How sharp should photos be at 3:1 in lightroom?

[christopher]

Hello I am new to the forum. Brief history, Shot a Nikon D50 and kit glass for over a decade, moved up to D7500 last year shot the hell out of it, got some Tamron G2 full frame glass, and just purchased a refurb D850. I like my pictures, I get good and some great results. Shooting in the studio with strobes on a tripod everything is wonderful. The Nikon Focus Book has been really help with technique when shooting in the real world.

Here is my question 1, when viewing in Lightroom, at 1:1 the photo looks great and prints great. However when going in further like 3:1 the sharpness kind of falls away ( i guess that to be expected). But then you see pictures on Flickr, youtube and even on this site and it seems the pictures are so sharp you can read the fine print of a newspaper at 100 yards. Am I expecting too much, from a raw out of camera image, or my current skill level? Is it silly to chase that tack sharp image at 300%? I know I have a long way to go on my photographic journey.

Here is question 2, How do I know for sure that the gear is not partly to blame? Could I have a bad copy of a lens? is the focus system in the refurb unit off? Yes I spent quite a bit recently on gear, (maybe a late life crisis), and my lack of experience knowing perfectly working gear is nagging at me. [ For example If I bought a new car and it had a small vibration on the highway, some would assume, the vibration was normal, I have a lot experience with cars and know that there was an issue and needed to be addressed by the manufacturer.]

Thanks for putting up with my long 1st post.

 

[DRwyoming]

Am I expecting too much, from a raw out of camera image, or my current skill level? Is it silly to chase that tack sharp image at 300%?

Yeah, I'd say you're expecting too much. At a 100% (1:1) view you're viewing one pixel in your image mapped directly to one pixel on your screen. Once you zoom in further than that you're actually splitting one pixel in your image across multiple pixels on your screen and depending on your screen and things like monitor contrast that can make a sharp image look much less sharp. A similar thing can happen in image editing programs like PS if you zoom to fractional zooms like 66.67% or 33.33% where pixels in the image have to be spread across multiple screen pixels and you can start seeing artifacts like jagged lines that don't really exist in your image but are a result of mapping pixels from your image to your monitor pixels.

Some guidelines:

- Evaluate sharpness of screen images at 1:1 zoom as that's how they'll be viewed
- Evaluate print images zoomed out to 50% view or sometimes less depending on the size of the image (even lower zoom for very large images) which takes into account normal viewing distances for prints with normal viewing distance typically taken as the diagonal length of the printed image.
- Avoid sharpness evaluations at fractional zooms like 33.33% or 66.67% or the like where pixel splitting occurs on your screen and likewise avoid critical sharpening decisions at 2:1, 3:1 or 4:1 views where again image pixels are split into multiple screen pixels for display.

 

[christopher]

Thank You very much. Your response makes complete sense. (It's also quite freeing)