On Sharpness

• There’s a saying photographers use a lot. “That photo is sharp as a tack.” If you are a professional photographer who has been taking pictures for a long time, you most likely already know the difference between “pretty sharp” and “sharp as a tack”. When I was starting out, I did not.
• My first couple of years in photography I thought I was taking sharp images.
• I would get my RAW photos into Lightroom after a trek through the jungle, zoom in 100%, and think, “Awesome, that image is tack-sharp!”
• It wasn’t. Almost none of them were.
• I was shooting on a garbage lens, without stabilization, in dark light. Even a seasoned pro would have had trouble capturing tack-sharp images in those conditions.
• Even now, after years of shooting wildlife, I zoom in on a photo in Lightroom and think, “Awesome, I got it,” only to continue down the line, zoom in on another, and realize the first one was not nearly as sharp as I want it to be.
• The reason for this is simple: it’s all about relativity.
• If you have not yet seen a similar, sharper photo to compare it to, the following image probably looks pretty sharp.
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• But, if you now look at the following image, and then back at the first, the second all of a sudden becomes sharp-as-a-tack, and the first, well, not so much. I would probably go ahead and mark that one for deletion.
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• Here they are side-by-side to really compare.
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• Look at the “hairs” at the top of the dandelion on the right.
• Do you see how much crisper the lines are?
• They follow all the way down to the stamen like that, just as crisp.
• There’s just a hint of blurriness to the “hairs” on the left image.
• That’s the difference between “pretty sharp” and “tack-sharp”.
• Now you may think I just took a blurry image for this comparison to prove my point, but this is a photo I thought was sharp before looking at the next, sharper image.
• I have gotten better at picking this out over time, but I’m still no expert.
• It happens often that I get my images on the computer and pick out a favorite, only to realized a few images later that it was not nearly as sharp as I first decided.
• I encourage you to keep a tack-sharp image in your Lightroom catalog that you can reference when you get back from a shoot.
• Compare the images you think are sharp to the one you know is sharp to be certain you are picking the right ones.
• Most of the time they look fine when you zoom back out, but as a professional, fine is not what I’m going for.
• If you want to stand out from the crowd, read this article again and let it really sink in.
• Go back through some of your recent photos and see if you notice some differences in the sharpness of a batch of images.