I need some help posting sharp pictures

[Grandpaw]

Thanks for posting the photo. I took a look at the example and found a couple things that might help. As is typical of wide angle lenses like the one you used, there is a lot of chromatic aberration. Most RAW converters these days support correcting that during processing.

Also, there appears to be a decent amount of in camera sharpening. It's possible that it's being compounded by jpeg artifacts, but the unprocessed photo you posted already has a lot of halo'ing going on. What are the in camera sharpening settings set at? Have you tried lowering the amount of in camera sharpening and taking full control of it yourself via photoshop?

The image you posted, on a scale of 1 to 10, probably ranks a 7 in terms of how sharp it is. The combination of CA and Halo'ing in the unprocessed image makes further sharpening more challenging.

I'm not familiar with your camera so can't offer any specific recomendations.

This picture was taken with my Nikon D80 on the Vivid setting. As far as I know there is no adjustment for sharpness. My D90 does have the sharpness adjustment but this picture was taken with my D80, Jeff

[drg]

The D80 does have sharpness setting by using the Optimize Image menu (which is were Vivid is set) and then going to the Custom option. Image sharpening is near the top and it ranges from none to Auto. And it is fairly aggressive for in camera JPEGS!

I took the full size marina image and played in the Lightroom

1. I reset the white balance via a custom white point on the umbrella at the top of the image.
2. Then I kicked up the exposure 1/2 to 2/3 of stop (+.67).
3. I settled on Medium Contrast preset as quick solution after playing with the curves experimentally.
4. The Clarity +29 and Vibrance +19 were adjusted to provide some preliminary sharpening effect and to offset some of the exposure and white balance effect.
5. The I reset the Black Clipping level by +6 by dragging the histogram.
6. At the same time I increased the Fill Light +5.

These adjustments were primarily to offset the image being underexposed (grey whites, too blue a sky, lack of obvious detail in some area except at full size, etc). I could not completely recover the image exposure from a JPEG without introducing more noise.

Then-

7. I made these settings using the built in Lightroom masking visualization tool (hold down alt and move the appropriate slider and get the gray scale visualization on a full size image)
Edge Masking=+6 Sharpening Detail=+2 Sharpening Radius=0.6
7a. Sharpening Amount was set to +54.

8. Still working at full size and with the type of adjustment that have been made Noise Reduction could now be used to eliminate some of the added problems:
Luminance Smoothing was set to 35
Color Noise reduction was set to 83
Both of these settings were as a result of detailed examination of the image at full and zoomed size. It isn't perfect but an improvement worth making with this image.
9. At full size looking at the image I adjusted the RED Chromatic Aberration by -29 to offset the original lens issues that were amplified by the JPEG compression and my other adjustments.

The photo was exported to have a long side of 750 as the other images posted were of that size rather than the 800 was mentioned in the post. I was just trying to be consistent for comparison.

Because this was done with a JPEG as opposed to a TIF or RAW file, I performed a few adjustment after the sharpening to offset some of the ill effects it introduced. Normally it would be the last step.

There was Standard Sharpening for the Screen applied to the exported image.

There have been several threads on 'sharpening' and other post processing techniques in the Photography Software and Post Processing forum. If you cannot find them let me know and I'll link them.

[Grandpaw]

Thanks Joe for taking the time to post your explanation to help me out and to learn more. Thanks, Jeff

DRG, thanks very much for taking the time and giving such a detailed explanation of what you did. I will look up and read some of your other posts to see what info I can get. One thing I do know for sure is that I need to learn a lot more about Photoshop and lightroom. Thanks again to everyone for helping me out and for trying to help an old dog learn new tricks, Jeff