What does it mean that camera lens is soft, and why is it so common in the industry for lenses to be soft nowadays? Learn everything about lens softness and our recommendations to invest in better lenses.
You might hear this quite common sentence from someone in the camera niche: “That lens is quite soft wide open,” or “I stopped using this lens because I think it’s too soft.” No photographer wants to hear the words “soft” camera lens; that is for sure. Why? Well, it directly shows that the lens you are using is not good enough in the most important ways.
What does it mean that camera lens is soft?
The word softness is linked to the sharpness in an image, which defines the overall clarity and quality of the image you have taken with a lens. A soft photo, when viewed on a digital viewfinder or on a large screen monitor, will look slightly blurred or unfocused. Several factors can lead to such results, but when we talk about a lens behind this, it is usually due to its internal design limitations.
Reasons behind Softness in Camera Lenses
The most common is fewer glass lens elements or poorly designed element groups in the lens. A high-quality lens is a product designed after years of research and development, which results in a much more optimized and high-performance optical formula. Makers of low-quality lenses bypass such research and rely on manufacturing shortcuts, which result in softness.
Another common reason behind this is the use of plastic or cheaper glass elements for the main optical element area inside the lens. Such cheap elements simply don’t have optimal refractive or dispersion properties, which a high-end camera would deliver in terms of sharpness and clarity in final results.
The latest generation of camera lenses now comes with aspherical elements, which feature non-spherical surfaces. This is done so that these surfaces can better focus incoming light and reduce optical aberrations, which are not desired in an image. A camera lens with softness won’t have such surfaces and often results in increased spherical aberration, leading to softness of an image even in good lighting conditions.
In short, when we try to answer what does it mean that camera lens is soft and how it happens, there are mainly three reasons to explain that: first, low-quality glass elements, shortcuts in manufacturing processes, and design flaws in the surface.
Lens Softness & Skill Issues
It’s not always the lens manufacturer that should be considered guilty when someone talks about softness in an image. A user who doesn’t know how to operate a lens properly in a certain scenario can also unintentionally bring softness to an image. For example, novices often come across autofocus errors, which lead to softness in final images.
To spot whether your lens is “soft” or if it’s just an error at your end, you can do target shooting at various aperture values by capturing a still of a high-contrast object. Checking the sharpness of each still or simply comparing it with another lens while capturing a certain image in the same conditions can also spot whether a lens is producing soft images or not.
Lens softness is not always bad
Since we explained what does it mean that camera lens is soft, it is also worth mentioning that in some cases it is a desirable feature. There is a big fan base for this softness when used in certain scenarios. For example, many people used it to produce that soft, glowing aesthetic characterized as a vintage feel. Many people nowadays create a dream effect in portraits by using a subtle focus fall-off in such pictures.
Having said that, soft lens and bringing softness in images are quite different; "soft lens is regarded as a bad term for a lens, a gear that underperforms. The softness, on the other hand, in portraits and vintage photography is a deliberate introduction of a dreamy feel to photos.
No-softness lens pick in 2025
The SIRUI AURORA 85mm F1.4 is a time-tested option that is approved by the camera community due to its consistent performance and high-quality build. The next-generation high-quality glass element design ensures that you always get ultra-sharp images for your portraits, and with that dreamy bokeh everyone loves.
The lens delivers glass with minimal possible aberration and distortion, putting it in the top-tier lens of 2025. Moreover, you get crystal-clear sharpness at all aperture values with beautiful rendering. Capturing portraits and stills of all sorts with this lens gives you confidence that you will get a tack-sharp shot every time.
