Sharpness in Photoshop and Lightroom - Nikon D850

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 27, 2022
3 replies
1133 views

I have the following problem. I have a Nikon D850 camera, which I use as a professional photographer to shoot in RAW Flie.

I have had several problems with the sharpness of the images, and have been going to NIKON's Zurich service for almost a year to have the problem solved. My camera has been technically tested and the result is that the camera produces sharp images.

On the advice of the NIKON Corporation, I downloaded the Nikon View NX-I program. I was absolutely shocked to see the over-sharpened image on my monitor as I had seen in the service department.

On the one hand, this reassured me that the problem was not with my monitor, and confirmed that the problem was probably not with the camera.

I am sending you 3 screenshots, which I hope you will see how Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop read the camera data in RAW File with a degradation of quality. I am honestly very disappointed with this quality degradation in terms of image sharpness.

I do not understand how this is possible. There are a lot of professional photographers in the world who use Nikon's top of the range camera and post-process their images using Adobe Ligtroom and Photoshop.

How is it possible that I have such a big drop in quality? In all 3 screenshots the photos are opened in RAW, i.e. NEF, at 100%. So you can visually see the quality degradation. My monitor is an EIZO Coloredge CG2420, which works perfectly, you can see the difference between the 3 images. My graphics card is Nvidia GEForce RTX 2080 TI, with the latest software update.

How to solve the problem so that I can see in Photoshop and Lightroom the same sharp photo that my camera takes? Thank you for your help

This topic has been closed for replies.

Per Berntsen

Community Expert

The images from NX View and Photoshop are over sharpened.

The image from Lightroom looks quite good (although a little too sharp for my taste), and for the record, Camera Raw and Lightroom use the exact same processing engine, but you have used much more aggressive sharpening in Camera Raw/Photoshop.

What kind of quality degradation are you seeing? I can't see any.

If you would like some advice on sharpening, you can upload the raw file to Dropbox or some other file sharing service, and we could take a look at it.

TheDigitalDog

Inspiring

You 'solve' this by setting a default preset for sharpening and anything else you subjectively desire for an initial preview of the raw data. Then you massage the settings if necessary. The default settings in raw converter A vs. raw converter B differ and often dramatically as you've shown here. The default out of the box isn't ideal for all subjects, cameras and so forth so you can and should create your own. This includes camera profiles, sharpening and even adjustment to brightness due to optimal exposure of the raw data.

This is really what your raw data looks like before rendering and as you can see, without a rendering starting point, it doesn't look anything like an image you'd want:

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"

D Fosse

Community Expert

You do know that you're supposed to dial in sharpening yourself in Lightroom/ACR? The Nikon software has pretty aggressive sharpening set by default.

There's no such thing as "image degradation" with raw files. A raw file is simply a data dump from the camera's sensor. The rest is processing and up to you.

Lightroom sharpening is very flexible and very effective. But you have to push some sliders.

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