Tack Sharp Help With AF VR-Nikkor 80-400mm 4.5-5.6D

manaheim · May 1, 2008

Hey there.

IMO, the images that have good lighting are predictably sharp/soft for a D80. (I actually spent all day discussing this in a different thread today...lol, I should probably just post the link)

Most digital cameras have an anti-aliasing filter over the sensor. They get you a better overall interpretation of the scene on a digital sensor, but do tend to soften the image a bit. Different cameras do this to different degrees... the Nikon D70S was VERY sharp right off the camera, but most Nikons are pretty soft. (including your D80) Interestingly, the increased sharpness on the D70S was a direct result of people complaining that the D100 was too soft... but then when they adjusted it, people complained about moire and step patterns. Poor Nikon.

Can't win.

You can go into the menu on your camera and turn the sharpness up if you like, but generally I would advise doing some post-shot sharpening in Photoshop or some other tool that has these capabilities. (I like Photoshop, but that's me)

Me, personally, I turn up my sharpness ONE notch on my D300... that usually leaves the images still slightly soft, and then I do the rest in Photoshop.

Keep in mind, once a picture is sharpened it is far harder to soften/blur it, and oversharpening can have some nasty side-effects such as halos and noise.

If you like, I can pull one of your images and do a quick sharpen on it to show you the result.

One Sister · May 2, 2008

manaheim said:
IMO, the images that have good lighting are predictably sharp/soft for a D80.

I'm using a D200.

manaheim said:
You can go into the menu on your camera and turn the sharpness

I don't want to turn on any sharpness factor in the camera, but I did add some noise reduction and more vivid settings off the menu, which seemed to improve the images.

Basically I agree with you about the lighting. Those images which seem to have more light tended to look sharper and have less noise, but how often do we get optimal conditions.? I saw an image of a large wading bird taken by another photographer with this lens and it was in the shade and it was phenomenal. I'd like to get the lens to perform like that. I'm trying to use this lens to shoot in daylight, even if it's not bright sun.

Also, the set of images from today were better than I've been able to obtain before even though they are not as sharp and clean as I had hoped. So the problem seems to have shifted from lens sharpness to image noise due to the high ISO. Any conditions less than in bright sun requires a high ISO in order to shoot in the f/11 - f/8 range (which is what I understand the "sweet spot" to be for this lens) and still have a fast enough shutter speed to stop breathing. Also, I noticed that a subject with a higher contrast than the background will yield a cleaner image with less noise, so that seems to be a factor as well as the light.

Unless I'm missing my mark here, I believe the other images I've seen taken with this lens and a D200 had a high ISO and the noise was removed later. I'm wondering how the noise was removed. My images seem to have a lot of noise and my brief foray into the noise reduction filter in PS did not improve the images much (I did not post these results).

I appreciate all your help, manaheim. I am kind of surprised that no one on this forum owns/uses this lens. I had hoped someone could shed some real world experience with it, but of course I appreciate any and all assistance.

Edit: Oh and by the way, you are free to mess with any of the images in this post if you feel you have some great pp techniques you'd like to share.

manaheim · May 2, 2008

Sorry on the D80/D200... lol.

I actually would have made the same comment for the D200, however.

The photog that you said took the picture that came out sharp... was it sharp directly off the camera? Are you certain he didn't do any post processing? The other question is what other lenses are you using on your camera, and how does the sharpness compare? You might do some comparison tests on the same scene...

I don't know the lense you are referring to personally, but I know that unless you spend quite a bit of money the wider range lenses tend to have some issues, such as softness. I have a xx-400mm Sigma that is unacceptably soft... but it wasn't expensive.

I have also heard some reports that the occasional VR lense runs a little soft but that is TOTALLY heresay, so I wouldn't put too much stock in it... just more things to investigate. I'm getting deeper and deeper into pure speculation here, so let's step out of that trap for a sec.

I did a lot of work with a D200 recently and I found the images to be quite soft on a variety of lenses, including a very sharp 18mm f2.8 that I run. That was on the default settings, of course, but regardless...

I can't speak to the noise reduction too much. I know they remarkably improved this on the D300, and I believe the feature was absent from the D100, but I never personally played with it on the D200. I would make the somewhat rash assumption that any kind of post-capture processing is going to mess up the fidelity of the shot at least some... so noise reduction may well soften it. You may try it without this just to get a sense of the difference.

Again... looks more and more like experiment time.

I'd say go pick 2 subjects- one lit "ok" and one well. Get a tripod setup and try a few different shots with different lenses and ISO settings and do a bit of comparison.

Regardless of your findings, my take is you're going to have to sharpen images no matter how crisp that lense may be. It's just the nature of the beast with most of the Nikon D cams.

Glad I could help.

One Sister · May 2, 2008

^^^ The lens in question is the AF VR-Nikkor 80-400mm 4.5-5.6D. I agree that way more experimentation needs to be done. I just thought someone would have used it here and could tell me how they got over this fairly obtrusive hump. I can't help but think that it's not a body thing, it's a lens thing. My bread-and-butter lens, AF-S Nikkor 17-55mm 2.8 G, does a smokin' job in its range. I also use a AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm 3.5-5.6 G with excellent results as well. It's just this 80-400 that is giving me fits. I probably would have returned this lens a while ago if I hadn't seen some images captured with it by other photographers, and no I don't know how much pp they did, but it wouldn't matter, my images aren't even worth pp'ing!

Thanks for your help and I'll keep you posted...

lockwood81 · May 2, 2008

Have you tested it with VR turned off on a tripod with mirror lock and remote shutter release? To me the pictures look like camera shake...but then the VR is supposed to adjust for that...so really I don't know then.

One Sister · May 2, 2008

^^^ Yes, I've tested it on a tripod with VR off. Pretty much the same results. So far I'm hating this lens...

As you can see, the series from yesterday were slightly better with regard to sharpness, but quite horrible with regard to noise. If you view yesterday's at 100% you can easily see the unacceptable noise. Anyone have any experience with a Better Beamer?? Perhaps that's my answer to the super high ISOs - don't use 'em!

manaheim · May 2, 2008

One Sister said:
^^^ Yes, I've tested it on a tripod with VR off. Pretty much the same results. So far I'm hating this lens...

As you can see, the series from yesterday were slightly better with regard to sharpness, but quite horrible with regard to noise. If you view yesterday's at 100% you can easily see the unacceptable noise. Anyone have any experience with a Better Beamer?? Perhaps that's my answer to the super high ISOs - don't use 'em!

Hey one. I've literally got my face about 2" from my screen and I don't see the noise you're referring to. It looks fine. I know I've said this before, too, but I think the images are -exactly- what I would expect from your camera.

IF you were experiencing high iso noise, that wouldn't be the fault of the lense. That would be the cam.

Look at this:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond200/page21.asp

Shows you noise starts to show up pretty noticably around the ISO400 range. My D100 was like this... anything over ISO200 looked horrible.

Go out tomorrow in the bright sunlight and do those tests and put them up. I'm quite curious to see.

RKW3 · May 2, 2008

Put noise reduction on "low", when your shooting around ISO 1000 the camera will automatically soften the picture a tiny bit to prevent noise, and that can be detrimental to the sharpness of the picture. You will see a little more noise in your photos now, but it should be easy to clean up in pp assuming the shot is exposed correctly (underexposed high ISO pic = a lotta noise).

Also, the pics you're posting are plenty sharp, now I think you need do try some pp on them. With my 400mm Sigma lens I got some pretty sharp pics from the zoo, but they were just as soft as your pics before I edited them in photoshop.

As long as you avoid camera shake and you focus correctly, you should have a picture to work with sharpness-wise.

Mav · May 2, 2008

I'd say the lens is fine but that you just need to work on technique and post-processing. I don't see anything seriously wrong with the second batch of photos. They're serviceably sharp for sure, and comparing it to your 17-55DX f/2.8 probably isn't a good idea. I have one of those, and it's NUTSO sharp.

With the right post-processing, those will sharpen right up and the noise will vanish too. Again, give DxO a try. It's great, will auto-sharpen the image just enough, and the noise will go bye-bye too. These are nothing to worry about. I post process images all the time that look much worse than these, and DxO will nail it.

JerryPH · May 3, 2008

First as the owner of a D200 as well, let me add my 2 cents.

The pics are quite nice and the lens is doing it's job. What is happening is that the D200 is not famous for it's sharpness straight out of camera. It shoots a touch soft to preserve detail and leaves the sharpening up to the post processing.

Shoot RAW and in the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), increase sharpness to about 100-125 and then see the difference.

One Sister · May 3, 2008

JerryPH said:
First as the owner of a D200 as well, let me add my 2 cents.

The pics are quite nice and the lens is doing it's job. What is happening is that the D200 is not famous for it's sharpness straight out of camera. It shoots a touch soft to preserve detail and leaves the sharpening up to the post processing.

Shoot RAW and in the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), increase sharpness to about 100-125 and then see the difference.

Thanks for weighing in, Jerry, and double thanks that you use a D200 because what is happening now is more camera involved than lens involved, I think. I agree that in the second set of pics the sharpness factor, although not the tack sharp that I had hoped (and secretly expected) but some pp sharpening would make them serviceable. However, was is irking me now, and what I would like to ask you as a D200 owner, is about the horrible noise at high ISOs. I've seen some phenomenal photos taken by other photographers using high ISOs and I do not see the noise that I'm experiencing.

This new lens that I've been struggling with seems to be a veeerrrrry slow lens best used in bright light situations...and I mean really bright...Sahara Desert bright. Anything less than that forces high ISOs. If I cannot shoot less noisy photos, then this is a deal breaker. Someone on another forum told me I had a lousy camera...I know better. But I had to admit I didn't shoot at high ISOs before...so I did a test yesterday with my AF-S Nikkor 17-55mm 2.8 G. High ISOs resulted in quite noisy pictures...to me anyway. When you review all the images above do you see the noise? What do others do? I know the D200 is used by many in all sorts of situations. How are others dealing with 800+ ISOs?

TIA.

Overread · May 3, 2008

For noise you could try a noise remover like Noise Ninja or Neat Image;
there is a link in this site (amungst the text) to a demo of neat image as well as some general high ISO shooting adivce
http://www.ophrysphotography.co.uk/pages/highiso.htm

One Sister · May 3, 2008

Overread said:
For noise you could try a noise remover like Noise Ninja or Neat Image;
there is a link in this site (amungst the text) to a demo of neat image as well as some general high ISO shooting adivce
http://www.ophrysphotography.co.uk/pages/highiso.htm

Thanks Overread! That link and the tutorials on his site are super! Yeah, I suspected it was not the camera, or even my sloooowwww lens, but my technique. I just have soooo much to learn and thanks for pointing me to that site. It's not enough to see the noise, but I needed to understand it; to know where it lurked and why it was there. "Shooting to the right" is something I had heard before, but wasn't sure how to apply it. Now I do. He also suggested that some noise removal program could assist as well, and I have been looking into one, but I'm leaning towards Noiseware as one which has earned rave reviews from a large number of pros.

Thanks again and I'll keep you posted.

One Sister · May 3, 2008

Sorry RKW3 & Mav, didn't want to dis you as I so appreciate your assistance here, but shooting to the right is where it's at. I definitely need to work on my technique and yes, RKW3, some pp sharpening after being extra careful not to underexpose is where I need to start. That's the key as I understand it.

Thanks again for your help.