Pics not sharp!

[AlanS]

I have a brand new Canon SD850is. The pics (as downloaded to i-photo) are not sharp. They have a 'soft' quality to them. If I use one of the adjustment features in i-photo called 'sharpness' and move the slider all the way to it's extreme, the pic gets sharp. Why does it not start out sharp? When I downloaded a little movie I made with the same camera, it was crystal clear...that leads me to believe it is NOT the lens.
I am NOT computer savvy...but it seems that one should not have to sharpen all pics. Is this inherent in i-photo? Is there a fix? Am I not using the camera correctly?

 

[l33r0y]

Can you attach an example?

There are many factors to producing a sharp image from a camera.... Focus and shutter speed being the main factors (I apologise if your are a photographer and you know all this )

However, digital cameras also have sharpness as a post-processing feature built in, so you may want to adjust this provided you have mastered the basics of focus and shutter speed (and to a lesser sense, aperture).

The golden rule in photography is to post-process as little as possible!

 

[decksnap]

It should be noted that iPhoto and Preview both apply a small amount of smoothing to make them look good at atypical viewing sizes. I would open your images in Photoshop and see what they look like before adding sharpening to them.

 

[l33r0y]

It should be noted that iPhoto and Preview both apply a small amount of smoothing to make them look good at atypical viewing sizes. I would open your images in Photoshop and see what they look like before adding sharpening to them.

I assume you are talking about anti-aliasing?

To the original poster, decksnap has a good point. When ascertaining whether an image is sharp or not, you should view it at its native size, or at 100%. If an image is at a lowersize to fit to screen, it may look artificially sharp if the image is being aliased - which may seem like a good thing to the untrained eye, but it is a mis-representation of the actual image quality.

 

[kolax]

Depends how in-focus the photograph taken was, and the quality of the lense.

My Sony compact camera can sometimes suffer from sight blur in photos, so adjusting the sharpess can correct this to an extent.