Bad sharpness due to resolution?

Dear Aviation Photography Experts :)

I need your help with a sharpening/resolution problem I generally have.

Here is the best example for my problem. In my "big" picture, the 738 looks a little bit muddy and unsharp.

But If I zoom in the picture, you can see that the plane ist definitly sharp...

I am shooting with a D5200 24 MP with the highes resolution. I process my pictures in Lightroom and export them with sharpness for web.

I fear that this is really a beginner question, but I couldn't find a way to solve this problem.

Would the first picture be good enough for beeing published nevertheless?

Thank you so much for your tipps and tricks and your support!!

Attached photos:

Hi,

No, the first picture would not make it. First off, it is above the max 1600px, secondly, it is quite soft, maybe even blurry towards the nose. I see some compression, so I would think that is a likely cause. Make sure you are not re-editing and saving .jpg files multiple times, also make sure you are saving at the highest quality (12 IIRC).

John

Hi John,

thanks for trying to help me...

I uploaded it above the 1600px that you can see it better by beeing able to zoom in the picture.

The soft look around the nose and the tail (around the letters) is exactly my problem :(

In the small picture with the extract of the tail you can see that the picture is much more sharper than it seems to be in the big one...

I export my files in lightroom with the highest quality and highest sharpness..

It seems like it has to do with the compression?

Has it something to do with the amount of MP? Is it better to shoot with less?

Thanks for your advice!

With all respect intended, screeners frequently make the mistake of rejecting images for being soft or over sharpened. They have no way of knowing how the image was edited so the assumption is that the photographer made an error in judgement/lack of skills/experience etc.

The reality is that when you resize an image from say 5500 pixels wide to the required maximum of 1600 pixels wide, you seriously degrade the quality of the image. You introduce jaggies into the image (without using sharpening to cause this to happen) and that in itself contributes to an overall pixilated/softening effect.

I have found this to be very frustrating and screeners are simply too busy to take the time to give accurate feedback (in some cases).

I would be interested to hear how others have dealt with the downsizing issue?

This post has been edited by Steve Bailey on 9th August 2014 - 17:27

Maybe a separate topic on downsizing?

This post has been edited by Steve Bailey on 9th August 2014 - 17:26

Steve, send me an email. I will share my workflow video. Philipp, shoot me a message to sanordheim@gmail.com. Include the raw file if you can.

Also, a recommendation....... Always resize before doing the editing of the shot. Every picture has to be treated individually, meaning it's very hard to apply a generic "one size fits all" edit. ALWAYS edit in 100% view of the picture. Editing in any other zoom view than 100% will not give you the perspective that you need.

This post has been edited by Andre Nordheim on 10th August 2014 - 02:07

Hi Steve,

hi Andre!

Thank you both very much for your comments!

The picture was accepted in the meantime. I did some selective additional sharpening...

http://www.airplane-pictures.net/photo/439853/ln-ngm-norwegian-air-shuttle-boeing-737-800/

Thanks Andre for your offer! Good hints! I will definitely follow your advice in the next pictures!

Would you also share your workflow video with me? Your pictures are absolutely gorgeous!!

Thank you both for your support!!

Hi, Steve.

Have you ever worked it out? How does it work? When it comes to the image resizing problem, I have another question for you. I wonder how can I accomplish the image resizing process . Do I need another image resizing SDK to help customize the size of images ? I am almost a green hand here. Any suggestion will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Arron