How to Produce Sharp Images

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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.

 

We LOVE answering questions from our readers (we’re not kidding, it’s the best part of this blog).

Head over to our Photographer-Only Facebook Group and vote with others on topics you’re dying to hear about!

***As always, make sure to read through the current Reader FAQ posts to make sure your question hasn’t been answered already!***

Hugs,
Erin

 

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We teach photographers to build life-giving businesses that they absolutely love.

About Us

We're Jeff & Erin

We’re Jeff and Erin Youngren – and it’s our mission to help you thrive not just as a wedding photographer, but as a business owner. It’s time to set aside the stress and comparison of a hustle mindset, and build a life-giving business instead.

We met in college, got married, and started corporate jobs before we discovered (and fell in love with) wedding photography. But like many creative entrepreneurs, we were booking anything we could, strapped to our laptops and living dangerously close to burnout.

So we dug in and learned how to build a thriving business that supports our dream life – instead of a joyless business that runs a stressed-out life.

Today, we photograph only 10 Dreamie weddings per year, but we also run two other wedding brands plus a commercial studio in San Diego, CA. And we do it by only working the hours that fit into our life. The other hours? We spend those living a joyful life raising our two beautiful sons, James and Samuel.

hugs,

Jeff and Erin

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