How can I get sharper, more vibrant landscape photos from a Nikon D5600 with the 18-55mm kit lens?

Question

I’m using a Nikon D5600 with the 18-55mm kit lens. When I photograph open fields and other landscapes, the results often look dull, lacking contrast, and sometimes seem a bit out of focus. Compared with images from another entry-level DSLR, mine look less vibrant.

One example was taken at 36mm, 1/200 sec, f/8, ISO 160. What camera settings or shooting adjustments should I use for sharper, more colorful landscape photos?

user85514 · Accepted Answer

You're asking about the camera settings which I can't help you with but the image may be ok once it's corrected with photoshop. All digital images need to be corrected. The camera settings definitely define the image but the digital processing defines the digital version. Quality digital processing makes a poorly taken photo look a million times better than the greatest photo with poor processing.

Here are the first basic steps to processing images. These are not to change or enhance the image in any way. These are to bring what you see on the screen closer to reality. Only the last step, the curves, is distorting and it's only doing a very general distortion to the overall image color and contrast balances. If you only do a little curves, it's towards reality.

The basic idea in levels, or the shape in the back of histogram, is to get rid of the empty or very low areas. You can look into what it represents and what you're doing when you do this but the action is simple. Below you see the arrow pointing to where your picture is empty and flat at the left end:

Slide the slider over to crop out the empty or very low part:

Next, fix the saturation. Max out the saturation to see where distortions happen. Usually images need about 20 saturation added to get real. Distortions usually start happening at around 40. Here's maxed out to see the distortions:

This is setting it to around 23. Those green flowers are bright but not distorting and the color feels much better

Next is contrast. Contrast is also usually best at around 20. The contrast got a good fix with the levels but it also needs this fix.

Check the image now and see how you feel about it. These changes should have brought it back closer to reality. The last thing to maybe do is curves. Curves is to change the overall color and contrast. If you make minor or little changes, keep the curve near the line, it could help get closer to reality, if you change them a lot, it gets off into distortion.

You can see how light curves makes things more rich but you can see how it's sort of distorting the brown patch and that green spot in this particular photo. I would play with the curves for this. You can look up tutorials on this. It's a little complicated but not bad.

Besides curves, these are the basic changes that should be done by eye to every pic. They are really fast too. Once you learn these, it takes only a minute. You can also save them and auto apply to groups of photos.