40d - soft focus / not amazing colours

gneville

gneville

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Dear Talk Photography Community,

I have a Canon 40d and a 400d and ever since I got my 40d (quite some time ago) I haven't been 100% happy with the sharpness of my images.

"Relative to what?" - Well, relative to my 400d (an 'inferior' model), and more recently - I was able to to test shots with a friends 450d and interchange lens's to rule out the lens's as the culprit.

Apologies, I don't have any evidence shots to attach; but I'm just wondering if anyone had come across this before and had some tip / suggestions of things to try.

One thing I do know, is that my sensor has some spots of dust - could this be causing the issue?
 
- Just to add, the colours I get out of the 40d are quite a bit 'off' white-balance wise compared to the 400d. . and that's with both set to AWB.

I know that shooting in RAW makes this pretty much irrelavent but its quite annoying!
 
Do you have the latest firmware on the camera?

Have you tried turning up the sharpness, contrast and saturation in the picture styles?

Don't compare RAW from 40D with JPEG from 400D, the RAW needs to be sharpened and adjusted as part of your workflow.
 
gneville said:
- Just to add, the colours I get out of the 40d are quite a bit 'off' white-balance wise compared to the 400d. . and that's with both set to AWB.

I know that shooting in RAW makes this pretty much irrelavent but its quite annoying!
Click to expand...

The white balance being 'off' could possibly be early signs of a knackered sensor. What picture style are you using? For a month or two I'd been using a custom picture style (neutral, with an extra stop of sharpness) and happened to change it back to 'Standard' randomly, and I immediately found a little bit of contrast was added into the image giving it more 'punch'. Comparing the picture styles afterwards in DPP confirmed my thoughts as well. Luckily shooting in RAW means all of these things can be sorted afterwards - check your picture style, and your white balance. AWB is usually good enough and if you shoot RAW you can fiddle with it afterwards anyway. Apart from DOF, and the actual content of the image, pretty much everything else can be altered on RAW files - it's great.

The images being soft is probably a classic front/back focus issue. This happens sporadically on my 450D with no rhyme or reason whatsoever (some images come out perfectly focussed, others it back OR front focusses...) so now I just manual focus. Have you tried using MF and seeing if you get better results? Live view focus is also very good, but slow.
 
User Name said:
Do you have the latest firmware on the camera?

Have you tried turning up the sharpness, contrast and saturation in the picture styles?

Don't compare RAW from 40D with JPEG from 400D, the RAW needs to be sharpened and adjusted as part of your workflow.
Click to expand...

Dear User Name,

Thanks for the reply, do you think upgrading the firmware on the 40d will make a difference to my focuswhitebalance issues, as I have checked the changelog's and there is no mention of any changes / fixes to these aspects of the camera.

Will certainly test out changes to picture style but don't think that will solve focusing / softness issues (I already process only RAW images).

Thanks again.
 
trencheel303 said:
The white balance being 'off' could possibly be early signs of a knackered sensor. What picture style are you using? For a month or two I'd been using a custom picture style (neutral, with an extra stop of sharpness) and happened to change it back to 'Standard' randomly, and I immediately found a little bit of contrast was added into the image giving it more 'punch'. Comparing the picture styles afterwards in DPP confirmed my thoughts as well. Luckily shooting in RAW means all of these things can be sorted afterwards - check your picture style, and your white balance. AWB is usually good enough and if you shoot RAW you can fiddle with it afterwards anyway. Apart from DOF, and the actual content of the image, pretty much everything else can be altered on RAW files - it's great.

The images being soft is probably a classic front/back focus issue. This happens sporadically on my 450D with no rhyme or reason whatsoever (some images come out perfectly focussed, others it back OR front focusses...) so now I just manual focus. Have you tried using MF and seeing if you get better results? Live view focus is also very good, but slow.
Click to expand...

Dear Trencheel,

Thanks for the reply. What you say is interesting but I think sort of missing the point - because I never actually process jpg's from the camera, always RAW. Perhaps I should have made that clear in my initial post, sorry :D

Front/back focus issues - are these camera-specific or lens-specific?

Cheers (y)
 
neil_g said:
it might be worth a factory reset if the settings have been "faffed" with?
Click to expand...

Thanks Neil,

I think I have tried this previously, but I'll definitely give it a try, and carry out some further testing.

Cheers (y)
 
gneville said:
Dear Trencheel,

Thanks for the reply. What you say is interesting but I think sort of missing the point - because I never actually process jpg's from the camera, always RAW. Perhaps I should have made that clear in my initial post, sorry :D

Front/back focus issues - are these camera-specific or lens-specific?

Cheers (y)
Click to expand...

I know - but what I am saying to you is check your white balance and picture style. If you use Canon DPP to process your images, it will pick up the white balance setting, picture style etc. used in camera. If your picture style is on neutral as mine was for a month or two, it can make images a bit less contrasty and bland. Sometimes I use neutral when I want to decontrast my images slightly, but mostly I just use standard, with a sharpness setting of three. You can somewhat rescue soft images by wacking the sharpness right up to 10. If I'm still missing the point, forgive me :nuts:

Front/back focus issues can be camera or lens specific. But for you it will be camera specific given what you have said in your first post. Mine does it (sometimes) with all of my AF lenses. If I put my feet up on a desk, and focus on my toe, I'll actually find that the bit between my toe and my ankle area is actually what is in focus, around 70% of the time. It's bizarre but I suspect you are having the exact same issue - it seems to happen to a lot of the budget Canons, unfortunately. I've got two mates who have a 450D who both concur with me that the AF system on the camera is less than perfect, and we all agree too that live view or MF gives far better results.
 
You could have a dodgy body. I moved from a 450D to a 5DII and I wasn`t impressed by the picture quality and wasn`t happy with the sharpness and kept saying to the wife that the 5D was worse than the 5D, she said I was being too picky. A couple of months down the line I got fed up and marched back into the shop and said I wasn`t happy with it,they then confirmed after checking the body that the focus was off on the body but the lens was fine.

It does happen. :(

Did you buy the camera new?
 
I think this is very hard to diagnose without a sample pic and full Exif data. Canon 40D has an excellent reputation so, with due respect, you'd have to say that something was wrong with either settings or technique, before saying that the camera was duff.

That's always possible of course, but a sample pic would nail it.
 
Cheers for the replies - I am certainly happy to get some test shots.

Can anyone suggest a good methodology of this kind of test? - What conditions / settings are best to try?
 
I have been testing my lenses and body for front/back focusing.
The way I did it was to get some blu-tack, some playing cards and kitchen table.
I blu-tacked the playing cards upright onto the kitchen table so that they were staggered from front left to rear right. They were spaced approx 1cm apart and overlapped by approx 1/2 the width of the card. From abovbe they looked something like:
......................__
....................__
..................__
................__
You can do use many as you want. (Ignore the full stops, used to stagger the cards in this message)
With my camera on the tripod I positioned the camera at just above table to height, perpendicular to the faces of the cards. Distance from the cards varied though probably averaged at approx 15 feet. I set the aperature to the largest setting (minimum DOF).
I then auto focused on the (1/2 visible) card in the middle of the line of cards going from the left away to the right.
I then took a shot (timer delayed) and studied it in the display. If the card that I had focused on was the sharpest the the focus was accurate. If the card to the left and slightly in front was sharper then I knew that the camera/lens was front focusing. If it was the to the right and slightly behind card I knew it was back focusing.
If all your lenses are front or back focusing then you know the camera body is tending towards back focus and maybe you could get it checked.
If one/some lenses are front and other lenses are back focusing then it is likely that that is just the tolerances of autofocus accuracy.
When using autofocus use the smallest focus (spot?) option available and be aware that the focus zone may extend beyond the focus point/box that you are using.
Hope the above is of some use to you.
 
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