Canon 7D issues

What is the secret in post processing? I cannot get anywhere near the sharpness and clarity of most of these photos from my 7D. If I sharpen my shots I get increased grain/noise. If I reduce noise I also remove detail AARGH!
 
I think the 7D suffered badly with a mix of some poor copies that once fixed performed well but mostly user error. The iso performance is what it is and for a camera that was aimed at the wildlife and sports side it's just not good enough.
How many people living in the UK go out using iso 100 :thinking:
My real world experience was that it didn't matter how much you ETTR @ iso 800 the actual image started to get poor.
I'm not a 7D hater and when it worked well i got some nice images out of it but the keeper rate was just not high enough for me, ok i paid a lot of cash to get a 1Dmk4 but my starting iso is now 800 ;)
If the light is good the 7D takes some beating but how often does that happen.
 
Wdiane said:
Maybe completely true but hardly helpful to those of us that are asking for advice.
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Apologies I didn't mean to sound obtuse, I meant to say if you ask the person who's processing you like they will be able to assist :)

There's a lot of poor processing advice on the web IMO, if you look at Flickr and search 7D there's an awful lot of mushy detailed, over sharpened examples on show. As I mentioned before a lot of images are only posted up in a small size so it's difficult to gauge the actual quality of the image
 
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Neil B said:
....How many people living in the UK go out using iso 100 :thinking:..........
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I shot a whole day at Silverstone recently at ISO100 but I agree the light we get in the UK isn't always great, so I use whatever ISO I need to get the shutter speed and aperture I want. This is sheer luxury when I think back to film days and you had whatever ISO was in the camera, but then we didn't pixel peep in those days, just printed our shots and put them on the wall, maybe we should start doing that again :D
 
I'm by no means an expert photographer and the majority of my photos remain un-printed, but coming from a 1000D to a 7D it's truly a revelation being able to confidently use Auto-ISO (capped at 1600), so partly it's what you're used to.

Having said that, I've done a bit of 100% peeping and never had that level of noise. But I don't have in camera sharpness set to 7 either. I saw some shots else where of a clear blue sky full of grain due to in-camera sharpening, so just left it at er... 2 I think.
 
Quick update in this. I wasnt going to let the camera beat me!! I have done a LOT of reading and it seems the 7D is what it is. It suffers from some grain in less than perfect conditions. When the conditions are right it does nail some very clear shots. I have had one of the images from last weekend printed to A1 after a bit of noise reduction and although it is a bit pixelated up close, from a normal viewing distance its perfectly acceptable for me. I also think this was partly down to the quality of print aswell as I have some A2 prints from the 550D that look similar. I also have a print from another company from the 550D at A2 that is faultless even when viewed at 3" away.

I have backed off the in camera sharpness, I have set exposure compensation to +1/3 and I will go out and shoot some more motorsport tomorrow and see how I get on. Strangely even with its faults I am actually starting to quite like this camera now :)
 
good to hear! Pleased for you!

And Canon rock, its a fact you see. :D haha

I love my 60D and it has its 1% of moments where it picks out tiny user errors but 99% we live in harmony. haha
 
I am going to try mine tomorrow t +1/3 seeing as I have read a lot about people using it and see how I get on, if it goes wrong I will not be very happy ;) :lol:.
As Ive upgraded from a 20D I suppose the noise is not really an issue for me, I did earlier in the year get a bird shot at 3200 which I did have to abit of noise reduction as it was noisy but perfectly usable, I would show you but I cannot find it.

Heres one from my weekend
Exif still intact but its
1/800
Iso 1/640
F6.3

Lens 100-400 at 320mm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maximumrevsphotography/9523838933/lightbox/

Will be interested to see what you think of that, only thing I done is put my watermark on.
 
I also have a 7D and have always thought it's sensor was noisey. I recently bought a second-hand 1D Mk3, and it's far superior to the 7D. Mind you, I now am in the lengthy process of fine-tuning the very sensitive autofocus/tracking settings to try and hit the sweet-spot. Something I'm led to believe is common practice with the Mk3.

Having said all that, I still like the 7D...I just use a tad more noise reduction.
 
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D-pearce92 said:
I am going to try mine tomorrow t +1/3 seeing as I have read a lot about people using it and see how I get on, if it goes wrong I will not be very happy ;) :lol:.
As Ive upgraded from a 20D I suppose the noise is not really an issue for me, I did earlier in the year get a bird shot at 3200 which I did have to abit of noise reduction as it was noisy but perfectly usable, I would show you but I cannot find it.

Heres one from my weekend
Exif still intact but its
1/800
Iso 1/640
F6.3

Lens 100-400 at 320mm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maximumrevsphotography/9523838933/lightbox/

Will be interested to see what you think of that, only thing I done is put my watermark on.
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That looks pretty decent to me that but then it should be at 640 iso! :)

Can't check the info for certain without connecting up my external drives but I think thats a similar iso to this one on my 60D, think around 400 i was at without checking so looks fine to me!




This image is shot at 1/50th @ iso 100 and as you can see no noise like the above image but the problem is like Phil says, the day conditions are totally different, this was a fantastic sunny day, as you can see, no noise, no grain or anything.



My opinion, the canon cameras are great, although I can clearly see in Johnathan's post that there was most definately a problem which is a shame as the second image to me is a superb quality shot! :)
 
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No sun at all in this one, :D 100% crop at 160ISO

IMG_H5583.jpg
 
nice shot there arty man, I love the moon :)

Would like to 2x convert the sigma, that or get the 300-800mm sigma... but that is NEVER going to happen. haha

Can imagine justifying that to the mrs just for shooting the moon. haha :D
 
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1/60th handheld at iso 160



:D

The 7D and 60D are great cameras... hell i still love the 1100D as a great walk about camera!
 
Its soooo far away which is gutting, would love to get to take some snaps of the drifting!
 
Willid1 said:
One piece of advice I would give (not sure if this applies to all 7D's) is to NEVER underexpose your images.

I seem to be constantly dialing in +1/2 or more EC, but the I am most often taking pictures of my kids and the metering does seem to pick up the focus point quite well.
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I have to agree with this statement 100%. I find that if I expose at +/- 0 EV that my images are under exposed.

I shoot raw, and hardly ever shoot below ISO400. This was shot at 1600ISO with no noise reduction:

4970215231_8a5f3dfea5_b.jpg
 
Well..... after the second outing with the 7D I am a lot happier. I took on the advice given about backing off the sharpening and adjusting a few other settings. I also did quite a lot in RAW yesterday aswell.

Overall there results were a lot more promising than the first outing. Images still not coming out as sharp as I was getting with the 550D but I think thats due to the focus system being a lot more sensitive.

Anyway.... A few of the shots from yesterday. All are straight off the camera, into LR and exported as 1280px jpg so the quality isnt going to be great.

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For anyone else reading this, if you find the image quality of the 7D is not up to expectations, experiment with it. It is a fussy camera but with a bit of LR adjustment the images do come out quite nice :)

Before
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After
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