My Garf's Purple Bonsai frag.

[rsteagall]

If you read up on the canon digital reble xt 350d, (from what I remember) in order to get good color canon sacrificed a little sharpness of the image. I remember it is highly suggested to post process with some kind image sharpening process to increase the focus. Play with the settings of the unsharp mask filter in photoshop to see what I'm talking about. Its much better than straight up sharpen imho. Someone please chime in and add to what I've stated to clarify.

As far as before and after processing, just imagine the picture not being quite as sharp or in focus and the brightness being a little too much while the contrast is not enough. This is easy to reverse if you'd like to see this part... just take my picture and increase brightness to +5 and reduce contrast to -1. Blurr the picture a minuscule amount and it should put it back close to "factory".



-Ryan

[MIREEFER]

vary nice frag.... looks like its growing and keeping its color well
good pics to ...

[louist]

what does unsharp mask do to a picture?

USM enhances the edges within the photo. You can also use it to enhance shadows. Human eyes interpret sharpness by the edges and shadows in the scene and thus enhancing these have the effect of making the photo appear sharper.

USM is pretty standard procedure in post-processing. Almost ALL DSLR photos are soft by nature (in comparison to slide film) due to the AA filter on the sensor. You can just take the AA filter out, but you then end up with moire patterns which is almost impossible to remove in post-processing.