Why bad quality picture when uploaded to photoshop? - 1

I use a Nikon D5100 shooting on complete manual, I'm also shooting raw but once I upload the picture to photoshop it doesn't come out as sharp? Really quality! Please any suggestions or help? Can it be the screen thats to big 17"?

Can't tell you much without seeing it.

It could be out of focus, could be motion blur, could be too shallow depth of field.

Why not post it in tinypic and share the link.

You have a camera that is fully capable of producing sharp images.

When you say you are shooting in complete manual, does that also include manually focusing your images as well. If so, you need to make sure that your focus point is on your subject and that the green rangefinder focusing aid it not flashing or no on, indicating that your lens is in focus

Shooting in RAW will give you the most resolution and enable you to control the final image, saving it usually to high quality JPEG or TIFF.

NOTE: When was the last time you calibrated and profiled your monitor. This is important when making colour changes in your images. A monitor that is off 40 points toward cyan will produce prints that are 40 points red if you use your uncalibrated monitor to correct for the visual shift caused by an uncalibrated monitor

With raw, you need to develop it. That's what the camera does when you shoot jpgs. When you shoot raw, you are telling the camera to not do the in camera sharpening and color adjustments, that you are smart enough to do it yourself.

You need a raw developer, Photoshop (at least if it is less than a 3 year old version) comes with ACR a sort of plugin that allows you to develop the raw image. Unfortuantely every camera has a different raw format, so you need to make sure you have a raw delveloper program that can 'read' your camera's raw format. If you don't, then you need to download the free Adobe raw to DNG converter. DNG was invented by Adobe to be a sort of universal raw format, this raw converter (again, free) is kept reasonably current and can read almost all but the very newest cameras. You use it to convert the Nikon raw image (NEF, if I recall) to DNG and then most modern versions of ACR can read it regardless of the camera it came from.

You are comparing the tiny image you see on the tiny screen on the back of your camera with the "real" thing on the computer.

Just about everything looks perfect on the camera until you see the whole truth (which is what you're seeing on the computer, Photoshop or not).

What you see in the computer is what the picture really looks like.