Some forum folks have mentioned worries about diffraction robbing their images of detail and sharpness on the higher resolution sensors and I wanted to give a perspective on this using my A7R6. Landscape photographers have been shooting deep into the diffraction apertures for many decades as they often prioritize front-to-back depth of field, and if you have followed some of those professionals you’ll see they won’t hesitate to routinely shoot at f/11 or f/16 if their composition requires it [focus stacking is not always possible or wanted depending on the circumstances and one's workflow preferences in the field]. What’s nice about our digital workflows is we can easily and quickly compensate in development and maintain a quite amazing amount of fine detail and sharpness that is capable of producing gorgeous gallery-quality prints even upon very close examination.
I am not a master at this like our member Mark Metternich [who has posted beautiful images in our Landscape forum shot at f/32!], and I’m sure many of you like Dan already have your own great technique for solving this. But with a simple, quick workflow I maintain very satisfying and rich detail while shooting well into the diffraction range. Below are examples: first image on the left is shot at a prime aperture of f/3.5 which is not in the diffraction range, using the very sharp Viltrox 135mm f/1.8 lens, and to the right is an exposure at f/11 which is firmly in diffraction territory. The f/3.5 frame has default sharpening in Lightroom, whereas the f/11 frame has 100% deconvolution sharpening applied which I find works so well to remove diffraction effects, along with a mere 5 points of clarity and contrast added to restore the small contrast loss that happens when stopping down [I also used Denoise on the f/11 frames so I could maximize seeing fine detail and not noise on the 200% crops]. The first set of each scene is at 100% view where it’s virtually impossible to tell a difference between the two apertures to my eyes, followed by a 200% pixel view for further scrutinization. The 200% view on my monitor is like putting your nose right up to a 75” wide print!
I hope these screenshots hold up to web compression enough for you to see why diffraction does not negatively affect an image for me when using a proper development workflow. Sharpening levels could be taken way beyond what I have done here, but I like to keep things on the conservative side to maintain a natural, organic look.
Jul 15, 2026 at 03:51 PM
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