[fuent104]

I've never taken a picture I thought was too sharp. I've also never owned a modern premium lens, like one of the limiteds, so I can't compare premium lenses in terms of sharpness / other properties. I haven't worked with quite a few premium cinema lenses...and I still have the same opinion...I've never seen a movie shot with lenses that were too sharp. I don't think there is such a thing, for me. However, it us up to me to make sure I don't put anything in front of the lens that is not flattered by the sharpness of the lens. When I'm shooting movies, I make sure the the lighting and makeup aren't unflattering (makeup artists are not usually happy when I question how they've done their job).

I don't shoot fashion imagery, or a lot of portraits in general. If I did, I may also feel like some lenses were too sharp. Generally, though, the sharper the lens, the more I feel like the image is tangible. I remember the first time I saw "Once Upon A Time In the West." I had never seen a western that made me feel so much like I was on location with the characters. Sound design was a huge part of this, but the sharpness of the lenses was, too. It felt like I could touch the actors if I had wanted to.

I also remember seeing a lot of National Geographic imagery, where the pores and veins were highly visible on people, and I loved it, for the same reason.

[wildman]

Sharpness - yes or no?

It depends - you decide.

Birds shots with $4200 600mm 3 element APO scope. Grinding done by Lomo in Russia with final figuring, polishing and coating done by Zeiss in Germany. Sharpness to burn.

People shots with a 200 buck Sigma 70-300mm consumer zoom lens at 300mm.

[arnold]

Sharpness - yes or no?

It depends - you decide.

Birds shots with $4200 600mm 3 element APO scope. Grinding done by Lomo in Russia with final figuring, polishing and coating done by Zeiss in Germany. Sharpness to burn.

People shots with a 200 buck Sigma 70-300mm consumer zoom lens at 300mm.

They are all excellent. The birds are perfectly razor sharp, and the people have both sharpness and a little softness in just the right amounts.

[magkelly]

That was the point of my whole first post that sometimes there is a place in photograph for softness and for not quite so tack sharp lenses sometimes too. Yeah, we all want that when we're trying to show off every last feather on a bird, but not when we're looking at a portrait of a mother and a baby. My very best portrait lens is decently sharp but I've got sharper lenses. Why do I use that instead? Because it makes my client's skin glow. There's a reason they used to put gels and soft filters on lenses when doing many of those old Hollywood glamor shots.

This is Garbo unretouched in a pic for Two-Faced Woman....

http://www.garboforever.com/Bilder/Film-Pic/Two-Faced_Woman/Two-Faced_Woman-015.jpg

Now look at her photographed and finished with a little more kindness...

http://www.garboforever.com/Bilder/Film-Pic/Two-Faced_Woman/Two-Faced_Woman-020.jpg

Yes, even the great Garbo wasn't perfect, but with the right lighting, with the effective use of the gels, and a skin softening lens she could look darned near even later in her career. Take a look at the rest of the site. You'd be amazed at how normal she really looks in some of those pics. I was stunned the first time I saw this site. I somehow had this idea in my head that she had the most perfect face ever and that she had nary a wrinkle on it till long after she quit films. Not so. Garbo's so called flawless persona is most definitely in part the creation of the photographers and makeup people who made her look that perfect and creating that "movie magic" sometimes entailed using a less sharp lens or blurring one that was quite deliberately...

These days you can practically see every single pore on an actor's nose on a huge screen. Magic has given way to ultra realism in a sometimes brutal way. I'm not entirely sure I approve. It may be more accurate but it's also a bit crass at times I think....

[tim60]

The lens in my collection that shocked me for its extreme sharpness was the STak 150/4, and it was a picture which too much sharpness was not flattering to the subject. I thik that sharpness is an important quality, but not eveything - depends onthe subject. For technical photos - you need sharpness. For some other photos you want the affect brought by some softness.

But absolutely I can say: out of focus is not softness in the desirable sense. It just looks wrong! The eye is attracted tot he focus point in the image, so out of focus drawas the eye to the wrong place. But soft can be just what you want for certain feelings.

[wildman]

I think in some types of photography tone (the gradual change from no light (black) to all light (white) often trumps other image qualities including sharpness whither in color or BW.
An excellent wide smooth tonal range is what gives modeling to the human face for instance. In other words what you are primarily responding to is not detail but the subtle modeling of natural light on the shape of the human face or even a green pepper as in the case Edward Weston's famous shot.

I often think that the digital sensor still hasn't caught up with large format BW film for sheer tonal range and subtlety.

[Iksobarg]

I want merely a sufficient amount of sharpness (I don't care for "soft" lenses); but once that sufficiency has been attained, other factors, such as microcontrast and especially color rendition, become paramount. All things being equal, I would prefer the sharper lens over the less sharp lens; but if all things aren't equal (as is often the case), if one lens is moderately sharp but features great color rendition while another lens is ultra-sharp but suffers from mediocre color rendition, I will prefer the former lens every time. In my experience, a moderately sharp lens with great color rendition will, in most instances, make images that look better than the ultra-sharp lens with flat colors, as people tend to notice and appreciate distinctive color far more often than they notice detail and resolution.

I'm somewhat confounded by how soft 90% of my pics come out at wide open. What's the point of a f1.4 or 2.8 when the sweet spot is all the way over at 5.6+??I've now resorted to flash @ f8 and pics are 90% spot on sharp, well rendered. Again, I'd prefer no flash in most indoor lowlight people pic but cannot bear most of those results. High iso,lowest f stop are not working for me. As always I am thankful for feedback. o/

[tibbitts]

I'm somewhat confounded by how soft 90% of my pics come out at wide open. What's the point of a f1.4 or 2.8 when the sweet spot is all the way over at 5.6+??I've now resorted to flash @ f8 and pics are 90% spot on sharp, well rendered. Again, I'd prefer no flash in most indoor lowlight people pic but cannot bear most of those results. High iso,lowest f stop are not working for me. As always I am thankful for feedback. o/

You are nowhere close to needing to worry about the "sweet spot" in optical performance of your lenses. It's usually a matter of technique, and technique for low-light shots of moving objects is difficult to master. At large apertures, it's possible that you might need to tweak your autofocus adjustments, but you need controlled tests to determine that (tutorials for that are here on the forum.) It's more likely that motion blur or simply selecting the wrong autofocus point is the culprit. When people talk about lens sweet spots on the forum, they aren't talking about glaring sharpness differences in almost every case. The differences in most lenses between wide open and a stop or two down are obvious when pixel peeping, but not in typical online photo viewing.

In the not-so-old film days, indoor color was dramatically more difficult than with any digital camera today, and we often resorted to flash. You don't have to just pop up the flash and start blasting away. You can often use bounce flash for far superior results, or if that won't work, you can probably come up with a multi-flash arrangement, at least for situations like special occasions in your home where you can experiment beforehand. There are also some on-camera flash reflector products than can soften the light from a direct flash and make it much more appealing.

Paul

[Iksobarg]

I've been meaning to adjust the AF with debug on this Kx for the longest...
finally did it a few days ago... and the results are much more pleasing... think +30 or 50nm is where it was best...
Post adjustment this was actually the first time I was particularly super critical of my pics.

moreover I just purchased a k30... o.0
farewell Kx...

[dtmateojr]

My main lens is terribly soft in the corners unless stopped down to f11. It's a cheap Sigma 17-70. I stopped worrying about sharpness. I thought that if people noticed that the corners are soft then my photo is probably very poor that the viewer had to look at the corners.

[HSV]

You are nowhere close to needing to worry about the "sweet spot" in optical performance of your lenses. It's usually a matter of technique, and technique for low-light shots of moving objects is difficult to master. At large apertures, it's possible that you might need to tweak your autofocus adjustments, but you need controlled tests to determine that (tutorials for that are here on the forum.) It's more likely that motion blur or simply selecting the wrong autofocus point is the culprit. When people talk about lens sweet spots on the forum, they aren't talking about glaring sharpness differences in almost every case. The differences in most lenses between wide open and a stop or two down are obvious when pixel peeping, but not in typical online photo viewing.

In the not-so-old film days, indoor color was dramatically more difficult than with any digital camera today, and we often resorted to flash. You don't have to just pop up the flash and start blasting away. You can often use bounce flash for far superior results, or if that won't work, you can probably come up with a multi-flash arrangement, at least for situations like special occasions in your home where you can experiment beforehand. There are also some on-camera flash reflector products than can soften the light from a direct flash and make it much more appealing.

Paul

I'll second this.

In the last few weeks was my first trip where I only took DA/FA limiteds to shoot (plus a tokina 80-200 2.8 for longer FL). Now, before I traveled, I tested all my gear for AF (thankfully no big calibration was needed, between 0 and +4) and sharpness (as expected from limiteds and the tokina, they are pretty damn sharp, some more than others, but you get the point).

Now I'm reviewing my shots, doing PP and whatnot...honestly, I'd say that all of my 5.6 shots have been spot-on in the focus department, while I could find problems with probably 60% of my wide open shots (with any lens). How could this be? All of them performed well with the charts?

Well, it it more of "operator incompetence" than the lenses...turns out that the DOF is so critical that a few milometers off here and there's quite a difference. If you want get demanding about it, there's quite a difference between focusing on someone's eyelashes, eyebrows, hairline or the actual eyes...even if their focal plane is just a few millimeters apart. It's almost as critical as in macros (although one would use a much smaller aperture in macros).

We all sort of learn lessons in a hard way (some harder than others), although there is a sweet spot that you can find with charts...real world shooting is a whole different ballgame from charts (specially when you don't have time to properly setup and your subjects are impatient people). Forget about sweet spots and use an aperture that is appropriate for the situation and your level of technique.

[emalvick]

Hmmm... I don't have a ton of lens available to me and none of them are the ones that people often think of as being the most sharp. But, I have yet to see many photos of my own and not even on this forum that are too sharp because the lens was too sharp.

Rather, what I often see as too sharp is the artifacts of post-processing and over-sharpening an image after it has been shot. In fact, this probably goes with the fact that the one thing I notice most in photography in general is what I assume is the affects of over-processing. There are many cases often when I view images on the net, in a gallery, and even after I've processed them where I can look and say the image looks so perfect that it looks fake. In most of the cases it is because of 1) over-sharpening and 2) over noise-reduction. Of course, this isn't as widespread, bad, or over-the-top as I make it sound, but I do notice the subtleties that make such opinions stand out in my mind.

When viewing others photos some of these opinions may be unfounded. I don't know that people over-process, but I don't think even the best lenses bring about the type of sharpening artifacts that can ruin an image from post-processing. That all being said, I think the medium we are viewing can influence our opinions. Images of shot will often look better or worse on one monitor over another or on a print vs a monitor and whatever other format you might choose.

Ultimately, I don't think it every hurts to have a sharp lens. It's only if you are adding sharpness that you have to worry about getting carried away. That kind of goes for all aspects of post-processing though. Digital photography has made it easy to go over the top but difficult to see when we have. That's what often makes the professionals stand out, and it is what I strive for.

[Digitalis]

I have access to literally hundreds of lenses, especially 50mm lenses - I own 179 of them. To be honest I like lenses that have character - Sharpness is a holy grail that photographers chase, ceaselessly pouring over MTF charts, obsessing over whether DXO will give it their stamp of approval. Many photographs that my students have shown me with the claim to have pushed the limits of resolution on their cameras are often of the most garden variety subject matter. I have a student that does sublime work with a Canon 5D and a Takumar 50mm f/1.4 - I have had a student do terrible work with a Leica M9 and a 50mm f/1.4 Summilux ASPH (one of the greatest 50mm lenses ever made). Was the gear to blame? no, It was the students attitude. The student who used the takumar was more interested in making images, the budding leicaphile was more interested in taking photographs that would show how well his lens was performing.

Sometimes I feel tempted to switch with one of my colleagues and teach film photography - instead of digital studio imaging.

[em-tx]

For me its interesting question, but part of much complex understanding. I love sharp lenses - I love sharpness and I am aware, that there is more to photography than sharpness (eg. other qualities of lens). However, as a photographer (for me its hobby which complements my professional art work) I want to be in charge what is soft and where - where I can see razor sharp structures and where I would like to be soft. I suppose its a matter of technique - and I have lot of the learn... I somehow believe, that with sharp lens you can be easier in charge as an artist what looks and how and eventually you can push more. (correct me if I am wrong).

I completely agree with Digitalis. Its about being interesting in making a picture. I got new camera and I found myself going for shots and later getting lost capabilities of lens and camera, making mistakes in composition.

However, my best shot till now was done by Holga....

Lot of people here talks about PP sharpening. For me, sometimes I can really enjoy it. Here are 3 pics which are sharpened in PP. Please share what you think about sharpening there. I like to hear criticism as well I can get more concrete about what at least some mean about sharpening and pics on web. (All this pics are from the first shoot session with new K5, which was upgrade from compact.)

[halfspin]

"[Ansel] Adams, with other California Bay Area photographers—Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, and John Paul Edwards—founded Group f/64 in protest to the sentimental and imitative style prevalent in the long-standing, turn-of-the-century, photographic trend of pictorialism. The name f/64 refers to the smallest lens opening on the camera through which light passes: images photographed at this setting yield sharp focus and fine detail of subject matter. This loose organization of photographers concentrated on exploring what they termed "straight" or pure photography. They emphasized form and texture, rather than soft focus and emotionalism, and translated scale and detail into an organic, sometimes abstract, design. By 1935, Adams published his first book, Making a Photograph, which was enthusiastically received. Six years later, his groundbreaking Zone System was formulated, which introduced a way for the amateur and professional alike to determine and control the exposure and development of prints for maximum visual acuity." Intimate Nature: Ansel Adams and the Close View | Center for Creative Photography