Canon 18-55 IS looks fuzzy

N

Notorius

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 15, 2007
Messages
132
So i got a canon rebel XS the other day, with the canon 18-55mm IS lens. After spending a few days with it ive noticed the edges in a lot of photographs look fuzzy. just barely but its noticeable enough that it looks like some filter has been applied to soften edges or something. its annoying enough it actually gives me a headache to look at for more than a few minutes when examining my photos from the day. Is this normal with IS lenses? I havent had time to turn IS off and test it yet but wanted to see if thats what i should expect or if theres something im missing.

Ive been shooting in P (program AE) and M (manual) modes mostly with IS on, varying images from portraits, indoors, outdoors, low light, sunlight, etc. It happens in almost all of them that the subject is more than ~2 feet away.
 
Kinda tough to help you out without seeing a couple of examples. Care post a few leaving the EXIF data intact?
 
Ya, post some examples. The 18-55 IS is a very decent lens, should not be "fuzzy" or too soft.
 
Could be your exposure length. With IS lenses you can use a slower shutter speed but you will loose sharpness if it is too slow or there is subject motion.

I have sucessfully hand held shots at 1/4sec but it is hit r miss when it is that slow.
 
IS is not the cause of this. IS problems cause things like totally blurred pictures.

Is it perhaps vignetting? Thats caused by a number of things - lens design at certain apertures, a lens hood, a lens filter, shooting a zoom at the very wide end, and more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting

Are you shooting in RAW or JPG? If RAW what are you pre-processing with (DPP, Adobe camera RAW, other?) If JPG, what are your picture settings?
 
how do i upload with EXIF data?

its not viginetting based on the wikipedia link. theres no shadow effect around the edge of the picture. just the edges of objects themselves look blurry slightly. i dont know if its aperature related or filter related (could be either). ill try to take some more pics today with a smaller aperature and without the UV filter i had on and see if it has any effect.
 
For EXIF go to zoom browser or FastStone image viewer. These will both show the EXIF data.
 
I've read that if you're shooting on a tripod, to turn IS off. If you're doing it by hand, by all means go for IS. But if you're pretty stable turn it off, cause the IS will still look to stabalize even if you don't need it. So turning it off when you definately don't need it will give you a sharper image. Though sounds like something else is the real cause here.
 
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