
The word ‘Photography’ should be the first clue, it comes from ancient Greek – ‘photos’ (ϕοτοσ) meaning ‘light’ and ‘graphos’ (γραοσ) meaning ‘writing’. Without light you don’t have anything to capture; and yes, even your ultra cool ‘Leica M9′ is going to struggle.
A lot of the time an unsharp image is simply down to the fact that there wasn’t enough light to capture the shot with a high enough shutter speed or appropriate aperture. You don’t need expensive strobe lights for this, the best light you can get is from the biggest light in our solar system …and it’s free.
Whilst expensive equipment does improve the technical quality of the final photographs, you shouldn’t use this as an excuse not to attempt to achieve the best results with whatever gear you have.
Fix up, look sharp:
Or, more accurately – look sharp and you wont need to fix anything up.
Choose the correct settings on your camera for the given situation and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble later on. The correct settings will depend on various factors but here are a few rules of thumb:
1) Use a tripod
If you have one available to you and sharpness is paramount then this one is a no-brainer.
2) Shoot in RAW format if your camera allows you to.
Raw format captures all of the information that the technology of the camera allows, without losing information through lossy image compression. Using the Adobe Camera Raw plugin through Photoshop you can adjust the ‘clarity’ of the image, perceptively increasing the image’s sharpness.
3) Don’t shoot at Maximum or Minimum apertures.
Maximum aperture means that the lens is at it’s widest, allowing more light to pour into the camera. The side-effect of this is that the depth of field is narrowed. As a matter of performance, lenses often do not perform optimally when fully opened. This means that although you can achieve faster shutter speeds, the overall softness of the image is increased.
You might, excusably, then conclude that the mimimum aperture will give you the sharpest result. In theory this works, but in practise whilst it gives you the greatest depth of field, diffraction causes a different kind of blur. (I know what you’re thinking “F*ck this, I’m sticking it in P mode” – but wait!).
The sweet spot is generally between f4 – f8
4) For long exposures use the self timer or a remote
Long exposures pick up the slightest vibrations, including the one from you pressing the shutter release. To get around this either: use a remote control, a cable release or set the self timer. (This is a good tip if you want to get into astro-photography.)
5) AF Point Display
Some cameras have a feature which, upon reviewing your images, displays which point of the shot (if any) is as sharp as your set up allows. In Canon SLRs this feature is called ‘AF Point display’, and you can enable it through the main camera menu.
Post production sharpening trick:
If you’re finding that despite all of this you’re still not happy with the image sharpness, here’s a very useful Photoshop trick that will help your images achieve that extra clarity: (I find that this method of sharpening images produces better results than the ‘Unsharp Mask’ filter in Photoshop.)
1) Open up your image in Photoshop
2) Duplicate the background layer by either clicking and dragging it onto the ‘new layer’ icon in the layers panel OR selecting Layer>Duplicate Layer.
3) With this new layer selected go to Filter>Other>High Pass
4) Select a Radius of between 1.0 and 3.0 (if you go above this then the image will look unnatural).
5) Select the ‘Soft Light’ Blending mode from the layers panel.
BOOM! Sharper image.
Zoom in to 100% and turn the visibility of the top layer on and off to see the difference this has made. You should notice the biggest difference in areas of details (hair and eyes on people).
That’s it for this week. Hopefully you’ve found some of this information useful. If not, then stay tuned for the next post.
Cormac.
P.s this post may be redundant in the not too distant future with the advent of ‘Light Field Photography’
Check it out – exciting, mind boggling stuff:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
