Welcome to another Reader FAQ! Thanks for submitting your questions to us – we get such a thrill out of answering our readers most pressing questions about their businesses.

This is an ongoing series, so make sure to read the rest of our Reader FAQ posts.

If you have a question that hasn’t been answered already, check out the info at the bottom of this post for how to submit.

You never know, it just may be featured here on the bloggy-blog!

On with today’s question…

All of your images have a special “crisp-ness” to them. What’s the secret? What sharpening method do you guys use?

When thinking about the sharpness and clarity of any image, it’s important to remember that there’s (at least) 3 things that contribute in a major way to sharpness.

1. Lens Quality

The biggest thing is the quality of the lens – better quality glass does less to distort the light as it travels from your subject, through your lens, and eventually to your sensor (or film as the case may be). Since sharpness is a super important thing to Erin and me, we’ve selected only the sharpest lenses to have in our bag. Read about our gear.

2. Focus and Exposure

The second thing that makes your images sharper is focus and exposure. You’ve got to have your images in focus in order for them to look sharp, and they MUST be properly exposed. Keep in mind that our brains associate brightness with sharpness and so an image that isn’t too dark and isn’t too light will look sharper to our eyes.

3. Blogstomp

Finally, when putting images on our blog, we run them through Blogstomp to apply our watermark and set the specific sharpening we’d like to use in the settings. The secret to Blogstomp is giving it the biggest image possible to use, so we export high-res images, and Blogstomp resizes them and sharpens for our blog.

Hugs,
Erin