Stop Throwing Away Less Than Perfectly Sharp Images

Image sharpness is, for the most part, a false economy. It is mistakenly believed to be synonymous with image quality; that isn't the case. One major difference is that image quality has a ceiling and once reached (if that's even possible), the image cannot be any better in terms of quality. However, with the sharpness of an image, you can far exceed the perfect amount (again, if there is such a thing), and it begins to cost your image dearly.

My approach to sharpness when I first started photography was built on the same misunderstanding I speak of above. I saw the beautiful creations of photographers who were unambiguously my superiors with regards to age, experience, and talent, and I decided the route to this level of imagery was clarity. I didn't understand the importance of light or settings, but that's not my main grievance here. I would butcher images with the express goal of making them sharper than cacti-covered knives in much the same way that I butchered my first attempts at landscapes with garish HDR. I have made peace with these mistakes as they are tantamount to a rite of passage for photographers like selective color and white vignettes have been in the past. My grievance is born of a far more contemporary realization for me: don't throw away images merely because they aren't as sharp as they could be.

If you are shooting beauty, products, or perhaps macro images, this advice isn't necessarily relevant. However, for other genres such as weddings, portraiture, or even landscapes, "softer" images ought not be automatically discarded. For lucidity's sake, I will clarify that I don't mean that you can bugger up a shoot by hand-holding a 1/10th of a second exposure; what I mean is that in the right circumstance, softness doesn't necessarily matter. A great example of this is when you are going to employ filmic processing styles. That is, you're going to edit your image in a way that it mimics qualities (or flaws) of film cameras. SLR Lounge recently did a video on this that is a great example:

You see, this style of editing shouldn't be used as a crutch, but rather a tool. If you want to capture an atmospheric shot where either artificial light might kill the ambience or it's not possible to set up in time (e.g., a wedding), settle for a softer image with the view of editing it in a way that isn't so focused on extreme clarity. I wrote an article recently on how much I take from cinematography and how I enjoy the "look" of cinematic photographs. A lot of cinematography isn't of a magazine style editorial as the tradeoff is often atmosphere and mood. A quick example from my own work is the below image:

I wanted to capture this image, but I was in a dark underground club with no windows. The lights in the background are from the fridges behind the bar, and the key light that is illuminating my model is a sign just out of frame. There was very little light, but I liked the way it looked, and so, I chose to shoot at f/1.5. I knew that this would butcher the clarity of the image as it's far from the sweet spot; I also knew that the dark areas and the ISO would combine to give off a fair bit of noise. However, from before I even took this shot, I knew I was going to edit it in a way similar to the aforementioned film look. You may not be able to tell in a down-sized version, but the full res file shows that even the model's eyes, which were the point of focus, are not perfectly sharp.

Although this isn't the salient takeaway point here, it's worth pawing through old image libraries and seeing if perhaps images you rejected due to softness can be re-imagained in a different processing style.