How important is sharpness?

[Overread]

A boring photo that's sharp is still a boring photo.

A boring photo that is soft is still a boring photo too


Sharpness is about potential - at least in so far as we are discussing the sharpness of lenses.
When you go to take a shot each shot is going to be different; or at least each situation will be. There will be times when you want crisp 100% sharp; and times when you want a little blur; or a lot of blur! The key is that sharpness is a bit like a scale; if your lens starts out soft then it limits you more so than if its starts out much sharper.

That's why most higher end lenses are sharper; its increasing the potential.


It's like dynamic range, noise, etc.... all these things can be done very well at lower values; but the higher the value the more degree of freedom the photographer has to create what they want. So same is true for lenses; they get sharper and sharper because you can use a soft filter or photoshop it to soften the crispness.

And yes sometimes you might want a very specific lens just to cut down on the editing if you've a very special shot or your style works in such a way that you want a softer result. Then you're looking at the end result; you're saying that you don't need a certain level of sharpness to get what you want in the majority of cases and that by using a "softer" lens you are significantly cutting down on editing and might also be getting a rather unique visual appeal that would be impossible or very time consuming to emulate in editing.

 

[gsgary]

If you shoot film you don't talk about sharpness you talk about rendering

 

[ak_]

how much do you analyze a lenses performance in other areas too such as chromatic aberration and so on. Would you reject a lens or pay a lot more for a lens based on extensive analyzes of them?

J.

Yes on those manual focus forums and on that Pentax forum. I'm less bothered about some people's disappointment with lenses wide-open. I think I rate color and contrast over resolution. Excessive barrel distortion isn't good on wide primes or zooms for the widest FLs.

 

[DanOstergren]

Sharpness is important, but it's not everything. A lot of times, I would accept slightly blurry images if it tells a story, creates a mood, or generates some sort of emotions.

I agree with this.

As well, I sharpen my images in post production, and the technique I use works really well, even on images that might be soft straight out of camera, so the sharpness of a lens itself isn't all that important to me anyways.

 

[psreilly]

Depends what type of photography I suppose. If you're an artsy type than a slight blur, or little noise wouldn't be the end of the world. There are quite a few perfectionists floating around though and everything with them is pixels this, sensor size that for that perfect sharp image

A great example of the two are Josh Olins and Paolo Roversi. Both extremely gifted photographers (Roversi more so) and both with polar opposite styles. Roversi often times has long exposure portraits which has his subjects with a slight blur cast on them, but they're enchanting images. Olins on the other hand IMO is the sharpest and most detailed fashion photographer in the business right now

Me personally, I could go without perfect sharpness if the image is interesting enough

 

[Peeb]

Sharpness is kinda like money: an infinite amount will not guarantee happiness, but at some point, a lack of it will create misery.

If I have an image that's too sharp, it's pretty easy to soften.

If I have an image that's too soft, the digital tools to sharpen aren't quite as good.

YMMV. Just my humble but accurate opinions.

 

[Solarflare]

So what do you think? How important is sharpness for you?

Perfect sharpness is physically impossible.

A complete lack of sharpness would mean theres no picture - it would be an uniform space of a single color.

The vast majority of pictures is prefered to be sharp in at least one place. How much unsharpness is tolerable is of course perfectly subjective.

Sharpness is often lowered due to photographer error, or due to the limits of the camera. So often theres more or less missed focus, camera shake, subject movement due to too slow shutter speed, or extreme noise at high ISOs. All of which will kill sharpness.

Sharpness is one of I think about two douzen possible lens errors, a list of which I dont know by heart and contains quite exotic problems like coma. Every lens has all of these errors, so the question is just to what amount; if the error is small enough, the sensor might not have high enough resolution to resolve it.

The main reason why sharpness is so popular is simply that its easy to measure. Thats why many testers will talk extensively about it. But microcontrast for example, i.e. the ability of a lens to resolve small changes in light intensity in small areas, is very hard to measure, so thats often not mentioned at all, especially in those tests of lesser quality. But in order for a picture to appear subjectively sharp to a viewer, microcontrast is actually also very important.

Or another very important property of a lens is obviously color neutrality.

An error I personally despise is chromatic aberrations, commonly abbrevated CA, which actually is a group of different errors all refering to the failure of the lens to focus all colors equally and into the same point. If visible, this is causing funny colors to appear in the picture; for example an originally white-black striped t-shirt thats out of focus will appear to also contain violett stripes. This can be partially fixed in software, so sadly many manufactors, including Nikon, dont put a lot of priority into CAs. But it can cause funny colors in unexpected places and not all variants of chromatic abberations are automatically fixable, such as the aforementioned color cast of a white-black t-shirt.

Lens errors I dont really mind due to my prefered subject (people) are vignetting (darkened corners), distortion (straight lines dont stay perfectly straight), and field curvature (the focus plane is not plane, but curved). I also dont care too much about some softness in lens borders; my pictures are most of the time not in focus at the borders anyway, and my focus point has to be in the center due to the limitations of my camera, so - whatever. People who focus on different subjects, such as landscape, might care a lot more about these types of lens errors.

And if I may add a side question, how much do you analyze a lenses performance in other areas too such as chromatic aberration and so on. Would you reject a lens or pay a lot more for a lens based on extensive analyzes of them?

Theres often not that many lenses to choose from in the first place, and their performance is typically not that extremely different either.

For example the most important options for wide angle zooms for my Nikon F system are:

- Nikon AF 14-24mm f2.8 - An older, optically pretty good lens - you'll have to go to the better Zeiss manual prime lenses to really get better, and even then not by much. Unfortunately its also huge and with a very large front element. Thats why it wasnt for me.

- Tamron 15-30mm f2.8 VC - Came out only quite recently, long after I choose my wide zoom. Optically superior to anything else in this list. Both image stabilization (Tamron calls it "VC" for "Vibration Control") and f2.8 ! Unfortunately huge and a large front element so I probably wouldnt have bought it anyway.

- Nikon AF 16-35mm f4 VR - Compact, can use filters, optically tolerable, offers image stabilization (which Nikon calls "VR", vibration reduction). So that one ended up being my choice. In fact the whole issue of this lens existing influenced my choice of system since Canon didnt have an equivalent of this at that time (they have it now).

- Nikon AF 17-35mm f2.8 - Oldest lens on this list. IIRC parfocal (good for video), but large, kinda overpriced now, and only 17mm at the low end, and I wanted at very least 16mm.

- Nikon AF 18-35mm f3.5-4.5 - Even more compact, quite cheap, but only 18mm at the low end, and the optics arent that great either.

As one can see, theres many more factors in lens selection than just sharpness, or lens errors in general.

One of the reasons I prefer companies like Nikon, Canon, Fuji, and others over companies like Sony or Samsung is that the lens selection of the former contain only few stinkers while Sony E for example is outright ridden with lenses that underperform.

 

[Braineack]

I wear this shirt when I'm on assignment:

"Shoot M
Shoot RAW
Shoot Sharp"

 

[limr]

And this is the one I wear:
Sunny 16 rule - White INVERTED by Alessandro Arcidiacono

 

[KenC]

And this is the one I wear:
Sunny 16 rule - White INVERTED by Alessandro Arcidiacono

That's fine for you, but other people have to twist their heads around.

 

[limr]

And this is the one I wear:
Sunny 16 rule - White INVERTED by Alessandro Arcidiacono

That's fine for you, but other people have to twist their heads around.

That's their problem

 

[beagle100]

Here is a really good one as well All About Lens Coatings

I suppose lens, fluoride, megapixels, etc. help with "sharpness"