CHG_CANON wrote:
At this point, skip the software and keep working on your shooting skills, especially your camera set-up. The colors and pose of this image are wonderful. Alas, the soft focus can be traced to your set-up.
Change from AF-S to AF-C and practice tracking subjects with the shutter half-pressed, to continuously engage the AF. Better yet, configure back-button focus (BBF) and use your thumb to hold focus and your index finger to release the shutter, with your thumb actively pressing / holding the assigned BBF.
Next: learn, practice and achieve the finger dexterity to move / position a selected AF point onto the subject's eye, when possible, or at least the face. This image has a centered AF point on the body, not the eye. If 1 AF point to too hard to track the eye of a moving subject, use any of the 'zone' options, such as a 9-AF box or the slightly larger 12-AF box. Get that box over the subject eyes, the camera will do the rest. That 'dexterity' means changing the AF location with the camera held to your eye in a shooting position.
If you're going to be a JPEG shooter, not a post-processor, change from Adobe RGB to sRGB. Otherwise, you have to process every image before sharing, if for nothing more than correcting the colorspace to the online standard.
As a JPEG shooter, customize your Standard picture control. Bump the sharpening to +4.0 or +5.0. Add some saturation, say +0.5 or +1.0. You have clarity at +1.0, consider Contrast at +0.5 to +1.0. Test how these changes impact your images and fine-tune further, if desired.
This result shows you're in the neighborhood of success. Up your game with these setting updates and technique adjustments. Let the camera make you successful and you're justified in skipping the post processing downstream work.
When you become one with your camera, the magic begins.
At this point, skip the software and keep working ... (
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Good counsel CHG. My camera is much less complicated than the myriad of options in LR and Photoshop. And the lure of Lr/Ps led me, at first, to try learning complicated pp instead of learning my camera.
And Ai is no longer on the horizon. It is here, learning, and soon to be integrated into most pp.
Lr and PS are great tools for the professional and those who aspire to use them. For the amateur/hobbyist posting online and saving the memories for family, less complicated options are abundant.