Would you say these pictures are OK?

top_underdog said:

Hi all, novice enthusiast here with an Olympus OMD EM10 Mark II and two lenses: Panasonic 25mm f/1.7 and Olympus 14-150.

I am not sure my pictures look as sharp as they should/could be. In most of them the borders are not as sharp as I see when browsing other people's galleries.

The camera setup has been done following Rob Trek's guide from YouTube.

I would really appreciate if you could give me some feedback about the sharpness of these sample pictures, so that I can find out if there is something I'm doing wrong or if these are the expected results with the gear I'm using.

All pictures taken:

• With the Panasonic 25mm
• In A mode
• With a tripod
• Both focus and exposure on the center of the image (the light blue car)

f/5.6 - ISO 1250 - 1/80s - Unless you are printing 46x33inch of this, I would say it is sufficiently sharp.

Click to expand...

As well as I could do last week at Muriwai Beach . I enlarged it for a 33x23 inch print, after I get paid.

Henry

--
Henry Falkner - E-M10 Mark II, SH-1, SH-50, SP-570UZ

Since the effect diminishes with aperture, I believe your lens has an issue called de-centering which means the optics are not aligned inside the lens. If the lens was dropped or abused, it could cause decentering. If the lens is new, I would exchange it for another one. This lens should perform better even wide open.

top_underdog said:

Hi all, novice enthusiast here with an Olympus OMD EM10 Mark II and two lenses: Panasonic 25mm f/1.7 and Olympus 14-150.

I am not sure my pictures look as sharp as they should/could be. In most of them the borders are not as sharp as I see when browsing other people's galleries.

The camera setup has been done following Rob Trek's guide from YouTube.

I would really appreciate if you could give me some feedback about the sharpness of these sample pictures, so that I can find out if there is something I'm doing wrong or if these are the expected results with the gear I'm using.

All pictures taken:

• With the Panasonic 25mm
• In A mode
• With a tripod
• Both focus and exposure on the center of the image (the light blue car)

f/1.7 - ISO 200 - 1/125s


f/2.0 - ISO 200 - 1/100s


f/2.8 - ISO 320 - 1/80s


f/4.0 - ISO 640 - 1/80s


f/5.6 - ISO 1250 - 1/80s

Click to expand...

If you want an honest answer, I don't think any of these photos are as sharp on the blue car as they should be. I don't have that Panasonic lens, but it has a good reputation and especially at f5.6 should deliver much better results than you are showing. How about the results from the 14-150 at the same FL. Or, if you have the chance, try another prime lens. I have an EM10ii, and with the Olympus 25/1.8 would expect much sharper results than you are getting.

I don't know if you bought this kit new or used, and I guess your next steps will depends on what you find in testing.

So far as the edges are concerned, there is almost nothing at the edge at the same distance from the camera as the car (maybe a bit of the edge of the table on the right) You should not expect to get everything in focus (sharp) unless the distance is the same, especially when you are using the lens wide open and focusing on a fairly close object. (Actually the Depth of field (sharpness zone) in your example is probably only a couple of inches in front of and behind the car) If you want to test the lens across the field you will need to find a suitable object (brick walls or newspapers stuck on a wall, I am afraid. Keep then square to the camera (really important) Boring, but it works) Do that and post a shot of it at various apertures, as you have done with this, and we can comment further

Good luck with your learning process. The EM10ii is a wonderful little camera which will serve almost anyone, of any skill levels



tom

I agree there are some softness to the images. The reason is, your scene has a depth of field larger than what your f/1.7 aperture can cover. If on a tripod you can shoot at longer shutter exposure with smaller aperture like f/5.6 or f/8 to cover the entire table.

I used mine to shoot a similar test scene myself and here's what I got (OOC JPEGs).



















Frankly, it's not a good scene to test a lens. Up close, most of the scene will be out of focus, so it's hard to judge sharpness or non-uniformity in sharpness.

But anyway, two comments:

1. Your ISO gets pretty high up there and yet, your shots are not noisy. So I assume you have noise reduction set to a pretty high value. This is a detail eater setting. Dial it down or even disable it (camera will still do some of it anyway). The setting that controls is is called Noise Filter. I have this set to off for the shots above.
2. Your focus might be off. Did you refocus for each shot? That might be a one-off miss or your lens might be suffering from front/back-focus issue that this lens is infamous for. I had to send mine for warranty service and it now focuses fine.

--
My photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrotripper2000/

Astrotripper said:

That might be a one-off miss or your lens might be suffering from front/back-focus issue that this lens is infamous for. I had to send mine for warranty service and it now focuses fine.

Click to expand...

Yes, the 25mm f/1.7 is notorious for focus shift (i.e. the plane of focus moves when you stop down the aperture).

The issue was first discussed here: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/60681476

For a more recent discussion, see: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/62394526

I don't have enough info here other than what you've provided.

A little math: assuming a 3 foot distance, 1.7 gives you less than 2.5 inches of Deth of Field. You're focus would have to be very spot on. So, even if you were using single point focus, and made the area small enough to just cover the car, you still can't be sure where on the car it focused on. Spot/pinpoint focus might not have enough to lock onto.

Enough of that geekery. DOF tests can be interesting, and a bit of fun. They aso can be difficult with todays cameras. I would use a yard stick or two, or a tape measure.

I can't say how the Olympus handles the 25.17. When I had it on my Panasonic cameras it was quite sharp. I didn't use 1.7 often, but for the cost, it was a good lens.

Danielvr said:

Danielvr said:

That might be a one-off miss or your lens might be suffering from front/back-focus issue that this lens is infamous for. I had to send mine for warranty service and it now focuses fine.

Click to expand...

Yes, the 25mm f/1.7 is notorious for focus shift (i.e. the plane of focus moves when you stop down the aperture).

Click to expand...

I wouldn't say it's notorious for this. My copy did not suffer from this. And I remember reading other people not observing this either, but still experiencing focus problems.

Mine had a very straightforward front focus. After repair, it suffers from no focusing issues whatsoever.

So it's safe to say that both types of focusing issues are down to a faulty lens.

For me photos do not look good.

I'd redo the test:

1. make sure you use shutter delay - having camera on tripod this is the way to eliminate camera shake when you press button.

2. instead of carefully organized scene I'd rather use textured surface (piece of floor carpet or something similar.

I'd say wide open it looks unreasonably soft. It doesn't sharpen up appreciably until f2.8.

I haven't reviewed what Rob Trek advised, but as was also mentioned here, if you're on a tripod and trying to test for sharpness, I'd make sure you have the noise filter disabled as that's going to be more destructive as ISO increases, though I don't think we really see that here.

I'd also turn off IS, since the camera's locked down. I believe it probably makes little difference; but to rule it out, I'd turn it off. A 2-sec shutter delay, or activating it remotely via wifi would also rule out vibrations from pushing the shutter button.

f2.8 and f5.6 look sharper than wide open or even stopped down to f2. It's interesting that the shot at f4 appears, to me at least, to be a bit softer than f2.8 and then it sharpens up again at f5.6. I think you can observe the same behavior in the other test in Astrotripper's example.

I don't have that lens, but it seems to be a bit soft.

If you set up a bad test you may get bad results.

What is the goal of this test? Testing sharpness at a given distance and f:/stop or DOF for a given f:/stop and sharpness?

If you want to know if a lens is sharp wide open, or at a given f:/stop, at a given distance, paste a highh contrast target on a wall, square up your camera, capture an image, and examine it.

DOF? Get a calculator app and a ruler.

Another curious thought: sure MFT mounts are the same, but it doesn't mean you'll get optimal reults when you start mixing and matching.

The lens has not been dropped or abused. But unfortunately it is not new (I've had it for over a year now).

I will try the same pictures with the Oly 14-150.

I took these with the same setup used for the ones in the top post but using the Olympus 14-150mm lens.

Am I right in that these look sharper?

tomhongkong said:

tomhongkong said:

f/5.6 - ISO 1250 - 1/80s

Click to expand...

If you want an honest answer, I don't think any of these photos are as sharp on the blue car as they should be. I don't have that Panasonic lens, but it has a good reputation and especially at f5.6 should deliver much better results than you are showing. How about the results from the 14-150 at the same FL. Or, if you have the chance, try another prime lens. I have an EM10ii, and with the Olympus 25/1.8 would expect much sharper results than you are getting.

Click to expand...

Hi Tom, thank you your your reply.

This is the post with the results from the 14-150. Do you think these pictures look better?

tomhongkong said:

I don't know if you bought this kit new or used, and I guess your next steps will depends on what you find in testing.

Click to expand...

I bought the kit new.

tomhongkong said:

So far as the edges are concerned, there is almost nothing at the edge at the same distance from the camera as the car (maybe a bit of the edge of the table on the right) You should not expect to get everything in focus (sharp) unless the distance is the same, especially when you are using the lens wide open and focusing on a fairly close object. (Actually the Depth of field (sharpness zone) in your example is probably only a couple of inches in front of and behind the car) If you want to test the lens across the field you will need to find a suitable object (brick walls or newspapers stuck on a wall, I am afraid. Keep then square to the camera (really important) Boring, but it works) Do that and post a shot of it at various apertures, as you have done with this, and we can comment further

Good luck with your learning process. The EM10ii is a wonderful little camera which will serve almost anyone, of any skill levels

tom

Click to expand...

Will try to post images with the setting you advise.

Cheers,
Diego

The last photo in the top post was taken with aperture f/5.6. While it looks sharper to me than the others, I still don't think the results are optimum. But again, I'm a beginner looking for some advice.

Thank you for your reply.

Astrotripper said:

Frankly, it's not a good scene to test a lens. Up close, most of the scene will be out of focus, so it's hard to judge sharpness or non-uniformity in sharpness.

Click to expand...

What would be a better scene to test a lens?

Astrotripper said:

But anyway, two comments:

1. Your ISO gets pretty high up there and yet, your shots are not noisy. So I assume you have noise reduction set to a pretty high value. This is a detail eater setting. Dial it down or even disable it (camera will still do some of it anyway). The setting that controls is is called Noise Filter. I have this set to off for the shots above.

Click to expand...

Exactly as you say, I had the Noise Filter set to Standard. I have since turned it Off. I also notice you have EV set to +0.3, but don't really know if having set that would have made much difference to my photos.

Astrotripper said:

1. Your focus might be off. Did you refocus for each shot? That might be a one-off miss or your lens might be suffering from front/back-focus issue that this lens is infamous for. I had to send mine for warranty service and it now focuses fine.

Click to expand...

I did indeed refocus for each shot.

Would you mind taking a look at a similar set of pictures taken with the 14-150 lens here? Do they look better than the first set?

top_underdog said:

Hi all, novice enthusiast here with an Olympus OMD EM10 Mark II and two lenses: Panasonic 25mm f/1.7 and Olympus 14-150.

I am not sure my pictures look as sharp as they should/could be. In most of them the borders are not as sharp as I see when browsing other people's galleries.

The camera setup has been done following Rob Trek's guide from YouTube.

I would really appreciate if you could give me some feedback about the sharpness of these sample pictures, so that I can find out if there is something I'm doing wrong or if these are the expected results with the gear I'm using.

All pictures taken:

• With the Panasonic 25mm
• In A mode
• With a tripod
• Both focus and exposure on the center of the image (the light blue car)

f/1.7 - ISO 200 - 1/125s


f/2.0 - ISO 200 - 1/100s


f/2.8 - ISO 320 - 1/80s


f/4.0 - ISO 640 - 1/80s


f/5.6 - ISO 1250 - 1/80s

Click to expand...

Sharpness is the last thing to be worrying about. Any micro Four Thirds lens (save possibly the lens cap lens) on any micro Four Thirds camera can take images quite sharp enough for the vast majority of uses so long as it is focussed properly. So, rather than test scenes like this, you need to be practising composition, seeing the shot and focussing properly. Even with AF, the latter is not trivial, so would be a better use of your time rather than worrying whether your lens is sufficiently sharp. It is.

There is a cult amongst photographers of the sharp lens. It comes from the old days of photography when many lenses weren't very sharp and the ones that were were very expensive. This is no longer that case, but still photographers like to get one up on each other by bragging about how sharp their lenses are, and test sites play to this obsession. As a novice, no need to get into this silly game. Free yourself from it and concentrate on taking photographs.

--
Ride easy, William.
Bob

My feeling is that the sharpest object in most of your pictures is not the blue car, rather the white one or the book.

Maybe your AF settings allow the camera to move the AF point when the shutter is fired, thus choosing the brighter and more contrasty target. If so, you need to use the AF- lock feature (ses user's manual), usually affected to the AF/AE button.

I suggest you do a test in manuel focus to compare the results.

I see nothing in focus, especially the f1.7 shot. Even a de-centered lens would most likely have something in focus.

Nasty Chromatic Aberration, especially around the sports car.

Noisy, ISO is too high.

Nothing of any value can be determined from these photos. Please re-take them in better light (lower ISO) and better focus.

If the Chromatic Aberration persists, you'll need to remove it in post processing (PP). One of the few perils of mixing Lumix & Olympus bodies and lenses.