I tried to take a shot of the Vanderbilt baseball stadium, and it came out a little soft and out of focus. I was in Apperture priority at F8 to maximize the depth of field, exposure compensation -2/3EV, metered in the field, and tried to focus on the two guys sitting there in the midfield. Tried one shot AF, the manually tweaking it in OIS mode 2. On screen it looked fine, but on the computer screen not so much so. What could I have done to make it better? How can I set the focus to infinity?

1)The exposure was actually fairly decent. Whatever you metered on wasn't far off. 2) There was no reason to force the camera all the way up to F8 as in this picture there was no challenge regarding DOF as everything you were shooting was quite far away including the foliage on the right. 3)There is however problem in the area of Sharpen. If you are going to use post enhancement you can set the sharpen and Contrast to low. If you are not going to post process the shot, putting contrast and sharpen to high will give you a better image although very rarely as good as an image post processed for sharpen and Contrast/Brighten-Darken. 4) The picture was not completely focused, you can see this in the bluriness of the stadium billboard on the right by the cars. This may have happened when you tweaked the focus manually. Sharpen and focus are two different things. Sharpen can be corrected in post but lack of focus cannot. I just push down the focus lock on the left until it locks and then worry about metering.

You used spot mode but in aperture priority for a wide area subject like that. You may want to try program mode instead. For a sort of wide angle shot like that, I don't find the smallest aperture very usable (but yes, in macro). Somebody still need to confirm how to do infinity focus on the FZ10. You may also look into the middle focal plane focusing technique to get the background and the foreground in acceptable focus.Your pic looked like no-sharp focus is uniform. Try not to spot meter/focus on the field but at a stadium part/area that has more contrast and in the middle between your foreground and your background.

I've played around with the 'unsharp mask' filter in Photoshop CS, and I must tell you the results were amazing. I guess I should have mentioned that I'm very new to digital photography and I'm learning new things every day. I've had my FZ10 for 10 days now, and same goes for PS. By the way, do you know where could I find a good PS tutorial? The PS copy that I have came from my university's software licence department, with no manual. I know it is an amazing piece of software, and I want to learn.