DSLRUsers.com

This was taken with a Tamron 18-200, and has been PS sharpened. I still reckon it's a bit soft. Do you reckon it's the lens, camera movement, just me or is it OK?

Thanks, Chris

Impossible to comment on the softness or otherwise with an image this size Chris, but the capture itself is nice - a good, relaxed moment to enjoy for years to come

Don't worry about the sharpness here (as long it's not out of focus), you've captured a nice childhood memory and that's what really matter!

Link

From what I can see, it doesn't look too soft. Although as Sheepie said, impossible to tell. The important bits to get sharp are the face and especially the eyes. The out of focus background (definately soft) and foreground (I think that's a bit soft) is probably spot on for what you were trying to achieve.
Cheers
John

Is there a good easy way to check sharpness?

Chris

Chris, IMO it depends what you mean by how to check sharpness. Your question implies to me that more sharpness is better. While generally true to the extent that an out of focus shot is very not sharp (soft) and usually doesn't look good. And generally you want your main subject to be sharp to stand out from the rest of the image, ie the thing that you focussed on and that you want the viewer to focus on. Then you start talking about foreground and background that you may want to be out of focus to draw the eye away from it, so in this case the background and foreground being soft would be good. In the case of faces, if they are too sharp, you will see every last little blemish, which may be good if your a skin specialist but may be bad if you're trying to make a glamorous look. In this case, you might intentionally blur (ever so slightly) the facial skin. But the eyes, lips and nose are generally the features that are peceived as best looking as sharp as a tack, especially the eyes.

Then take a picture of moving water which you often blur by using a long exposure to get a creamy effect. Compare a shot of a water fall taken at 1/500 sec Vs a shot taken at 10 sec. Is the smooth creamy water which has motion blur induced softness better or worse than the sharp individual water droplets frozen in time? It depends what you're trying to do.

From a technical perspective, you can definately over sharpen an image. As you do, you start to get a halo effect around areas of high contrast, and if you sharpen even more, the whole picture starts to break up. And you can go the other way of course, too soft.

So, IMO there is no such thing as the right amount of sharpness. You generally want the image sharp but not all of it and not always. In the end, it is the eye of the photographer and eventually the viewer which determines if the sharpness of an image is right or wrong.

As you start to print something bigger, you will loose sharpness. So the size that you are going to display it comes into it as well.

In your case, I think the main feature of the shot is the face and the red hat with the secondary feature being the hands. The bit that you don't want to focus on is the background and extreme foreground. Does the face and hat look right to you? To me they look pretty spot on. The fingers are slightly softer which looks right and the background is nice and soft so your eyes dont dwell on it. If I had a comment about the sharpness of this image, I would probably say to soften slightly the extreme foreground, the bottom few percent of the image.

Sorry for the sermon, but that's my opinion.
Cheers
John

Thanks John, a very comprehensive answer ! I think sometimes it's hard to see the wood for the trees, I was more worried about the eye sharpness than the foreground. I liked the bacground, but selective softening of some of the sand would be a bigger improvement than worrying about nth degrees of eye sharpness...

Thanks, Chris.

One thing i find is crucial in this regard is focus point . Especially when shooting people . If the focus point locks on the hat or the collar of the shirt instead of the face it can be off enough to be distracting .
One of the pic review programs i have has a viewer that shows the focus point over the picture . Surprising how often what i thought was bang on was close but not close enough .