85mm lens and focus

[Designer]

Your camera didn't come with a cable?

And no card?

Any software?

 

[Tegan Payton]

It came with the cable, no card, lots of software. But the cable needs a funy multi-pronged end-adaptor in order to connect to the camera to transmit the photos.
It also came with the TV/Video cable thing. But what am I gonna do displaying my photos on our TV? Pretend to be at a funeral/wedding?
I just bought the body from e-bay and a lens from KEH. I got a pretty good deal on both, so I'm not too unhappy!
For my 300+$ camera and another $300 on the lens, I bought it all for around $250.

 

[Tegan Payton]

Oh, but it came with Photoshop (on a disk) and the Canon software.

 

[Derrel]

Sharpening doesn't effect focus.

Sorry, but that is a very inaccurate statement. Many times, I have selected out of focus areas, badly missed focused areas, in Photoshop using the lasso tool, and then have used the Sharpen command, then faded the result, the re-applied Sharpen, then faded, multiple times. On a large image, such as that from a 36 to 12 megapixel sensor d-slr, the above process can actually create "fake focus" pretty damned well--especially if that huge image is down-sized.

I've had published sports photos shot with 300mm and 400mm lenses where I have selected entire football and soccer players in this manner, and sharpened the cr** out of them, in many small steps, and it can bring a player who is outside of the focus plane to very acceptable focus. No layers, nothing except multiple small steps of taking something that is not sharp, and using the Sharpen command, then fading it, multiple times over.

I'm not saying this method can salvage the OP's specific portrait, but I have used this technique maybe a hundred times before, and it's damned near invisible when done right and the image is not seen "huge".

 

[TCampbell]

That being said, I also bought a used (tested, cleaned, certified, and rated) lens that I thought was 25-85mm f/2 but it is f/3.5-4.0.

You can find f/2.8 zooms... but that's about as low as they go. Lower focal ratios are generally only available in "prime" (non zoom) lenses. I say "generally" because there's no reason why it's not possible... but it's difficult to design and get good image quality and the costs become ludicrous (as if f/2.8 zooms aren't already expensive.)

Also, let's say I took her image of my son (which I won't!) and sliced the unfocused portion into another layer in photoshop, and just sharpened that layer. Would that be another workaround?

There are limits to what you can do with sharpening.

See this article: LensRentals.com - Have You Seen My Acutance?

Specifically see "Figure 1" and "Figure 2" in that article. Each has 5 blocks of vertical stripes to some varying degree of "sharpness".

Look at Figure 2. The 5 vertical stripe patterns are as follows.
1 - block 1 is in sharp focus.
2 - block 2 is slightly soft -- just a little.
3 - block 3 is very soft.
4 - block 4 is REALLY block 2... after applying 'sharpening'
5 - block 5 is REALLY block 3... after applying 'sharpening'

And here's the take-away. Notice that block 4 (the 'sharpened' result of a moderately out-of-focus area) can be cleaned up, but block 5 (the 'sharpened result of a very out-of-focus pattern) cannot be cleaned up? This is because the software needs to be able to distinctly recognize what it's trying to clean up and there needs to be space (gaps) between each "stripe" in the pattern.

When the details are there... but slightly soft... you can clean them up. When the image is so blurry that the details aren't there anymore (they all start to blend together because the blur is strong) then sharpening software isn't going to save you.

Also of interest... go back to Figure 1. This is the same as Figure 2 except the stripes are larger, bolder, and have more spacing between them. Because of this, it WAS possible to sharpen both the 2nd and 3rd set of stripes. But look CLOSELY at the results. Notice that the "sharpened" results of the stripes widen at the top and bottom? ...and yet looking at the first image in the row -- which is the "in focus" version -- these stripes are perfectly parallel and consistent width from top to bottom. This is an artifact of the sharpening process. When sharpening is applied, it's never quite as good as an image which needs no sharpening.

However... with a narrow depth of field, it is possible to take lots of images ... each focused at a slightly different distance... and then merge them together. Image stacking will allow this and Photoshop will do this. It's a problem when doing close-up photography so it's a fairly common technique among macro photographers.

 

[Tegan Payton]

This is my "Hello world!" photo with my new instrument. I just wanted to play around with the focus and see how everything sort of went together to make an image an image that I would want.

 

[Tegan Payton]

While I have everyone's attention and many many pros over on this query...
Is there a way to re-direct lighting with photoshop?
For example, in the photograph that I posted the light is behind my son and to the right side of the photo.
Is there a way to make it seem like a source of light is coming from in front of him?
***Barring the obvious here of "buy an umbrella" and "face him the other way". I was just curious if there were actually a way to do that. I've looked it up recently, but all I find is people using Gaussian Blur. I guess that's pretty cool.. but to me it makes it seem like a lot of distracting smoke is going on and I don't really enjoy being distracted.