Poor image quality?

Hi, I wondering if someone can help me please? I've recently brought a Nikon 7100 and for some reason my photos are not coming out as sharp as I'd like no matter what mode I'm using, even in auto, the weird thing is if I zoom into the picture once it sharpens up to a good quality image and I can't understand why, I've wrote to Nikon and they annualised a photo and said I was using a low shutter speed on the picture I sent over, I've since tried using my camera on shutter priority and increasing the speed but the images are no better, I've purchased a book for more info m,used a tripod but nothing seems to do the trick. Any advice please?

Can you post up some examples with exif information? This would help others assist you.

[email protected] said:

Hi, I wondering if someone can help me please? I've recently brought a Nikon 7100 and for some reason my photos are not coming out as sharp as I'd like no matter what mode I'm using, even in auto, the weird thing is if I zoom into the picture once it sharpens up to a good quality image and I can't understand why, I've wrote to Nikon and they annualised a photo and said I was using a low shutter speed on the picture I sent over, I've since tried using my camera on shutter priority and increasing the speed but the images are no better, I've purchased a book for more info m,used a tripod but nothing seems to do the trick. Any advice please?

Click to expand...

Posting an example pic would help a lot. Are you shooting in RAW or JPG? If it's the latter you probably need to adjust the Sharpness setting in the Picture Controls. To do this...

Go into your Menus and highlight the "Shooting" menu (Camera icon).
Drop down to "Picture Controls" and click right one time.
From here, highlight "Standard" (or whatever Picture Control you want to use (they all have their own sub-menus)) and then click right one time.
From this Settings menu, increase the "Sharpness" setting to "7".
As an optional step, drop down and increase the "Saturation" setting +1 notch on the slider.
Press "OK" to exit the menus and you're done.

This will help you get sharper shots, but if your technique is the problem, or if you're using too slow a shutter speed, then those are other issues entirely.

[email protected] said:

the weird thing is if I zoom into the picture once it sharpens up to a good quality image and I can't understand why

Click to expand...

Tell us more about about this. If I am understanding correctly, you view the picture, it looks bad at first, then you zoom in and it looks good. Is that right? If that is correct, you might have issues with whatever software you are using to view the images.

Welcome to the forum,we need to see samples.

[email protected] said:

Hi, I wondering if someone can help me please? I've recently brought a Nikon 7100 and for some reason my photos are not coming out as sharp as I'd like no matter what mode I'm using, even in auto, the weird thing is if I zoom into the picture once it sharpens up to a good quality image and I can't understand why, I've wrote to Nikon and they annualised a photo and said I was using a low shutter speed on the picture I sent over, I've since tried using my camera on shutter priority and increasing the speed but the images are no better, I've purchased a book for more info m,used a tripod but nothing seems to do the trick. Any advice please?

Click to expand...

Hello, and welcome to the program.....(I mean to Nikonites).
Just because you put your camera in shutter priority and increase the shutter speed does not mean that you are going to get properly exposed and sharp images.
If it was that easy, we wouldn't need to learn anything else and could just use any camera attached to any lens.

The first thing to learn is about the exposure triangle. The relationship between shutter speed ISO and aperture. This is the fundamentals of photography.
You can't learn algebra or calculus without understanding the fundamentals of mathematics. Same with photography. I'm not saying that photography is difficult as calculus but you still need a basic understanding of the fundamentals, which is the exposure triangle.
Here is a fantastic website that can get you started.


Learning about Exposure - The Exposure Triangle - Digital Photography School

Just guessing , but some photo viewers-( settings ) take a bit of time to load the entire image and give you a soft looking preview until then. So it might start showing the actual sharpness while you're doing the zooming in, it can be subtle, and if you're zooming around ... things would look like you describe.

[email protected] said:

Hi, I wondering if someone can help me please? I've recently brought a Nikon 7100 and for some reason my photos are not coming out as sharp as I'd like no matter what mode I'm using, even in auto, the weird thing is if I zoom into the picture once it sharpens up to a good quality image and I can't understand why, I've wrote to Nikon and they annualised a photo and said I was using a low shutter speed on the picture I sent over, I've since tried using my camera on shutter priority and increasing the speed but the images are no better, I've purchased a book for more info m,used a tripod but nothing seems to do the trick. Any advice please?

Click to expand...

A "soft" photo can be caused by a lot of things. Shutter speed being a common culprit. In general I recommend whenever possible you shoot at shutter speeds that are at a minimum twice the focal length of the lens you are using, which should eliminate any camera shake you might experience. Keep in mind if your subject is moving you might also need to up your shutter speed even more to cancel out motion blur depending on what your shooting.

Keep in mind too that if you shoot in RAW you will most likely need to do some sharpening during post processing, since it's one of the things the camera does automatically for you when you shoot JPG. You might want to try some test shots using RAW+JPG so you can see the difference between the two.

If you can post some sample images with EXIF data (shutter speed, ISO, focal length) that will help quite a bit in diagnosing the problem. I shoot a 7100 myself, trust me the camera is capable of producing very sharp images indeed.