Waterfall C&C

[bhee321]

all pictures shot in RAW could use sharpening. just my opinion.

 

[Sachphotography]

It looks as if you are shooting at the wrong f/stop. I usually shoot at about f/16 or so. By doing this you will sharpen up the pictures a ton by widening your focus range. I would shoot at as low an ISO as possible and let the Shutter speed fill in the frame. I shoot about 4 seconds usually. Of course it all depends on the area. When it comes to shooting nature. You want it to looks real unless you are going for a strange look or some artsy feel. What ever floats your boat. But 99% of the time you want it to look like what it looks like in person. I try to do as little PP as possible. I hate my pictures looking fake and like I spent 4 hours fixing them. Keep on keeping on.......the best thing you can do is keep practicing. The more you shot the better you will get.

But won't the overall image-sharpness decrease with f/stops above ~f/11 due to diffraction??
I always use the optimal f/stop for whichever lens i am using too squeeze out the most of it, and besides with f/5.6 (canon 50mm f/1.4 which i believe is optimal f/stop) i think i got enough DoF for this picture since aprox 4/5 of it is in focus and that part out of focus doesn't add much anyway (kinda overexposed).

And about this pp, well I'm shooting nature but waterfalls long-exp look "strange" already whether pp or not since it d*mn sure doesn't look like that in person ^^


edit: thanks toes ^^, I checked the image @ 100% no need for sharpening, but thanks for the cropping tip ill try it out.

No you will not lose any detail. You will gain detail. And your picture is not as sharp as it could be. If you shot that at F/14 or so you would have a sharp shot from top to bottom. Th entire top half of the picture is fuzzy. That shot looks like it needs about a 20-30 foot DOF from front to back. F/5 will not give you that large of a DOF. Trust me I have been shooting waterfalls and moving water straight for the last year. I have some shots I did at F/8 similar to yours and I was not happy as they were not totally in focus.

f-16 is about where you need to be.

 

[Sachphotography]

all pictures shot in RAW could use sharpening. just my opinion.

You are 100% correct. When you shoot in RAW there is no in camera processing done and therefore you need to apply sharpening appropriately.

 

[Noxire]

well i was probably unclear, what i meant was additional sharpening, i always sharpen the basic value 25 in camera raw.

And i know you gain DoF with higher aperture-numbers but im still pretty sure diffraction degrade image quality