image quality issue with A7RII files

[UNOlker]

Hi. New to the forum. Hopefully I can explain this correctly and it makes sense to someone.

 

I was using a sony a6000 since it launched, and it did me very well till it died last week. So, I decided to replace it with the A7RII. (in between that time, I had used an A7S for a weekend). Clearly, I think I had a good expectation of the resolution / image quality / low light quality on the A7RII based on moving up from the a6000 and having some time with the A7S,  

 

So, this past weekend I shot a festival and took about 700 hundred shots over the course of 2 days. I used 4 lenses. the Mitakon 50mm 0.95, the sony fe 28mm 2.0, the sony sel 10-18 in full frame mode at 16mm, and the rokinon 8mm in crop mode. I shot one day in jpeg fine image quality, and one day in raw, and mostly in either full manual or A priority, A few i did with dro or hdr on, but as I kept using it I tried to have all of those extra settings off and get closest to just raw files so I can make any adjustments in lightroom.

 

The pictures when viewed in the camera look amazing, unless i didnt focus properly or really under or over exposed. The only ones that looked grainy or pixelated is when I went above 16k ISO. (in comparison, i could easily tell with me a6000 anything over 3200 got grainy, over 10k was unusable). Id say that definitely anything at 5k and under left no doubt in my mind would be amazingly crisp.

 

Excited to go through these in Lightroom, I was very surprised to find that many photos that looked good in camera, and also went sent to my iphone via the sony app, look very pixelated or grainy, even the relatively lower ISO shots. very few seem as I would expect. Anything I produce with the a7rii and the full full fram 28mm / 50mm I think should have noticeably better resolution / detail / range to work with in post processing then anything I took with a6000. 

 

Am I missing something? I have to turn these photos into my editor for publication and I feel like I would be better off to send them to my iphone and edit in snapseed because those photos look better then anything i have sitting in my lightroom catalog (Im updated to the newest release, running on a macbook pro 13 retina early 2015, 16gb ram, newest osx). Also, when i export to jpeg, I usually will either do max 1200px long edge or 5mg max size depending on publication place. Most of these files say "can not make image that small" since they are all like 56 mg DNG files. 

 

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Maybe I'm expecting too much? do I have a setting wrong? dont convert to DNG? I still have the originals on the memory card. I imported from the memory card to lightroom to the internal SSD. 

 

I suppose i could take shots of the same photo on my phone, the camera's screen, and my monitor if that helps when I get home later. To give some reference of the work I have been producing, you can look here for a gallery that was shot with my a6000 and the a7s at a festival earlier in the summer. For these shots I used the same or lesser quality lenses then mentioned above. 

 

Thanks 

 

 

[KlausH]

Did you use the app "send to my phone"?

If yes, open the app and go to option (trash can button), there you can choose between 2 MB or original file size. Default is 2 MB, that could be the reason for your pixelated images.

[addicted2light]

Do you have noise reduction set to anything but "off" in camera AND in the creative style you're using?

 

This because the preview you see in camera (and the file transferred to your phone) is a jpg, not a raw, so IT WILL have the set noise reduction applied. While the raw file in Lightroom will be, well, raw so without ANY amount of noise reduction.

 

BTW, same thing goes for sharpening: have you noticed how the pictures look so much crisper on the camera LCD screen compared to Lightroom? (that is, until you actually set a fair bit of sharpening in Lightroom as well...)

[UNOlker]

thanks for the replies. The image quality is / was fine on the images sent to my phone...  The issue was in lightroom.  that said.. i left my mac open all day... with lightroom open, and when i came home it looks like all the files are fine. My guess is since so many images are such large sizes it wasnt done rendering them. So perhaps I made my assessment too soon. I waited for the processing bar to finish before looking, but perhaps there was still more to go? In any event, Im going to make sure all NR and other settings are turned off and only shoot in RAW and give plenty of time for processing. Thanks

[lacroix]

I've been LR user since coming to market until I downloaded the free for Sony Capture One; it's by far superior to LR when processing RAW files.  I ended up buying the Pro Version for Sony Cameras.  

[FDP]

Yeah, sounds like a Mac/Adobe fail...