Why are my landscape photographs muddy and grainy?

Question

I am a beginner and I have been recently trying to do some landscape photography. However what I am not satisfied with is the level of sharpness and muddiness, it feels the photos come out always quite muddy and not very sharp. They look somewhat okayish when zoomed very small like 25-33% however when viewing at full screen (how I like to view any of my photographs at 40-60%) edges start to come out pixelated and overally the photos look unnatural and pixelated.

These photos I took at the rocks by the sea, the clouds and the sky look decent, a little bit noise here and there but nothing terrible. The waves and the sea look quite muddy and grainy, also clearly quite noisy. Rocks look muddy, grainy and unsharp. Blacks are decent, no noise there.

I am not sure what I am doing wrong here. Any tips? I used ISO100 and 1/125s both shot handheld. First with f1.8 and second f4.5. Nikon zf with 20mm f1.8 lens.

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Answer 1

Both images are reasonably sharp.

It may be that your expectations about what you will see straight out of camera may be higher than the reality. Landscape images that have a lot of local contrast, which our brains tend to interpret as being "crisper" or "sharper", usually only show such contrast after significant post processing, especially by using processing actions that increase local contrast.

From an answer to this question: Are award winning landscape images edited?

Pretty much everything on 500px that are at the top of various popularity lists have the everlasting stink edited out of them. Every.Single.One.

Nothing comes out of any camera on the market looking like CGI for a multimillion dollar movie. That's all I see in the "top images" at 500px.

Most of the "Featured Photos & Videos" at Fstoppers also have a lot of editing done to them.

With Flickr, it depends on which communities you're looking at. But many of them there are also highly edited, though not to the point many images at 500px are, and there are also a lot more that are much closer to what one might get from the camera's own raw conversion engine and user selectable options that can be selected before the shot.

Here's an image I shot recently near Page, Arizona. It was taken with a Canon 5D Mark IV and an EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L lens (non-IS) handheld. The lens was zoomed to 43mm, ISO 100, f/8, 1/320.

Here's what it would have looked like with the in camera settings at the time it was shot. Auto White Balance. Standard Picture Style with in-camera adjustments to contrast (-1) and saturation (-1) [These don't affect the final image since I can set them to whatever value I want in raw conversion, but they do make the histogram, based on the JPEG preview attached to the raw file and used to display the image on the back of the camera, show a little more accurately what's in the raw file]. It's shot a bit dark because if I'd shot it any brighter, the brightest highlights would have been blown out.

Below it's been converted from raw using global adjustments. White Balance was set at 5800K and a 2.5 Mired shift towards green. It was brightened by almost a full stop in overall brightness (with the highlights then pulled back considerably to prevent them from clipping) and the shadows boosted another one-third stop or so. There were adjustments to contrast (-), highlights (-), shadows (+), and minor adjustments to color using an HSL tool. Lens correction included chromatic aberration, color blur, and distortion corrections.

Here's the same raw file with the exact same adjustments as above with additional tone mapping applied to increase local contrast. Various raw processing applications call this 'Clarity/Vibrance', 'Detail Enhancement', or even "Local Contrast'.

Also understand that, no matter how well it was shot and with what high end equipment it was shot with, nothing will look as good magnified to 100% on a large monitor as it will at a more normal display size. Pixel peeping has raised expectations to ridiculous levels! A 24MP image displayed on a 23" HD (1920x1080) monitor at 100% is the equivalent enlargement of a 60x40 inch print! Viewing a 50MP image at 100% on such a monitor would be like looking at a small section of a 120x80" print! How often do you critically examine a 120x80" print from a distance of only 18-24 inches (the distance between most people's eyes and their computer monitor)?

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An interesting aside: All images in the above answer were uncropped and resized to 2160x1440 pixels when exported before uploading them. istatic has resized each one to be the same (decompressed on display) file size. As the contrast is increased in each image, the resolution goes down to maintain the same decompressed file size. From 2160x1440 in the "straight out of camera" photo, to 1868x1245 in the second photo after initial raw conversion settings, to 1736x1157 in the photo with the same initial raw conversion settings plus additional tone mapping to increase local contrast.

Answer 2

I took a look at the exif of the first image and I don't see any obvious issue. 20mm f/1.8, 1/125, 100, VR on...

But I do see one potential issue and that is active D-lighting was enabled. Active D-lighting causes the camera to underexpose in order to preserve highlights, and that affects both raw and jpeg images.

Image noise has more to do with lack of light/information per area; and underexposure certainly doesn't help. The only thing ISO has to do with noise is that it is compensating for a lack of light; it makes the noise visible (may actually reduce noise).

However, ISO does not compensate for a lack of information... e.g. blues (sky/water/etc) are almost always noisy because the typical sensor only has 25% of the photosites sensitive to primarily blue wavelengths; 75% of the sensor is lacking adequate information... and that leads to noise/color noise (usually magenta).

Pixelation is an entirely different/unrelated thing... if you are seeing pixelation it is due to a magnification or monitor setting.

Answer 3

F1.8 matters a lot for cameras with large sensors. For a deep scene like yours you will see significant difference between F1.8 and F4.5 (but F8 might look the same at this focal length).

Noise is almost always present. The strength of noise depends on a lot of factors:

1. smoothness of objects. Noise will always be more apparent on objects with no details
2. image settings: there's obviously noise reduction but all other settings will have effect on noise visibility: increasing saturation, contrast and sharpness through image settings will increase noise
3. colour of objects. Camera sensors are generally biased towards green frequencies (both sensitivity and number of green pixels), so saturated blue and red objects are in most disadvantage and even more so if sensor requires strong colour conversion (colour matrix)

As for your two examples I am almost sure that you've increased sharpness setting too far for DSC0755 (it's clearly different value than what DSC0853 has) which will make image look bad when there are rough textures such as uneven waves. You can confirm it yourself by looking at detailed image information either in the camera or in Nikon software. By the way waves are clearly different between your two examples what also contributes to the difference. Waves on DSC0755 clearly have more small details because of different wind.

These photos I took at the rocks by the sea, the clouds and the sky look decent, a little bit noise here and there but nothing terrible. The waves and the sea look quite muddy and grainy, also clearly quite noisy. Rocks look muddy, grainy and unsharp. Blacks are decent, no noise there.

DSC0853 looks very normal to me besides smaller DoF. Can't any problems there. That's exactly like I would imagine waves and dry and wet rocks to look. Also when you are not viewing image at full resolution it's important to take into account what image viewer you are using. Scaling full image to your display is not a standardized operation and will differ between viewing programs.