can you help with these oly functions?

[clive francis]

in the menu system for my 3040, there is an option for sharpness:

hard;
medium;
soft;

what do these do, at the moment it is set to medium, i have had a play and can't see any difference?

the second function is contrast:

high;
medium;
low;

this is set to high, but again i can't see any difference, what does this do?

cheers

 

[blacknet]

Hello,

Well for sharpness you want hard. Nothing speaks louder on an image that jumps out at you strong enought to cut diamonds. If you look at the old 50's and 60's tv shows they always shot women on the soft settings.

As for contrast it's a different story. if you are doing b/w you can get away with low contrast. in fact low contrast/flat color images is good candidates for printing in b/w. if your doing color you want high contrast.

I would set both on high and leave it there.

Hope this helps.

Ed

 

[raxafarian]

usually it's better to do the sharpening in photoshop... much more control. If you turn off sharpening in camera, then the image might appear softer, but you will be using a much more sophisticated program to apply sharpening rather than the more limited "in-camera" software. The softer image actually has less "artifacts"... especially less edges that have a "staircase" effect.

Sharpening can improve the photos when viewed online, but can create prints that appear "fake".

Try some test pics of something with alot of detail, including text and or lots of edges. Take the same pic with the 3 in camera settings and print each one.

I'd leave it at soft or medium.