I love my old sony a5000. But as I get my toes wetter with techniques and tutorials and editing, I often think it is not so great anyome.

Please see this: https://imgur.com/a/XPLLBmx This is the RAW file open in RawTherapee, with no processing applied beyond the camera specific distortion corrections.

It was a sunny day. I have my ISO set to auto. The picture is not blurry because of long exposure or anything, but it’s simply not clear and sharp. Granted, that’s a lot of zooming on the software editor, but shouldn’t it be sharper?

What am I doing wrong? Any advice would be appreciated!

  • ApatheticAbsurdist@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    1. the lens isn’t great

    2. you’re shooting at 400 ISO and the a5000 is going to show noise earlier than newer cameras and you’ve got a bit of noise.

    3. You have a bit of color noise that’s making it look worse. RawTherapee is a decent tool for free, but paid programs like Capture One Pro or Lightroom will have better noise reduction (you can try increasing color noise reduction and see if that helps, just avoid luminance noise reduction as that will make the image softer)

    4. You are shooting at 1/60th of a second… that is a shutter speed that can cause some shake/blur which might not be so dramatic as a 1 second exposure, but it’s enough that can cause the image to be a bit soft.

    5. You shot this image VERY wide and are cropping in substantially on a 20MP image. If you had a 100-ish mm lens you’d have far more detail at that distance and would need to crop in less.

    • SkoomaDentist@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You shot this image VERY wide and are cropping in substantially on a 20MP image.

      And they are pixel peeping at around 5x pixel magnification which will make even a small amount of noise look much worse than it would at 1:1 crop.