Canon 50mm f/1.4 focus and sharpen problem

There is going to be some copy variation. How does the lens do at apertures like F2, F2.8, F4 & F5.6. The lens should get sharper as you stop down, but should be pretty sharp at F2 and F2.8. It should be excellent be F4. Most lenses get sharper as you stop down.

Assuming you used the middle focus point, you can see the green ball is not in the middle of the frame. The focus point wasn't exactly on it. Also the contrasty part of this ball, the drawing, is even higher in the frame.

The focus point is around that "thing" between the big green ball and other ball and the most contrasty and very close area is where the small balls highlights separating them from the darker background. So, not surprising at all, the camera focused on the most contrasty target almost exactly where the focus point.

No sign at all that there is any problem with the lens from this test. If you have focus issues on a good target where the focus point is directly on that target, that's different. Maybe you can post examples if you do?

If you used a non-center focus point then that's also different.

After months of thinking I was crazy, last night I finally came to a solution. I checked what happend with very low light and full automatic (no flash) and the photo was perfectly taken by the camera at f/2.0.

I tried taking the photo with every aperture available, and realize I was starting to get good results over f/4. So, automatic was working good but manual don't. So, the problem should be on the camera.

I did a camera settings restore and... SOLVED!

Here is the same picture, taken before and after the restore. You can see the letters on the ball and everything is very sharp.

Left, before the camera settings restore. Right, after the restore.

Thanks anyway!

the 50mm f1.4 is soft at  f1.4. It gets good at f2.8. as noted by others the dof matters, but it is still soft wide open. back in the day Joe mama did many tests with 50mm lenses and i concur with his results back then

I don't want to discourage you and I'm not saying the camera reset didn't solve a problem (weird but who knows...), however...

In your new side-to-side examples, you can see that the good focus example (right) has the center focus point exactly on the big ball where it says "student". The out of focus (left) has the center focus point under the writing, exactly on that thing that is in front of the ball, and there is even more contrast just in front/below that.

So again, it makes sense that it was front focused (in comaprison with the green ball, but correct for the photo). I'm not saying this is what happened, but in the left example it makes more sense that the focus isn't on the green ball. The focus in both of those photos is what I would expect it to be, assuming you used the center focus point.

clarnibass wrote:

I don't want to discourage you and I'm not saying the camera reset didn't solve a problem (weird but who knows...), however...

In your new side-to-side examples, you can see that the good focus example (right) has the center focus point exactly on the big ball where it says "student". The out of focus (left) has the center focus point under the writing, exactly on that thing that is in front of the ball, and there is even more contrast just in front/below that.

So again, it makes sense that it was front focused (in comaprison with the green ball, but correct for the photo). I'm not saying this is what happened, but in the left example it makes more sense that the focus isn't on the green ball. The focus in both of those photos is what I would expect it to be, assuming you used the center focus point.

Actually, both photos has the same focus point, and that's my problem. I don't have the RAW photo any more, so I can't show you right now the focus point, but it was in both photos on the letters over the ball. It's weird, i know, I tried to solved it for months. I'm still making some tests to verify that the problem is solved.

Thanks for your answer!

kusser wrote:

Actually, both photos has the same focus point, and that's my problem. I don't have the RAW photo any more, so I can't show you right now the focus point, but it was in both photos on the letters over the ball. It's weird, i know, I tried to solved it for months. I'm still making some tests to verify that the problem is solved.

Wait... do you mean these are crops and not the full photos? I assumed they are not crops. If they are crops (different ones, I guess done each seperately) then what I said doesn't apply. If they are not crops, but full photos, and since you used the same (I assume center) focus point for both as you say, then the focus point wasn't on the letters on the out of focus example.