The Online Photographer

Digitizing 35mm Slides and Negatives

The Leitz Aristophot with some of its accessories
(Note: you don't need one of these)

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Written and Illustrated by Henning Wulff

Digitizing slides or negatives can be a huge pain. The best way to get optimal quality used to be, and sometimes still is, to use a dedicated film scanner with its attendant software. Popular examples are the Nikon Coolscan series, such as the 5000 and 9000 models, which are now rather long in the tooth and need old computers or third-party software to work. The other problem is that they are slow, and even though the 5000 and its predecessors had batch feeders, they were too finicky to not need constant supervision.

A current solution, and my favorite solution, is to use a digital camera to digitize film. I'm going to concentrate on 35mm film here, as larger film is often better handled by other methods.

Vs. scanners
Photographing 35mm slides and film using a digital camera has a number of advantages over using a slide scanner. Mainly, it's a lot faster. As I (and probably many of you) contemplate digitizing thousands if not tens of thousands of images, time becomes a factor. Also, speed equals less boring. Digitizing is not very high up on my list of exciting things to do. I don’t want to digitize everything, but I don’t want to stop just because I ran out of time. Secondly, the files will be in the camera raw format, for which I have good software with a decent UI, and the raw files are relatively compact. Scanners need scanning software, which is almost universally clunky, and produces TIFFs, which, while they can be imported into the same processing software, are huge. They are probably the most universally readable files, so that is in their favor, but they are big, with the attendant problems that creates.

Camera and lenses
Which camera; which lenses? Macro lenses from the last couple of decades are generally very good to excellent and can almost universally extract the maximum of information out of most film of 25 ASA and up, as long as the lenses are operating within their design parameters. Current macro lenses for direct mounting to cameras are almost all designed with floating elements and for reproduction to 1:1, so are suitable. For slides, particularly in cardboard but also plastic mounts, flat-field reproduction is not critical as it's impossible to get the film flat unless they're removed from their mounts and placed in glass carriers. That's a huge pain that most people aren't going to put up with. Negatives are easily placed in glass holders, but then negatives are in general often not as "sharp" as slides.

I have a couple of different cameras at my disposal, from Micro 4/3 to full frame. The FF cameras (including a Sony A7rII) obviously have the highest sensor file quality, and the Micro 4/3, particularly the earlier ones, have a 16mp-sensor producing lower file quality. However—and this is the crux of my argument to generally use the Micro 4/3 cameras—the sensor size is not the same size as the film size. This is important, because it is necessary to focus on each slide separately, and that means manual focusing for the FF cameras. It is optically impossible to focus at 1:1 with AF, in whichever format. Thirty-five millimeter to FF digital is 1:1 imaging, so focusing has to be done manually by moving the camera or slide/negative. Thirty-five millimeter to Micro 4/3 is 1:2 imaging, approximately, so focusing can be done using the lens's autofocus. This speeds operation hugely.

In general, I use an Olympus E-M5 Mark II for copying with a Panasonic/Leica 45mm ƒ/2.8 Macro lens. If I want to get a bit higher file quality I use an Olympus E-M1 Mark II [currently on sale] with an M.Zuiko 60mm ƒ/2.8 Macro, but the differences are minimal and are rarely visible. I find it slightly clunkier to use for this purpose. On Kodachrome 25 it’s just noticeable on the most demanding slides. For very fine grain B&W film it's worthwhile to use the Olympus's multishot (i.e., pixel shift) capability, which results in effective 40–60mp files, but for slides and B&W films over 32 ASA I've not found this to be worthwhile. But multishot/pixel-shift is still faster and more convenient than switching over to FF, and results in similar quality.

Lighting
For lighting I'm using a color-corrected fluorescent lightbox or an incandescent light source, with a couple of high quality acrylic diffusion panels between the light and the film. The final diffusion panel is about 5cm behind the film. This avoids additional dust problems. The only important thing is that the light has to be truly continuous in wavelength and duration.

All cameras are calibrated with the X-Rite Passport ColorChecker, and for unconventional items I shoot reference images of the ColorChecker or color patches/gray scales under the same light sources as the lightboxes to make sure I have a solid basis for correction. I often deviate from that in processing, but at least I have a common base.

Stands
The camera gets mounted on one of two stands: either a wall mounted Bencher copy stand or an adapted Leitz Aristophot. The Aristophot was intended for reflected and transmitted micro photography in the range of 1:1 to 20:1 and lenses of 12.5mm to 120mm were available for it. It is usually used with a Leica MD camera or 4x5 camera (included). Depending on age, the focal lengths, names and apertures differed slightly. I have the 25mm ƒ/2.5, 50mm ƒ/2.8, 80mm ƒ/4.5 and 120mm ƒ/5.6 Photar lenses for it as well as a Zeiss Orthoplanar-S 60mm ƒ/4 and an Olympus 38mm ƒ/3.5. All these lenses are excellent, but the longer Photars are best in the range near 1:1. These do not outperform the Olympus 60mm ƒ/2.8 Micro 4/3 lens for slide copying, although for slow, high-acutance films they are worthwhile. However, the stand seems to be made of solid steel and although not that big, weighs about 60 lbs.

Alignment starts with good levels and a glass-mounted Kodalith negative. A couple of shots tells me what corrections have to be made.

Shooting technique
I usually shoot at ƒ/4 for glass-mounted slides and ƒ/5.6 for plastic-mounted slides. Occasionally ƒ/8 is required for cardboard mounted slides or other problematic film. At 2:1 (the Micro 4/3 magnification ratio), the depth-of-field is greater than at the 1:1 ratio required for FF cameras, so you gain a bit there, but of course the shorter focal lengths mean that diffraction creeps up sooner, so ƒ/8 is definitely the limit and ƒ/5.6 is better. Sometimes with wrinkly slides a compromise is necessary.

In summary
When practical considerations like using autofocus and the speed of workflow are taken into consideration, using a Micro 4/3 camera with one of the macro lenses made for it is an excellent option for digitizing 35mm slides and negatives.

Henning

Henning Wulff, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is a retired architect and commercial/architectural photographer with a background in physics. He has used/shot many, many cameras and systems, from Minox to 8x10, and used to enjoy darkroom work. The only continuous thread in his equipment over the years are Leicas—since 1962.

©2017 by Henning Wulff, all rights reserved

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Marcelo Guarini: "Many thanks for sharing your technique Henning. I have a Pen F and the ZD 50mm ƒ/2 (with adapter) and the 60mm ƒ/2.8, and a couple thousand selected Kodachrome 25 slides. I have a Durst enlarger stand that I will adapt for the job. Thanks again."

Moose (partial comment): "You have missed a crucial, at least to me, aspect—dust, dirt, scratches, etc. The better dedicated film scanners, and even some flatbed scanners with illumination and holders for film scanning, have an IR channel which allows automated dust removal. This is, in my awed opinion, magic. No spotting!!"

Steve Hutchison: "I have been using a similar method to digitise slides for myself and family members. Results vary depending on the source material but some of the more recent Kodachrome 64 from 25–30 years ago looks excellent. The worst are the Agfa slides which are very purple and seemingly always with fungus. The speed of this system is what makes it attractive however, I can do a box of 36 in less than an hour including tidying up in Lightroom and uploading the resulting images to Googledrive for my father in law to download and relive his memories from 50–60 years ago, and that is the magic."

Geoff Wittig: "Excellent post! I have some thousands of 35mm slides, only a relative handful of which I have scanned. I still have a working Minolta Dimage 5400 scanner which is very good at extracting all available image data, but egads, is it slow and clunky to use, and on my current desktop the only software that works with it is Hamrick's 'good enough' Vuescan, which is pretty tedious, although I can't complain about the price. I'm feeling more than normally obtuse after reading Mr. Wulff's explanation, as I have all the requisite gear to do this, but never thought to try! (Smacks self on forehead)."

Dennis Moyes: "Honestly, you're really going to waste time doing this when there are reasonably priced, high quality service bureaus that will do it for you? I for one have better ways to spend my time."

Mike replies—even thought it's not his article—: Devil's advocate on that: Do you really want to ship your most precious irreplaceable slides and negatives off to some anonymous service bureau? Speaking just for myself, that would drive me completely crazy.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I tried a service bureau. The idea is good, but the price was not that minor, and I was not happy with the results compared to what I produce myself. And a more professional service bureau would have been even more expensive. (what sort of prices do you get good results for? Maybe I just didn't hunt well.) They seemed oriented towards producing 8-bit adjusted scans in sRGB, whereas I want 16-bit unadjusted scans in ProPhoto space (I want them to get the data out of the film and leave the rest to me). Also, the workflow is better if I get to decide what to scan as I'm running things through the scanner; I don't scan as much, and more of it is the right stuff."

Gerard Kingma: "An addition—how about medium format? I've literally written the book on scanning (shameless plug), and I shoot Fuji Velvia slides with my Hasselblad and an A16 645 back. Projection on the wall is the end product, and there's still nothing quite as marvelous. However, for print and web use, I can't feed the framed slides into my Nikon 9000 scanner. There's no holder for 6x6 slide frames. So I reproduce them with a Canon M2 on a tripod, with the slides on the light table. Here's the thing: I take two pictures, one of each half of a slide, and stitch those together in Photoshop CS5 > Automate > Photomerge > Reposition. The merge is seamless and it effectively doubles the resolution to about 35 MP. It works."

ERC (Exposure Range Correction)

We complain a lot about excessive HDR, and rightly so. (Although I liked it the first time I ever saw it.)

But I use "HDR" all the time, if by HDR you mean the Shadows and Highlights sliders in Adobe Camera Raw, my raw processor of choice. The picture of Butters I linked to yesterday has lots of it applied.

Usually, though, I'm just using the sliders to make the picture more like the scene as I saw it with my eyes, because natural camera vision tends to accentuate contrast and darken shadows.

I apologize if I've written a post using these shots before—I know I meant to, but I can't remember if I ever did. (You know what they say: if I repeat myself I repeat myself.) But here's an example:

This is the uncorrected out-of-camera JPEG.

That's not what the elements in the frame looked like to my eye, though.

Here's the frame with the exposure range corrected so it merely looks more like what I was seeing.

You might be able to tell that some "HDR" action was used on this, depending on your sensitivity to the HDR look. I did exaggerate it a little so it would be obvious on everyone's monitor. But it's really meant to be ERC, not HDR. You'll notice that I haven't pulled all the highlights back from white, nor pulled up detail in all the shadows. The Winter sun was brilliant, and the real scene was contrasty, and I didn't want to destroy the feeling of that kind of light. But the JPEG was much more extreme than what I saw. I certainly could see the steam curling up from the hot coffee—even more vividly, it seems to me, than in the lower frame. And the coffeepot didn't look like the tip of an artillery shell like it does in the top shot.

It's too bad we don't have distinct terms for HDR that's obvious and HDR that's invisible, or meant to be invisible. It's very likely that almost everyone uses HDR when it's just ERC. At least once in a while.

Mike

P.S. The picture was taken with the Panasonic GX8 and Panasonic 12–35mm lens, and the coffee filter holder is a Clever Coffee Dripper—it has a valve so you can let the grounds steep before draining. The electric teapot is a Bonavita 1-liter Electric Kettle, which I use for boiling water for every purpose, including cooking. If I were buying one today I would splurge for the swanky variable-temperature model. But mine's been going strong for more than five years now and shows no sign of wearing out, dang it.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jack: "There are those who insist that the term 'HDR' means the capture of images whose dynamic range exceeds the capabilities of the camera, by capturing multiple images at different exposures and combining them during post-processing. So that makes three different usages of the term."

Dave Jenkins: "I just think of ERC as burning and dodging."

Joe: "As much as I despise the HDR look (and I think your coffee pot example is a tad overcooked but I don't despise it), I find that my iPhone does an amazingly subtle job of it. So good that I leave it turned on all the time. What's the algorithm for that, and why don't the computer HDR utilities use it? And the subtlety of the iPhone HDR just goes to prove The Toupee Principle: you can say they all look horrible, but you're only judging based on the ones you can spot. (Also, the HDR giveaway in your Butters photo was the detail out the window. I expected it to be blown out, but no.)"

Mike replies: I have never heard of "The Toupee principle." Love that, and thanks for it.

Chris Kern (partial comment): "Whether you're working with camera-generated JPEGs or raw files, the tone curve of any digital image always is going to be set algorithmically—either by the camera firmware or some post-processing program—because all the light sensor can capture are individual RGB luminance values. Sure, you can overdo the expansion or compression of highlights and shadows. (Or your camera can.) But I would argue that the distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' is elusive—and essentially subjective, because there is no way to know precisely how the subject of a photograph would be perceived through the eyes and brain of someone else."

Mike replies: Oh yes, absolutely, no argument there. The photographer / artist uses their own judgement and creates the effect he or she wants. For me, my guideline is always to make the picture look natural so that viewers will hopefully look "through" the technique to imagine the original scene; the test for me with processing is whether the processing calls attention to itself, in which case it fails. But that's just my subjective desire for my own photographs, not a directive everyone else has to abide by.

(Note that Chris goes on to give several interesting examples from his own work. See his complete comment in the Comments section.)

Ernest J Zarate: "I like and use Hank Wessel's maxim: make the light look believable. Using that, I'd say either version (and, probably, all the ones in between) could work. I tend to favor the first version more in terms of my response. While all those other objects were there on the counter, what I react to is the coffee mug. The rest is just visual clutter, IMHO. Don't fear the shadow."

Andrew Webb: "One lovely term I've heard used to describe heavy-handed HDR is 'Clown Vomit.'"

Look at Tone as Light

...So to pick up where I left off yesterday...I was railing with good-natured hyperbole about the general run of digital B&W. And on that point I need to begin by making a short digression to emphasize two points:

1. I wasn't necessarily talking about the B&W of devoted practitioners—experts—many of whom know more about conversion than I do, and do splendid work (at least, they do the work they want to be doing).
2. It's not a matter of film v. digital with one or the other being better or worse. I always used to gadfly at length about the normal run of poor printing with film on photo paper, too. Ninety-five percent of digital B&W might be crap (present company not included in that), but 95% of film B&W was crap. It's not a status thing we're on about here: it's about improving our perception, vision, taste, and technique, whichever medium we use.

...So then. As I mentioned, earlier this week I was agonizing over the Sony A7II vs. the A6500, and happened to run across this photo by a guy who shoots the A6500 and Sony 16–70mm ƒ/4 zoom, Paul Grubb. It perfectly illustrated what I was saying about modern digital tending to depress the middle values, so it provides an opportunity for discussion. Paul gave me his permission to use his picture for that, for which our thanks to him.

[For emphasis: Check out the photo on Flickr first.]

And I need to add—yet more qualifying, but it will come up in the comments otherwise—that there's nothing wrong with his picture or the way he's presented it, as I see it on my monitor. Insofar as it was deliberate I have utterly no problem with it; people own their own pictures and should do with them whatever they want to do. In critiquing, I'm not criticizing, necessarily. Paul for instance can take my comments and reject them all and that's perfectly okay with me. It's his picture.

But this should show what I mean by the way digital tends to shift the middle values downward:

Original on top, modified version on the bottom. They may look quite close to you at first, but before we go on, let your eyes go back and forth between specific areas of the two until you start to get a handle on the differences.

What I did was take a quick screenshot of a portion of Paul's picture—so I'm working with far less information than would be in the original file—and add an inverted S-curve to it:

At the risk of muddying the waters, I also added a touch of sepia color. But really, most of the effects you see are tonal.

Start with the man's and the woman's faces. Notice how the change in tone seems almost to change their expressions—in the top version their eyes are hooded, their features more sharp. The man looks a little angry, even, like he is scowling, and seems to have his mouth in a slightly different position—seems a bit more closed in the top version and a bit more open in the bottom picture, do you see that?  In the top version, the bridge of the woman's nose is bright and her facial planes are emphasized.

Next look at her hair. In the top version it almost seems unnaturally streaked; in the bottom version it just looks like soft blonde hair.

I'm probably exaggerating just in order to put these things into words. But do you see how the top version feels just a little stormy, a little harsh? The bottom version just looks like people in a crowd enjoying themselves on an overcast day when the weather wasn't the best. This is the stuff interpretation is made of in black-and-white.

Note that this has nothing to do with "contrast" in the conventional understanding of it*. With the curve modification the black and white points stay in exactly the same places. It's merely the distribution of tones in between.

You might not agree that the change is an improvement, and that's okay, of course. The point I was trying to make is that the default conversion processing—across the tens if not hundreds of thousands of digital B&W representations I've looked at online, and far fewer (but still lots) in prints—tends to depress the middle values. In Paul's picture it's noticeable but moderate; sometimes it's much more extreme.

Flip over
I'd also encourage you to try to learn the trick of backing away from the technical observations and paying attention to the emotional representation. How do the expressions on faces look? What is the overall "feel" of what you're seeing? At the risk of more hyperbole—I'm emphasizing slight differences too much here—the top version imparts just a touch of dread and brooding, of severity, while the bottom version is more relaxed, more harmonious with the meaning of the scene we're looking at—a family strolling in a relaxed way in a crowded city.

It's a matter of learning to flip over from looking at the representation to looking at what's being represented.

The same mental trick can be learned with the light. We look at tone as a technical matter, and we see grays, contrasts, edges; but it's also possible to learn to look at it as light. Look at the representation and try to see the light of the day. What was the sky like? What time was it? To me anyway, the subtle change from the top version to the bottom version makes the light become real.

Please do grant me a bit of leeway here, in trying to put subtle visual effects into words! And also for the fact that the critical tones might appear too light or too dark on your monitor or device.

In any event, I think if you start looking for depressed midtones and learn how to recognize the "look," it will start to pop out at you, and you'll see it everywhere in online B&W.

Anyway, have a nice weekend! TOP will return on Monday, "same as it ever was." IF you happen to go shopping yourself and you're not in York, please start here!

Mike
(Thanks to Paul)

*[UPDATE: By "conventional understanding of it" I meant macro/overall/global contrast, i.e., pushing or pulling more or less information into or out of pure black or pure white. This short phrase has caused a lot of consternation in the comments. It's impossible to stop to define every term and qualify every phrase when writing a short, basic article. Please grant me that leeway I asked for.... —MJ]

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ed Hawco (partial comment): "I'm following this with interest, because I do a bit of digital B&W and I come from a B&W film/print background. The standout item for me was the comparison of high end and low end. But I'm not 100% convinced on the middle values part. Mike, you said '...the way digital tends to shift the middle values downward.' My question—and I hope this doesn't sound flippant—is this: is it digital that shifts the middle values downward, or is it digital photographers who shift the middle values downward? By that I mean I wonder if it's primarily an aesthetic trend."

Mike replies: Various people have complained about this, including privately. But as I took some care to explain, it's not a film vs. digital status thing and I made no attempt to pinpoint the root causes. I'm just characterizing what I often see done, typically or usually. There's no time in a short, basic article to go into every ramification of every phrase.

I think your insight that it's partly an aesthetic trend is wise, however.

Paul Grubb: "Mike, thanks for the critique, they are always welcome, it's how I grow as a photographer by understanding how others view my photos. For me B&W post processing is one of the hardest, as pictures can change significantly with the smallest of tweaks to a lightroom slider. I do like the idea of the emotional approach to post production as it separates out some of the hard science and allows you to focus on what you are trying to portray. That said what I have learned is that the tone curve can totally transform the emotion of a photograph. Looking at the photo again, that guy's brow does trouble me, a little shiny and as you say a tad 'angry.'  :-) 

"Thanks again for the critique, it's given me some good food for thought and a desire to revisit this pic."

Michael: "Thanks a tremendous amount for this, Mike. (And thanks to Paul, whose photo from York reminds me vividly of the, ah, heightened experience when we first went there with two small children on a swarming Saturday and lost track of each other and the kids.) This illustration is a perfect teaching example and I will look for these effects much more carefully now that you have made the effort to tune my eye. I can certainly understand liking Paul's original, because it captures the moodiness of a winter's day in northern England. (It was on such a moody day that we misplaced each other and the kids.) But the raised mid-tones do, to my eye, reveal both a kinder side, and probably a more faithful interpretation, of people in in The Shambles (which, during the missing kids episode, seemed so ominous because it means the medieval slaughterhouses and butcher's shops of the city)."

Al C.: "Technically, your curve is not an 'S' (cyma recta), but a cyma reversa. Don't you always apply a cyma reversa in post, whether B&W or color? I do, for all the reasons you noted."

Henry Rinne: "I tend to agree with you about the basic B&W conversions in most software. I always find these defaults to be rather muddy and poorly defined. I have been using the Nik Silver Efex II for quite sometime and have created my own recipes for conversion that largely do what you suggest. I also like SEII's ability to indicate the ten step tonal range, which I have used to help understand the tonal relations in the image especially the mid and high tone values. I also agree that stepping back from the image and removing the technical aspect from your assessment is very important. After all it is an expressive work that should communicate something and not just enthrall another photographer because of its technical proficiency."

Lynn: "My starting point for B&W conversions of digital images is:

1. What are the existing light conditions—is it bright/sunny with high natural contrast and deep shadows, is it overcast with a flatter tonal curve and more nuanced transitions from light to shade?
2. What is the overall mood of the picture I visualize?

"When processing I prioritize maintaining the natural tonal relationships in 1. so the image retains a natural credibility rather than looking over-processed. Any tone re-mapping with curves to tweak the mood have to be done within the constraint of retaining credibility. The failure of most B&W conversions is when the natural tonal relationships in the picture for the existing lighting conditions are destroyed, and the image looks manipulated and fake. Most HDR (unless done subtly) falls into this category. The eyeball test is 'does this look credible?' Low contrast on a bright sunny day or high contrast in open shade or an overcast day usually fails the test."

Andrew: "This is an interesting discussion, with the crossing threads between technique, aesthetic, and technology.

"I recently went to see a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit, and to provide context they included photography from her partner Alfred Stieglitz, and her friend Ansel Adams.

"I was very curious to see Stieglitz's work, as he is one of the giants in early American photography. But I was truly underwhelmed by the prints I saw there! Whether it was the medium, or the age of the prints, or his exposure, I noticed precisely this phenomenon you're talking about—the midtones were just wrong. Everything about the images seemed a bit too drab, and they felt underexposed, especially in contrast with the bright white matting of their frames.

"Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed it quite so acutely if I hadn't been able to juxtapose Stieglitz's work with Ansel Adams's. The Adams photos just had so much more depth and nuance in them—while there is no denying the talents of his eye, his mastery in exposure and printing was what truly stood out to me.

"A bit of a rambling story, especially placed against the very neat visual comparison you have up there, but all this to say that I wholeheartedly agree.

"Now, to load a roll of T-Max in my old Koni Omega 6x7. (Ugly camera, as your other post illustrates, but fantastic results that come out the other end....)"

William Schneider: "About strong opinions regarding 'right' and 'wrong' renderings of tonality...

"In 1995, I was hired to teach darkroom photography at the same time a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper photographer was hired in our department. She preferred a much higher print contrast than I did. I had used large format film and the zone system extensively, and preferred that softer kind of rendering.

"To me, her B&W photos approached a kind of 'soot-and-chalk' appearance that Adams complained about. In pondering why, I thought of her experience. Newspaper printing destroyed subtle pictures, and couldn't reproduce all the shades of gray apparent in an original darkroom print. She preferred a print suitable for the inevitable shifting of tones when on press and strong graphics in the content. That's what she was used to. It was right for her, and she had a Pulitzer Prize.

"We still poke fun of each other about our printing preferences but we both understand that it's a decision born of taste, experience, and circumstances. It's not a 'right' or 'wrong' decision.

"By the way, I would have gone further than Mike did. But that's my preference, not his."

Mike replies: Something similar happened to Carl Weese and myself, but with the opposite result. When we (first?) met in the '90s, he was in D.C. to photograph some athletic events on the Mall. We argued spiritedly over print contrast, with me advocating softer, gentler contrast and he advocating stronger, livelier contrast. But some time later, we each realized our arguments had had an effect on the other—he had begun exploring soft, gentle contrast, and I had moved to "punch up" my printing style to make it stronger and more lively.  :-)

Peter Wright: "This discussion had me pulling out my copy of Peter Turnley's French Kiss which was a TOP book offer some time back. Peter doesn't include technical details, but I believe that the pictures are split fairly evenly between film and digital using a film Leica and a digital M-Monochrom Leica respectively, each with a 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens. If you want to study good, consistent tonality across both mediums this is a great place to start. Most photographers would be able to tell which was which, but the tonality alone gives no clues. In my case, I also took advantage of the associated print offer, and bought one of the pictures which happened to be printed by Voja Mitrovic (who printed for Henry Cartier Bresson). Seeing examples like these has helped me know why and where to move that pesky tone curve! Time for another book/B&W print offer!"

Ken Tanaka: "Re 'I'd also encourage you to try to learn the trick of backing away from the technical observations and paying attention to the emotional representation.' That's actually the most important message here. Learning how to use color and tone to implicitly communicate from within an explicit scene should be the goal. Rightness can only be judged against communication intentions, not against technical standards."

Doug Thacker: "I think this suppression of the midtones in B&W photography pre-dates digital. I think it represents a change in the collective eye.

"When I got into photography as a high school student in the early 1970s, it didn't take long to realize I detested the middle gray of most black and white photography. To me, it looked bland and boring and old fashioned. Shortly after I learned to print, I started using a higher contrast paper and printing for deep, rich blacks, and luscious, pristine whites, with only enough tonality in-between to hold up both ends. I also wanted to know why art photography couldn't be shot in color, and proceeded to do just that.

"Life then intervened and I got sidetracked for a while, but when I next looked up, sometime in the '90s, I noticed color photography had gained wide acceptance in art, and lots of people were printing black and white the way I used to—lots of advertising and magazine photography reflected this trend, as well.

"So that's when I concluded that this must be a generational shift of some sort, a change in the collective eye. Maybe being inundated with advertising all our lives had something to do with it, who knows? Or maybe it was the influence of electronic media—bright colors and high contrast B&W being the visual equivalent of sugar and fat.

"Then digital came along and made a necessity of preference, if not a virtue, and here we are. Even still, I hate the way digital typically renders highlights, but this may be changing. I've noticed that some current cameras seem to retain info even in the brightest highlights, and no longer just fall off a cliff the way digital used to. These seem to be the ISO-invariant sensors, such as the Nikon D7200."

How to Cure the Digital B&W Nasties

The biggest change in film > digital from a visual, artistic, results standpoint* is the wholesale changeover from B&W to color. When I got into photography in 1980, almost all serious photography was B&W. Color was considered "literal" and "decorative" and widely denigrated as being the province of commercial photography on the one hand and amateur snapshooters with their machine-made 31/2 x 5-inch prints on the other. There were a few serious color photographers, but they were token. When serious photographers began committing to color in the '80s, it took some courage.

That's been turned on its head. Carl Weese opined way back in the 1990s that "digital is the coming of age of color photography," and the years since then have borne out the truth of his words. Cameras shoot color now. People shoot color now. Color is ubiquitous. B&W has become as quaint as an old-fashioned wooden boat.

(...Also as beautiful, but if you don't feel that, you don't, and if you do, you already know what I mean. This is a 1941 Chris-Craft barrel back, photographer unknown.)

And here's one reason why: most digital B&W is nasty. I mean NASTY. I'm going to give you the simplest recipe to cure that.

There are two reasons why almost all digital B&W is like drinking rotten pond scum:

1. The first is that B&W film is biased toward richness and detail in the highlights and lacks information in the shadows (hence the old adage "expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights," because if you didn't get the shadows right in camera you weren't going to be able to get them by prestidigitation later), and this happens to match how our eyes see. Digital does the opposite: it has a low amount of detail in the highlights and has vast reserves of information in the shadows. Ever taken a raw file with a camera high in DR and tried to dig the shadows in a good raw converter? It's amazing. This does not match how our eyes see. Bad highlight detail isn't just a problem with digital B&W: it plagues all digital. We're getting used to digital highlights now, thanks to the habituation of constant bombardment, but that's like learning to love an ugly dog. It still doesn't make it pretty.

2. The second reason why almost all digital B&W is slathered with pasty poodle excrement is that digital depresses the middle values. Compared to a scale of theoretically ideal tones, Zone VII is rendered as Zone VI if not Zone V, Zone V is rendered as Zone IV if not Zone III. It looks terrible. Rodinal used to have this effect on film. Mildly, not as bad as a lot of digital. Okay, okay, granted, it's a "look," and a few photographers have done it on purpose and can make it look aesthetically coherent. Emphasis on "few." Especially if their subjects are dark and airless. But most digital B&W is that way by default and it looks awful.

The combination is a one-two punch of harsh grating ickyness. Vacant highlights as stupid as a lobotomized lobster, and all the grays crushed toward black like the Devil's own fog of depression. Shoot me now!

It's no wonder most people prefer digital color.

(May I just point out here in passing that most scanned film also looks terrible? It's because the film's characteristic curve was designed to be counteracted by the paper curve. Virtually everyone scans film and reproduces the film tones exactly—literally—which is why scanned negatives also look harsh and tonally wrong, and nothing like the same negative printed on an appropriate photo paper. Here's the best way to scan B&W film: 1. Take the negative. 2. Make an 8x10 print on a suitable photo paper. 3. Scan that.)

So here are three simple steps if you want to make oh-so-nice black-and-white in digital:

1. NOT MANDATORY: Use a Fuji X-Trans sensor. They just yield better B&W. I won't go in to the reasons why here.
2. Underexpose everything by 2/3rds of a stop for headroom. You'll want to be be able to place your highlights "just so" in post, and this will give you more information to work with. If you are using a high-DR camera (look at DxOMark Sensor and click "landscape" for a ranked list of these, if you don't use a Fuji. They don't rank Fuji). Shadows? You don't hafta worry about no steenkeeng shadows. Digital will let you dig out dark-value information to your heart's content in B&W.
3. Correct the tonality by lifting the midtones.

Here's how to lift the midtones: in whatever editing program or you use for post processing or conversion, find the curves function. Grab the middle and move it up, to taste. Viz.:

That's the simplest formula. However you do it, a) get enough highlight detail and b) restore the midtones to their proper values and relieve them of their horrible depression, and you'll be way ahead of 94% of the digital B&W out there.

DISCLAIMER: I know there are dedicated practitioners out there who do very nice digital B&W and I don't mean to "damn them by generalization" with my playful rhetorical hyperbole about pond scum and poodle poop. I'm just slagging the typical desultory, rote B&W conversions you run across here, there and all over everywhere. Nothing personal, fellow B&W mavens. I don't mean you.

Most digital B&W is never going to quite match film B&W, for the simple reason that it is no longer the era of the classic wooden boat. But that doesn't mean dedicated workers can't make perfectly nice, non-atrocious B&W files and prints in this, the Era of Color.

Mike

P.S. Two hot equipment tips: the original Sony A7, now available used for $700–$1,000, is a great camera for B&W because of its very high DR. And the new Fuji 23mm ƒ/2 lens is well matched to B&W because it's biased toward high lens contrast like a classic Leica or Kodak Commercial Ektar lens.

*The changes to the industry and in convenience might be larger but are already well parsed.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

It's a gray area
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Featured Comments from:

Bill Wheeler: "Thanks for the informative article, Mike. As a rule, I prefer black-and-white photography, so I have been working on improving my digital technique. Thanks again for the tips. By the way, I love hyperbole."

greg brophy: "Ha, that's funny. I once asked Carl to help me with a B&W photo and he basically lifted the midtones."

Andre Y: "Interesting thoughts. A while back, wasn't there going to be a post with annotated examples of good B&W photos? I might have missed it though...

"Two random thoughts:

1. I just started reading Keith A. Smith's Structure of the Visual Book, and he rails against color photography as it was practiced when the book was written (maybe 20 years before digital became popular), by saying, among other things, that people think it's literal, when that's the worse thing color does.
2. And underexposing to save highlights is an interesting topic, which on the face of it seems to contradict ETTR practices (it doesn't), but there are a few cameras which do that automatically now, including your Fujis with their DR modes, and the current Hasselblad and Fuji medium format digital cameras.

"What they do is that above a certain ISO (1600 is common), they no longer brighten the images in the camera, i.e., apply digital gain. Instead the files are exposed for metering at ISO 1600, even if you're using IS0 6400, and as a consequence they get increased dynamic range at high ISOs. You can see the measurements on photonstophotos.net, for example, of how the dynamic range curve flattens out above ISO1600 for the two mirrorless medium format cameras instead of decreasing like say on a Nikon D810.

"The RAW converter on your computer then automatically applies the correct brightening when the RAW conversion is done so that the photos appear to have been exposed at the intended ISO. The noise in the raised photo is basically identical to a shot that was metered and exposed at the intended ISO because of the way the sensor works. It's too complicated to explain here, but look up on DPreview, for example, ISO-invariant or ISO-less sensors. Basically for those types of sensors, there is no difference between exposing at ISO 6400, or using ISO 1600 and raising the brightness two stops afterwards: the noise is identical.

"There are cameras without these kinds of sensors, and some sensors have regions of ISO-invariance separated by sensor gain bumps at some ISOs. The Nikon D5 is sort of an example of the first kind, and some of the Sonys have a dual-gain structure that are an example of the second kind. So do your research first, and experiment!

"What you gain is an increase in dynamic range at high ISOs, which is especially useful for situations where you might like to use high ISOs in the first place, like night shooting or theater stage shooting where the brightness range of the scene can be huge due to individual lights being very bright against a dark background, and it's easy to blow out your highlights.

"The great thing about this practice is that it can be applied, somewhat inconveniently, to any camera that has an ISO-invariant sensor, like the Nikon D810 and D500 that I use. Of course, my camera previews will be dark (unlike the Fuji and Hassie images), and I need to manually raise the exposure slider in Lightroom, but it's more than compensated by the fact that I now have at least three more stops of dynamic range in my camera at high ISO than before (my ISO is set to 200 and I expose as if I was shooting at 1600), and that helps quite a bit with post-processing. I was also going to get a D4S, and I don't think that's necessary anymore, at least for high ISO dynamic range reasons when I use this trick."

Andrew McFaul: "Any experience or comments regarding the use/benefits of using Foveon sensors (either Merrill or Quattro) for B&W photography?"

Mike replies: My experiments with the Merrill were extremely lovely but I found the camera I tried (not a current one) and its workflow pretty difficult to use.

Al C.: "Agree: most digital B&Ws are ugly, unless their 'digital hardness' serves an artistic purpose. But Merrill Foveon B&Ws are gorgeous. The transparency and smooth tonality cannot be achieved by any amount of post of a Bayer file. Have not used the Monochrom, but people I trust say the Merrill is almost as good."

mike: "I'm going to have nightmares about that dog. And maybe the Omega too!"

Stan B.: "Sorry, Sternfield's American Prospects was published in '87 (could've sworn sooner), Meyerowitz's Cape Light in '78, and Shore's Uncommon Places in '82. Soon photojournalists like Paul Graham got into the color mix with smaller formats in essays like Beyond Caring [the link is to Jeff Ladd's book on the book —Ed.] and the incredible Troubled Land, and the rest as they say is...."

Ken Ford: "Very timely post for me, Mike—I have a new X-Pro2 and 23mm ƒ/2 and have been starting to create a B&W workflow for them. Thank you! "

Douglas Chadwick: "I would advise one modification from your advice, 'the best way to scan B&W film: 1. Take the negative. 2. Make an 8x10 print on a suitable photo paper. 3. Scan that.' Change step 3 to 'match that.' And match it from a scan of the negative, not the print. I spend a lot of time matching digital files to darkroom prints and have learned a lot from doing that."

Mike replies: That's a great idea. Wish I'd thought of it.

Jeff: "On the other hand, I've seen a lot of mediocre silver prints, and a fair amount of gorgeous inkjet prints. While tools, techniques and materials help (e.g., large sensors, all B&W inksets, fine papers. etc), the most important tools remain between the ears. Nothing substitutes for a good eye and good judgment, film or digital."

Oskar Ojala (partial comment): "I'm not 100% sure what exactly is referred to in this article; examples would help a lot to clarify!"

Mike replies: It's a problem. Probably the biggest problem, historically, with this website, as a format. I could find hundreds of examples of what I consider "bad" B&W, easily, but how could I present them? If another person's  picture is used as a subject of a critique, it's legal under Fair Use (probably—Fair Use is never 100% certain), but I'd have to be taking someone's work and holding it up as a negative example. As a normally courteous person I have trouble with that idea. I certainly wouldn't like it if it were done to me, so how can I do it to someone else? What if I were to use as an example of "bad" tonality something someone did very deliberately, because they like it that way?

Over the years I would have loved it if I could have put up pictures I find on the Web to discuss—many pictures of many kinds, to discuss in all kinds of ways. But I just don't think it's polite to do that to the people the pictures belong to.

It's a big difference between the Web and a classroom. In the privacy of a classroom you can use specific pictures as examples, easily. But I have a problem with doing the same thing here.

Funniest Thing I've Heard All Week

...In the Comments to the republication of his "What Is Bokeh?" article, émigré to Asia John Kennerdell reports that "in recent years Japanese photo writers have evidently decided they need a cool new loanword instead of 'bokeh,' so one now often sees the fractured English expression 'outo fokasu.'"

So English speakers are using a loanword from Japanese and the Japanese are using a loaner from English! Too funny.

By the way, the most sober term (in English) for what either means is "out-of-focus blur," which of course has the disadvantage of being long, fussy, and annoying to type. I think "bokeh" and "outo fokasu" are more charming and whimsical.

Creating a monster
I should mention that I'm not personally a fan of the ongoing craze for ultra-shallow focus, except if it really works. I like lenses too much to use them wide open, where almost all lenses perform less than their best, very often. And I'm thoroughly, permanently sick of seeing endless photographs in which "lots of bokeh" is equated with "good bokeh," such that parts of the main subject which conventionally should be in focus are not. Examples include flower pictures with the petals closest to the lens unsharp, and pictures of dogs looking at you with their noses out of focus. It can be nice in a portrait when a face is in focus and the ears and the rim of the hair are not, but when the tip of the nose and the hair over the forehead closest to the camera are also not in focus, well, erg.

Yeah, they're proud of owning that fast lens and that larger-sensor camera, and good for them. But a very basic part of being a photographer is nailing the correct plane of focus and getting the depth-of-field right, and the "bokeh craze" has done harm to those basic competencies.

Of course some people are deliberately exploring extreme out-of-focus blur (bokeh, outo fokasu) in a sensitive and artistic way, and more power to them. But another thing that makes me roll my eyes is the idea that "if you spent all that extra money for a superfast lens, it only makes sense to shoot it wide open all the time." Or some variant of that. I've read such comments many times. I think it's nonsense. I suppose if you paid for a fast lens, then it does make sense to shoot it wide open sometimes. Having that wide aperture available for those times when you need it should be sufficient reward for your investment. But the picture comes first, doesn't it? Do what's right for the picture. That's not always the widest possible aperture and the minimum possible depth-of-field, blindly, in every case.

But hey, it's not for me to say. Everybody owns their own photography and they can do anything they want with it as long as it's not hurting anybody. I've never actually had the courage to explore radical out-of-focus myself, although it's been in the back of my mind for years.

But please don't blame me for all those pictures out there in which the D-o-F is obviously too shallow and it's obviously just wrong. Not my fault!  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to JK)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Only shallow sometimes
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Featured Comments from:

Manuel (partial comment): "About those Japanese neologisms: I'm proud the Portuguese enriched Japanese vocabulary with so many words. The most relevant of all is, of course, 'arigato' (thanks), which derives from Portuguese 'obrigado.' And 'tempura' (spicing) comes from our 'tempero.' Germany contributed too: 'Arabaito', Japanese for 'work', stems from German 'arbeit'. But the most remarkable neologism actually comes from English, and is not 'outo fokasu': it's 'purepeido kado', from 'pre-paid card'!"

j. thvedt: "I've seen more than one cookbook where all of the photos had paper-thin depth of field. What can they be thinking? These are illustrations. We want to see the food. All of it."

tex andrews: "Thanks for the sanity on Bokeh. But now, I think I'll drum up a little insanity over at the infamous DPR forums by posting the link to this, so as to start a raging flame war. Fun!"

JK: "At the risk of getting pedantic (can’t help it—linguistics degree) I’ll try to clarify the translation and transliteration issues that several people have been talking about in the Comments section of this post and my "What Is Bokeh?" post.

" オートフォーカス means autofocus. The term has been around as long as the consumer technology, i.e. since the late '70s. Usually in Japanese text it's abbreviated to "AF" (yes, using the Roman letters).

" アウトフォーカス (literally “out focus”) is a much newer coinage. It now appears in Japanese dictionaries, typically defined as 焦点外れ (shōten hazure), which means, well, out of focus. And recently it has come to be used interchangeably with bokeh. You can see an example in the sub-head of this piece.

"Now here’s the pedantic part. That first term is Romanized as "ōtofōkasu." The macron over the "o" extends its duration, which is as close as Japanese phonetics can come to the "aw" (IPA: \ɔ\) sound in "auto."

"Confusingly, an exact Romanization of the second term would be "autofōkasu." In fact that’s a pretty accurate rendering of the dipthong in "out" (IPA: \au\) but unfortunately it conflates with our spelling of "auto." So for casual use I figured it was best to go with "outo fokasu." (Nobody ever fully realizes what a bizarre minefield English spelling is until they start to try Romanizing non-Western languages.)

"Point of all this is that Mike is exactly right: even as we English speakers have embraced a Japanese loanword for o-o-f blur, the Japanese have now adopted an English loanword for the same thing."

Teacher's Corner: Panorama in Pieces

Words and pictures by Darlene Almeda

While away on a quick personal trip to Marietta, Georgia recently, I tried using my favorite point-and-shoot camera, the Fujifilm X100t, for panorama making. Earlier in the week I instructed my students to make a panorama using Lightroom (LR), vertical slice shots, and manual focus for their weekly shoot assignment. After a brief walk around Marietta Square, I thought I would try to photograph a beautiful church and challenge the software with vertical and horizontal slices to see if a tourist with a point-and-shoot camera could make a decent-looking panorama, and then share the results with my students.

Located just off Marietta Square on Church Street, and in a high traffic corner (hey, this is north Atlanta!) is First Baptist Church Marietta. I had to ignore all my rules for exposure and perspective to get the shots, but if I could get something decent, this would be a great way to shoot with this small camera and without a tripod. My days of carrying around an ultra wide lens with a tech camera and 50+ megapixel back might be gone, at least while traveling for pleasure and not for photography in general.

Here are the initial slices shot very quickly while traffic waited:

The final image was created using Photoshop (PS) for piecing it all together, and then into LR for perspective and exposure corrections and cropping. PS did a better job analyzing and piecing together the slices, although LR's merge tool was close. I usually try LR for panorama building first, and if LR cannot do what I want it to do, then I’ll take it into PS through LR by selecting the images, right-clicking and choosing: "Edit In—Merge to Panorama in Photoshop.”

The finished image is 1.62 GB, and you can do a lot with those pixels. The resulting photo is not perfect, but for the amount of time and ease it took to create, it is perfect for my needs.

So if your lens does not offer enough coverage, or if the print size will need a higher pixel count, you might have this option available if you give it a try. Many thanks to the patient drivers of Marietta who gave me a nod!

Darr

©2017 by Darlene Almeda, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

The Documentary Impulse

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Featured Comments from:

Mark: "Best to shoot verticals so your final pano has a reasonable width to height ratio, i.e, ...a reasonable aspect ratio. Also...as a suggestion...first shot should be of your left foot and when you finish the sequence (shooting left to right), photograph your right foot. This will provide 'bookends' for the composite. I've found this approach very helpful when editing a pano composite sequence."

Color Correction

I got a marvelous comment yesterday from Peter Conway that deserves its own post, about the color-correction of aging eyesight (he and I are the same age):

Towards the end of 2016, I got a couple of new lenses, but they weren't Nikon or Sigma Art—they were from Abbott Labs, and replaced the "factory-issued" lenses which had cataracts (I'm 60 in two weeks).

After the first eye was done, I was shocked at how blue the world looked through that eye—until it occurred to me that the issue was likely that the world looked unusually yellow through the other eye. My ophthalmologist assured me that the Abbott lens had the truer colors. The three weeks between surgeries was an interesting period, with each eye vigorously disagreeing with the other on how things looked.

Now that both eyes are done, the world does look different, but more subtly than I would have thought after the first eye. It turns out that "Carolina blue" is actually blue to me now. And the green pill I was taking, which the pharmacy said was blue—well, it turns out the pharmacy was right.

I've started looking at some of the color prints I've made, and am pleasantly surprised that some actually look better than before—less muted than I had been seeing them. Others, though, are a bit over the top and will need some re-work.

So my question to you is, given all the color management technology available—profiles for our monitors, profiles for our printers, profiles for all sorts of different papers—is there any way to color manage our eyes? That's a lot bigger variable than I'd realized even two months ago.

I can't begin to answer his question, although I have what I believe is an example of older eyes leading a photographer astray—at the end of Ansel Adams's life, the art dealer who had made him rich, Harry Lunn, prevailed upon him to make "The Museum Set," a master edition of his greatest masterpieces, destined for museums. Which he did. Unfortunately, Ansel was very dissatisfied with then-current photo papers, and he also appeared to be having vision issues—the "Museum Set" prints are among his least satisfactory from a printmaking standpoint, nowhere near the spectacular balancing act of his best prints.

Basic color correction
By the way, to learn color correction, it's necessary first to simply memorize the major RGB complements (the three pairs of two opposites per pair), then teach yourself to see what color a picture has too much of. At that point, you know what to add.

RGB color wheel

Blue is the opposite of yellow, red is the opposite of cyan, and green is the opposite of magenta. So if you see just a little too much green in a picture, you know to add a little magenta. See too much cyan, add red. Thinking of it in terms of what color to add will gets you out of all sorts of trouble. And it's much easier to detect what's there than what's missing.

I've mentioned before that many experienced color printers have a "color cast preference"—a color they favor just slightly. I favor prints that skew just a skosh red; Ctein told me he favors cyan (which I believe is unusual—he's the only person I know with a cyan bias). Knowing your color bias preference helps you to keep it in check, for one thing! I'm always cautious about whether I might be adding too much red.

A little secret
Another issue with color correction is that most people have wildly varying tolerances for casts, and here's a little secret. While most people don't like even a little bit too much of certain casts like cyan and magenta, human beings in general have a huge liking for yellow, AKA "warmth." Whereas you might not even be able to get away with two or three points too much green or cyan, you can add five or ten points too much yellow and you might still be all right. (The theory is that "golden hour" sunlight is yellow and inherently pleasant to us.)

That's why the "color temperature" slider (blue-yellow) is so central to most editing programs. And it's also why yellow gets newbie color printers / post-processors into trouble they sometimes can't get out of. Why? Because judgement with yellow is tougher to "feel" correctly—everything from neutral to way too yellow might look subjectively equally good, just different. So which way do you go? Without experience, it's easier to get confused.

My preference was to teach people to always to get the color temperature, the yellow-blue pair, as neutral as possible first—with reference to your memory of the original scene—which in turn allows you to see other color casts more easily. Correct those, and only then add a bit of yellow back in to see if more warmth is preferable to you.

For practice, go to any photo site, the more amateurish the better, and start looking for pictures with color that looks "wrong." Figure out what it has too much of, and thus, what you would need to add. There's nothing stopping you from actually doing it, either—that is, nothing stopping you from downloading strangers' pictures and color-correcting them for your own practice. As long as you toss your copy out afterwards and don't actually nick their work.

Color correction is fun, and, as any experienced color printer will tell you, helps you see color in pictures much more readily* and accurately, too—and enjoy it more when you see photographs with color that "sings."

Mike
(Thanks to Peter Conway)

*To me, for example, the second picture in the "Two-Hat Weather" post, of the frozen waterfall, is a riot of colors!  :-)  Look at it again and notice the rust browns in the rocks and the cerulean in the ice.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

We like green
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Featured Comments from:

Ben Rosengart: "Very interesting, Mike. I just forwarded this to my dad. He claims he's no good at color correction, but I maintain he just hasn't put in enough hours."

Stephen Cowdery: "Looking at the color graphic, I thought that my green perception was faulty—the green and chartreuse triangles appeared to be exactly the same. I opened the graphic in Photoshop and checked the info reading: R-0, G-255, B-1, for both segments!"

Mike replies: Sorry. I start with a Wiki graphic of unknown provenance, convert it to sRGB, and then submit it to the mercies of the TypePad blog software (which does change things). By that time it's far from calibrated—really just a rough illustration of what it's supposed to represent.

Here's another, possibly easier way of visualizing additive color:

Each primary color (R, G, or B) is the opposite of the smaller overlap opposite it. (Top image courtesy Wikipedia.)

The colors still aren't quite right but if you accept that these are just illustrations you'll be all right. The key thing to emphasize is just that you have to memorize the three pairs of opposites. Then, whatever color you see too much of in a picture, add more of its opposite.

Ranjit Grover: "The 'factory-issued' lens turns yellow, opaque and rigid with age. That is the reason it has to be replaced. The automatic white balance in our brain does a good job and we do not see the effect of the yellow lens as long as both of them are of the same color depth. But once one of them is replaced with a plastic lens we see the difference. The plastic lenses too are slightly yellow, but not as much as the 'factory supplied lens' with cataract. What one person sees as yellow may not the same as another one sees. There is no way one person can tell another person exactly what he sees or hears or tastes or feels. Neuro scientists call this problem 'qualia.' Qualia comes alive when we have two different lenses in our eyes. Or when one ear is defective. Probably qualia is what causes our individual color preferences."

Herman: "I'll stick to black and white."

Mike replies: That's even harder! But no worries, you're good at it. :-)

Ken N: "I use reference pictures to 'calibrate' my eyesight as I work. It was a trick I learned many years ago with audio editing."

Mike replies: That is indeed a very good trick. It helps a lot with B&W, too (apropos Herman). I used to keep a manilla folder of reference B&W's in the darkroom—eight to 12 examples of "perfect" tonality—and if I felt my perception getting a little off-kilter, I'd just look through them. Naturally I still remember some of those pictures!

MarkR: "I'm reminded of Claude Monet, who redid some of his water lily paintings after he had cataract surgery. He was reportedly upset that he had painted them too red."

Mike replies: The story of Monet's struggles with his vision in later life is very involved and complicated; one thing that stuck with me is that he apparently wanted to convey in his paintings how he saw, because it was very lovely, but he couldn't see well enough to paint it properly. At this point I'm not sure if that's some species of fact or just my interpretation....

Stephen F Faust: "Re 'The key thing to emphasize is just that you have to memorize the three pairs of opposites. Then, whatever color you see too much of in a picture, add more of its opposite.' ...Which explains why Lightroom has a blue/yellow slider and a green/magenta slider, but why doesn't it have a cyan/red slider?"

Mike replies: Because technically you can do everything you might need to do with just the blue-yellow and green-magenta sliders in ACR. Increasing both blue and yellow at the same time (moving both sliders to the left) is the same as adding cyan, and increasing both yellow and magenta at the same time (moving both sliders to the right) is the same thing as adding red. Try it. The problem with that is that it's not as intuitive as having three sliders in terms of looking at the picture, evaluating it, and knowing what to do, which is why in Photoshop I would suggest doing color correction in Image > Adjustments > Color Balance, which has three sliders.

Presumably Lightroom has the same three sliders somewhere too? (Or is it more automated in LR?)

John Krumm answers Mike: "To answer your question, Lightroom doesn't have that color balance tool. Lightroom adjustment options mirror ACR. I'll have to try it; it will give my neglected Photoshop CC something to do."

Mike replies: That's weird. I reviewed the correction options in LR using Adobe's online instructional videos, and looks to me like Develop > HSL falls into the classic trap of automated tech: it makes color correction—better make that "color enhancement"—easier to carry out, but more difficult to understand. 

Richard: "Color management of your eyes is really just knowing about their shortcomings and working within them. The biggest enemy, according to my research, is your own brain. That's why it's best to only look at something you want to color correct for a few seconds at a time. After that your auto color correction kicks in and you won't be able to see what's wrong anymore. And eat your carrots, of course. The normal caveats apply as well, paint your walls a non-pigmented grey, keep light levels low, and don't work when you're tired because your brain just won't be up to the job. The one other thing I would say is that there is no shame in using a ColorChecker to create a custom profile—especially when you shoot in weird mixed lighting conditions. Using a color checker or a calibrated grey card is like sharpening up your saw and planing your boards before you start a woodworking project. It frees you up to be more creative because you're starting from a neutral place."

Educate Me?

So since we're on the subject, sort of, who are some photo-artists / photo-illustrators / Photoshop artists that people like?

Photoart by Loretta Lux

I had a vague idea I knew of a bunch of them, but the only name I can actually come up with is Loretta Lux, who does (sorry for the shorthand!) creepy-perfect portraits of children, sort of as if they were midway to being dolls, or otherworldly like the twins in the Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining (who in turn were inspired by the famous Diane Arbus photo).

And help me out here—there's another, also woman, who I've actually featured (or mentioned) on the site before. She does domestic tableaux with carefully arranged arrays of objects throughout the frame. Can anybody help me with the name?

I'd love to see some more. Doesn't have to be someone famous or "known to the art world." Just anyone whose work you like who heavily Photoshops their images. Have any suggestions?

Mike

UPDATE: The person I was thinking of was Julie Blackmon—thanks to all those who supplied the name, and sorry for my "proper noun aphasia." It's pretty obvious that her work is Photoshopped sometimes but it's not always obvious exactly where and how—this example might or might not have been (although I can't quite believe the birds and the plane and the dog were all in their places with the other actors at the same time). The greater part of the deliberate manipulation is the conceptual design and careful staging of her tableaux. She has variously claimed inspiration by Norman Rockwell and Jan Steen, the Dutch painter of raucous, densely populated interior scenes. (Rockwell painted largely from staged photographs, so that inspiration is somewhat circular.)

Julie Blackmon, Olive & Market St.

 

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Andreas Waldeck: "One of the highest paid photographers in the world, Andreas Gursky, often creates reality with extensive image manipulation. The documentary movie Andreas Gursky—Long Shot Close Up by Jan Schmidt-Garre (2011) gives a great inside into the way Gursky composes his images."

Robert Peterson: "I suggest you look at John Paul Caponigro as a visual artist who works with photographic images and Photoshop. Some of his images are 'simple' artistic photos, but others are constructed. Another artist who starts with photos is Kathy Beal.

Kathy Beal, from "Still Life"

Mike replies: I should have thought of John Paul...(egg on face).

C-E-R

Why we shouldn't say "post" or
"Photoshopping" any more.

-

By Michael C. Johnston
all rights reserved

Ctein hates the term "post-processing." It's one of those (unfortunately all too common) terms that grew up twisted and parasitic, like an invasive species in the forest. "It's clinical and has a disparaging connotation," Ctein wrote. "It implies that 'getting it right in the camera' is somehow inherently superior, like the snobbishness one used to get from the Kodachrome users—'we get it right the first time.' What a load of B.S...." (He went on to point out that slide-film shooters were just making a virtue of a necessity—okay, "putting lipstick on the pig" was how he actually phrased it—because with slides you really were stuck with what you got out of the camera. Maybe they got it right the first time—there was some virtue in that, actually—but it was because they had no choice.)

He said "we really need a better term than 'post-processing.' It's off-putting and unnecessarily divisive. Mind you, I've got my individual answer which is, I don't post-process, I print. But that doesn't solve the larger language problem."

He asked me to think on it. Bad terminology is a particular bugbear of mine, because language can't keep up with technology—it needs more time to evolve. Ctein said he prints, but don't get me started on print and its modifiers—print being both a verb and a noun, and a printer being both a person and a machine! Yikes. A word so nice we have to slather it all over everything like pesticide on a potato field.

I ran across an analogous situation in psychology recently. Adult attachment, a relatively recent field, divides people into "secure attachment styles" and "insecure attachment styles." The insecure types are further divided into "anxious attachment style" and "avoidant attachment style." Nice examples of exceptionally poor terminology—all those terms are too long, all use words that have different meanings and other commonsense connotations and are frequently used in other contexts, and none go from the collective to the individual case easily. E.g., what do you call an individual person with an anxious attachment style? An "anxious"? Thanks, that's helpful.

The only term making inroads on "post processing" is "editing," based on the fact that some image-modifying software programs are being called "editors." Again, totally hopeless, since "editor" is a staff member at a publication and "editing"—in photography—more commonly means selecting shots to use from a larger amount of shooting. (At least "sequencing" is a separate word for that separate task. Be thankful for small felicities.)

If I could correct any of this I would, but I appear to have neither a gift for neologisms nor any influence in getting new terms to stick. Well, apart from bokeh. (Michael Reichmann got pixel-peeper to stick, which was impressive.)

But Ctein is right—"post-processing" (often abbreviated just to "post") is hopeless. It's even potentially misleading, not only for the reason he mentioned but because it implies it's what you do after the processing...which in film days meant the onerous chore of developing exposed film into negatives. We don't do "processing" at all any more; we just import (or send) and open the files. Right now, we use "post" to mean anything from clicking an Instagram filter that puts clown makeup on a face, to spotting a film scan, to wholesale computer-generated imagery like constructing a background that never existed for a catalog product shot. It's hopelessly vague, an "umbrella" term that covers everything, and that keeps its meaning well hidden—wholly unhelpful except as an arbitrary label. A nonsense word would work as well. We might as well call it brillig (in the slithy toves).

"Thinking on it," as Ctein asked me to do, I'm aware that I can't change accepted convention. But if I could, I think I'd change "post-processing" to "C-E-R." Pronounced "see-ee-are," as in the letters of the alphabet.

• "C" for correction, meaning the continuation of all the choices you made before and during shooting. You chose what camera (sensor) and lens to use, you chose where to where to look from and what to include and exclude. You chose, or could have chosen, white balance and exposure level and aperture and focus point and a number of other variables. "Correction" after the fact, once the image is imported to software, just continues those choices, to include minor cropping (or the cropping you visualized when you shot if it's major), cast correction (if the camera's automation made the picture too cool—too blue—you can change that), exposure range correction (slight "HDR" to retain highlight detail and reveal shadow detail for instance). Color balancing. Minor cleanup when something went wrong, for instance if your sensor has a hot pixel or a dust spot that creates a blemish in a sky. This is the sort of thing we all do even to snapshots and record shots and is pretty mild and habitual for a lot of us.

• "E" for enhancement, the addition of visual effects that you think might heighten the impression somehow. Changes in what's now called "clarity" (because that's what Adobe labeled it in Lightroom—better than "reverse unsharp mask" which is what the same thing used to be called before there was a slider for it), heightened saturation, local contrast for effect, sharpness past what human eyes can see, rebalancing of the tonal properties, HDR effects, vignetting, or selective lightening and darkening of areas to call attention to certain things and make others less obvious. "Structure" in B&W, because that's what hyping the local contrast and creating pseudo edge-effects is called in Nik Silver Efex.

• "R" for reworking, meaning the wholesale adding, subtracting, or changing of elements and/or meaning. Take another look at the "before and after" GIF that reader chris_scl supplied the other day of Steve McCurry's rickshaw picture:

It becomes obvious how extensively the picture has been reworked. As several readers pointed out, the changes are many, and the extent of the reworking has changed the very meaning and feeling of the picture. How hard the driver is working, the busy-ness of the street, the mood of the passengers, and the signifiers of the presence of the photographer have all been altered. "Reworking" is currently called "Photoshopping," (or 'shopping or potato-chopping or any number of slang variants) which, again, as terminology, has so many things wrong with it I don't even have time to list them all.

"CER" as a term implies a progressive hierarchy of alteration to images in software, from very light correction to very heavy reworking, but you'll note that none of these three terms imply value judgements. Yes, formal photojournalism has restrictions in place against reworking, but photojournalists sometimes get away with enhancements that are pretty extreme—if this were a longer essay I could specify several examples. The other day I referred to reworked photographs as being "faked up," but that's really only a comment on my own personal value system—as a general descriptive term it's not helpful at all; for some artists and some enthusiasts, reworking is an indivisible part of their project and of the way they make their work or have their fun with imagemaking, and it can in some cases be planned or intended from before the moment of exposure. All three of the terms comprising CER are value-neutral.

And the three words, correction, enhancement, and reworking, are adaptable and have sensical* meanings. And they adapt to speech well, because you can just use the individual terms—"I have to do correction before I send the files." "She's an enhancer but she isn't into reworking."

And Ctein is right—there is utterly no intrinsic value in not doing CER. There's no such thing as "purism" in digital imaging (although each person or organization can choose their or its own principles.) It's taken for granted in digital imaging, and it should be (however you do it), because it continues the sequence of creative decision-making that characterizes the whole chain of image-making from initial idea to finished product. That whole chain is the "process," really. No part of it is "post" (i.e., preposition meaning after).

You'll never encounter the term CER again outside of this one single post about it by me. (See, there's that all-purpose word again, post.) Language settles where it settles, and like it or not we're stuck with the stinky little misshapen bastard term "post" for the software phase of digital imaging, and "Photoshopping" as a wholly unfair word for altering or reworking a digital image. C'est la vie.

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)

*This is a made-up word that's a back-formation from nonsensical and commonsensical. It means something that has internal logic. I encountered it reading philosophy. It's not officially a real word, but I like it anyway.

P.S. I put my byline on this because some guy on Facebook ripped off my post from Sunday! He later apologized and posted a link, though, when Carl nudged him about it, so all is forgiven. But really, you can't steal stuff from the Internet just because it's on the Internet.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Wes: "I prefer the term 'adjustments' to 'corrections.' I feel the latter has too much of a negative connotation in most people's minds, implying mistakes were made and need to be fixed. 'Adjustments'—while not perfect—is a much less negative, and still accurate, word."

Joe Boris: "File 'optimization' is how I describe post-capture workflow (charges) in my estimates and invoices. This seems to cover whatever final medium the image is being prepared for, whether for 'print' or 'electronic' display."

Keith B.: "The term 'post processing' to describe processing makes no sense. Just like 'micro contrast' (very tiny contrast??). I suspect, but have not determined with certainty, that the terms 'post' and 'post processing' are misappropriated adaptations of the terms 'post' and 'post production' used in motion picture work. In movie work, 'production' is the actual shooting of the film. Actors, sets, lighting, crew...and photography. 'Pre-production' is the work that precedes this: Hiring actors and crew, planning the logistics, designing and building the sets. 'Post production' is all the work that follows the shooting of the film: assembling the pieces (editing), mixing and dubbing sound, special photographic or computer-generated effects, recording music, etc. What we do with digital still photography after we shoot is analogous to, but obviously not exactly the same as, movie post production work. How 'bout we just call it 'processing?'"

Richard Newman: "I can't agree with Ctein and you on this. 'Post-processing' is accurate and appropriate. Every image coming from a digital camera has been processed, in varying degrees, through the camera's on-board computer. Even with raw images. And of course, most cameras today offer in-camera processing options of great variety. As for CER, its a nice concept whose definitions open a whole truckload of worms. Is HDR C or E or R? Many will beg to differ, no matter which choice is made. Ditto many less complex modifications to the initial image file. And what about files from the variable focus cameras? If you change point of focus, is that C or E or R? Or....?? I think of it as post-camera processing. And the term 'photoshoping' as become generic, much as xerox did for photocopying. It may not be aesthetic, but it isn't inaccurate."

Andrea Blum: "So from now on I'll be 'corrhancing' my photo files because as awkward as that neologism is, the word better describes what I do who does not print much and who mostly avoids any rework unless it involves a stray electric wire. I never could figure out what I was supposed to do after processing a photo! Whatever term may eventually catch on, thank you for this article. I had begun to think I was the only one who hated the term 'post processing.' It is nice to find that I'm in such good company!"

David Cope: "As an ex slide shooter I can tell you there was nothing snobbish about being told to shoot an assignment for production where it was expected you would get 'get it right the first time'! Mildly terrifying actually. Whilst there was pride in ones work when one did get it right the first time, the reality had more to do with copious bracketing and the occasional rescue attempt with the slide duplicator! CER (assuming the rights for this are now in the public domain otherwise my agent will need to contact yours to sort out a deal!)—I like where this is heading and will adopt for my work if I may. I'm definitely a C type person, with a bit of E as needed and never any R. (Well, so far!)"

John Sparks: "I used to post my film at the Post Office to the photo shop for printing by the printer on their printer so they could post the processed film and prints back to me so I could edit the prints. Now I just Photoshop my images in post and then post them on the Internet."

Mike replies: Exactly.

John Denniston: "I always thought this was simple. Processing is colour correction, cropping, straightening, HDR if needed, and cleaning up dust spots. Post-processing is adjusting the picture for specific output such as converting it to CMYK, checking for highlight dot, maximum ink limits, USM, and cropping to size. Or, it can be re-sizing for the web, changing the profile to SRGB, etc. Softproofing is also post-processing as you're making adjustments for a specific paper on a specific ink jet printer."

Joe (partial comment): "In the days of film, it was called darkroom work. In the days of digital, maybe it should be called 'screen' work since you are looking at a computer screen most of the time."

William Furniss: "My quotations have line items for 'processing' and 'retouching.' If necessary I explain that processing is adjusting raw files for colour and contrast. My clients seem happy with that. Retouching is apparently well understood at this stage and it sounds more serious than Photoshopping which I think infers a hacks fix of something gone wrong."

Mike replies: That seems like the best practical distillation of the issues to me. As a practical matter no one's ever going to use "CER" as a term; but "retouching" is a well-established word that makes a (fairly) value-neutral acknowledgement of what, for instance, McCurry's people did to the rickshaw photo. Also, this should please the people who insist that there's no difference between the darkroom and Photoshop, because you could retouch and change the look of the picture in both media.

Victor Bloomfield: "Edward Weston's take on post-processing, from his Daybook on 4-29-30 as quoted in My Camera on Point Lobos, p. 74: 'In my work the final form of presentation is seen on the ground glass, the finished print previsioned complete in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure. The shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception. The first fresh emotion is captured complete and for all time at the very moment it is seen and felt. Feeling and recording are simultaneous, hence the great vitality in such pure photography and its loss in manipulated photography. The nearest thing to it is a quick line sketch, done usually as a note for further elaboration. And how much finer, stronger, more vivid these sketches are than the finished painting.'"

Color Calibration

A reader showed me a picture the other day that looked so "off" to me that it made me suspect he is working on an uncalibrated monitor.

There are a number of ways to calibrate your monitor and a number of products to help you do it. I believe Ctein uses the X-Rite ColorMunki products, probably because he likes munkis. Monkees. Er, monkeys. (X-rite is a maker of a full line of professional [a word which actually applies in this case] color calibration tools, up to and including light booths.) Actually, he probably uses a higher-level product such as the ColorMunki Photo bundle ($460).

Me, I like to KISS, so I tend to use the lowest level (and lowest cost! —for reasons I will explain) calibration products. X-Rite's ColorMunki Smile is cheap ($89), but gets poor marks for buggy software. I've always used and recommended the lower-end options from Datacolor, and not because I like spiders. Although I do like Spyders (so called because early versions had suction cups to stick to the glass of curved CRT displays; the new ones look less like spiders and more like pucks). The last one I used was an earlier base-level Spyder; the current version is the Spyder5Express ($126).

The unit is very easy to use...once you warm up your monitor (TOP's never gets cold!), dim your ambient light, and position the Spyder, a wizard walks you through an easy-to-follow five-minute calibrating procedure, and Bob's yer uncle. (My uncle is named Smokie Polk, but you know what I mean.)

spider

Spider

Spyder

Therein lies the rub, and my only complaint. Once you're done with this very simple and fast procedure, you really have no more use for your fine $126 device. I used to recheck every six months, then every year, only to find that good monitors didn't drift and that recalibration wasn't necessary. I really only need the Spyder again when I buy a new computer (my current desktop is a mid-2011 model).

...By which time I've lost the Spyder.

With two moves since 2011, my Spyder is...somewhere. Probably. Maybe. Where? Not the faintest clue. As with most things I hardly ever use, it has migrated into the land of Around Here Someplace, a land I have never been permitted to visit and will probably never be privileged to gaze upon. So—this is embarrassing to admit—each time I buy a new computer I end up buying a new Spyder. You know what they say: Oh well. Fortunately I don't buy a new computer very often.

I used to advise sharing a Spyder between a group of friends, to improve cost effectiveness, but that requires more organization than is required to keep track of a Spyder, and doubtless I will expire with that sound notion still in a vaporous and unexperienced state.

But a calibrated monitor is a basic must-have for photography these days, so a Munki or a Spyder you must have. Team Spyder!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Team Spyder!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Hugh Smith: "I never calibrated my monitor until a few years back (with a Spyder) after reading Michael Reichman's suggestion to do so. I could not believe how off my monitor was. Like you, Mike, I gave up calibrating after a while because I just didn't need to. Good advice and mi dos pesos."

Mark: "Easeplay ixnay ethay arachnidyay icspay."

Christopher Crawford: "The best way to calibrate your screen is to use a screen with its own software and sensor that allows the internal lookup tables to be adjusted. The NEC Spectraview series and the Eizo Coloredge series do this. I have used NEC Spectraview monitors for years and wouldn't ever go back to using monitors that require third-party software and hardware to calibrate."

Thomas Paul McCann: "If you find your Spyder best of luck in getting updated software for it. I gave up on all that and following Ctein's advice bought an Apple Mac with Retina display and an Epson P600 to go with it. Worked out of the box."

psu: "A couple of years ago you ran a link to a great set of lectures about the history of pictorial print making given by Richard Benson. To me one of the peak moments in the series came near the end in this video, covering color calibration, and also color management. You need flash to watch the videos. Since I'm not really a serious photographer I have never bothered with any calibration tools. Modern Apple screens all tend to be pretty close to each other in general performance, so I make my stuff look about right on my laptop (and iMac) and for my purposes this is good enough. Occasionally when I make prints I find that there are no huge color shifts as long as everyone is in sRGB, though sometimes you have to adjust for gamma. So I make a note and do that the next time. I do think there are people who do and should need to care about this stuff, but I also think that most people who think they do don't really understand what they are getting into and just end up getting confused. So my general (and as usual, lazy) rule is: unless you can explain why you need to do anything but use all of the default engines, just don't touch it. Also, I take Ctein's recent article on using in-printer color management as more evidence that the lazy way is right. 😃"

Larry Gephardt: "My NEC reminds me to recalibrate every few weeks. I never seem to notice a difference so it doesn't drift much over that period. I use the NEC's puck for my monitor. The upside to calibrating as often as it nags me is the puck never seems to get too lost. I use the ColorMunki for prints with the ArgyllCMS software. Works great and I get a near-perfect match between the screen and prints from several printers. The downside is when the color isn't right I only have myself to blame. As far as Spiders go, the Fiat is pretty nice. I like the styling better than the new Miata it's based on."

Bernard Scharp: "I still have my Spyder3, which helped me through three computers and a decent collection of monitors (calibration is a godsend if you're using a two- or three-display setup with CRT screens), but Datacolor recently informed me they were dropping support on the Spyder3 (and older). So even if you don't lose the thing, you may have to get a new one eventually anyway.  :-(  "

glenn brown: "Not too happy with my Spyder, bought from the TOP link to B&H as everyone should. Installed it and calibrated once then it stopped working. The software could not see it. Customer support is terrible, after five times back and forth I gave up and went to the WWW. Found a solution in two minutes versus four weeks with Datacolor. I still am not sure you can calibrate a retina screen...anybody know about that stuff?"

Urs Willi: "I have been using Datacolor's products for several years now (for screen and paper calibration) and am still very happy with them—not only with their products but equally with their support, which is excellent (at least here in Switzerland)."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "I think the general color quality and consistency of displays has tremendously improved, especially with the demise of tube monitors. That, plus the great improvement in inkjet print technologies has enabled many people, particularly amateur photographers, to largely shrug at color management and be very productive with uncalibrated off-the-shelf equipment. Indeed the iPad and the Retina iMac displays have become my own reference standards for electronic (emitted light) presentation. Purists may quibble with such a standard but the naked fact remains that it represents the medium that the vast majority of my target audience use to view my images. [...]

"Color is all about visual relationships. If you can manage those relationships and your equipment is reliably and reasonably consistent then you probably don't need to buy into a CM system at all any more."

RayC: "(Bias alert) I work for a company that makes one of the above-mentioned calibrators. But given that I've been in the photography business much longer than that, and have fought color battles from the day I stopped shooting B&W exclusively, I'll say with only a little bias that having a calibrated screen should be a requirement for your 'digital darkroom.' There are a number of photo labs that actually promote their customers use of screen calibration because it dramatically lowers their customer service and dissatisfaction. Locally we had one lab that actually sold the devices and offered discounts on their services if you bought a device.

"Ultimately if the only thing you do is look at the images on your own screen it may not matter too much whether you calibrate or not (technically this probably isn't true but practically it may be). If you print, either to your own printer or to a lab, you will dramatically lower your frustration (and costs) by calibrating the screen. As far as stability goes...I have two 'work' locations each with two screens (in addition to the MacBook Pro screen). One of those setups is incredibly stable and I generally recalibrate only a couple of times a year. The other...I find I need to calibrate (or at least validate the calibration) before I'm going to do any serious color correction work.

"Some other day maybe we can take on Ctein's statement that you know longer need to profile your printer...."

Color Photoshopping (and 'Falling Out of the Camera')

We talked a lot last week about processing color photos, starting with the conversation around the Cuba portfolio at the Times. I thought that was interesting because it seems possible that the photographer(s) declined a byline on the basis of the processing choices.

I just wanted to add a few words about my own approaches to processing.

First of all there are two distinct approaches to work in this regard—the first is concerned with how you look at your own work, and the second is how you look at work by other people. I refer to that, casually, as my "artist's hat" and my "critic's hat"—two different perspectives, which can certainly overlap but are fundamentally different. Artists can be very uncompromising and quite passionate (even to the point of fighting about it, as anyone who went to art school probably knows) about their choices for their own work—because art satisfies a need, people can be quite partisan about what they like and what they don't. (One classmate in art school once said of two others, "no, they can't be friends because they don't like each other's art.") However, if you really want to appreciate a broad range of work by a rich variety of other practitioners, you need to be open-minded about other peoples' choices. If you only like one kind of technique for your own work, and you only look at other people through the filter of that particular litmus test, then you're going to severely limit your ability to experience and appreciate the wide variety of work that exists out there in the world.

For my own work, my basic approach is that the processing choices—the controls, or "tricks"—just shouldn't call attention to themselves. If they do, then you've thrown up an additional veil or filter between the viewer and the picture. You've created an impediment to its immediacy. I used to say that even if you work all night in the darkroom, the goal should be a picture that looks like it just fell out of the camera that way. Good processing is transparent, and gets out of the way of the pictures.

Pay attention to your own response to pictures, and notice your own first reaction. If your first thought is, wow, heavy on the clarity slider, rather than wow, what beautiful evening light (for instance), then I think the processing has failed in a significant way. Of course, makers of anything are more prone to seeing the techniques of the thing they're looking at...one of the structural flaws of figure skating (as an example) is that we almost always look at it behind the voice-over of cool appraisals of technique, which subverts the artistic effect the skaters are trying for. Another old joke of mine is that the difference between a photographer and a non-photographer is that when the photographer looks at a picture of a geranium, he'll say "look at that edge definition! Look at the purity of those reds!", whereas the non-photographer will say "that's a geranium." In this sense, non-photographers can "see" pictures better sometimes.

So my basic guiding principle is, whatever control it is that you're using, take care to make it invisible. If you want to juice up the color, don't cross the line such that most viewers' first reactions will be "that color is very exaggerated." You want to back off until your tricks fall below the threshold of immediate noticeability (at least).

So, then: keep it subtle. (That's just my personal approach.) Use all the tricks you want, but don't let them call attention to themselves first and foremost.

Critic's hat
In the work of other people, what I look for is something different. First, consistency. Everyone is allowed their own way of working and they all have their own ideas of how pictures ought to look. But if you're really expressing your aesthetic (or "your personal vision" as it's now, awkwardly, said), then it had better hold true for more than one shot. Processing that's all over the place just fractures a body of work and prevents a cumulative effect from building, and it more or less proves that you have no real opinion about how you want your pictures to look or how you think photographs in general ought to look.

Secondly, I look for appropriateness. Good technique works in concert with what a photographer is trying to say with her photographs. There are no rules about what goes with what, but I think anyone with visual sensitivity and aesthetic awareness does have a sense of when a particular technique is adding to the work and when it's distracting or detracting from it. A good example is the work of Alvin Langdon Coburn that we looked at recently. We're all broadly familiar with the pictorialist aesthetic, but if you can strip the received ideas away, you can see his work is technically radical and quite extreme—very far removed, certainly, from today's conventions. But he's extremely consistent with his chosen visual language, and for the most part he made it work. His pictures fit his technique and his technique fits his pictures.

From a creator's perspective, it's good to let your work evolve toward what you love best, and what expresses you. You'll know it because it gets you in the gut. From a viewer's perspective, it's better to approach with an open mind and see if you can tell what another artist is trying to do, and whether they succeeded for you.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Olympus Pen F is back in stock in black

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Newman: "Photoshopping can be a sticky issue. In addition to the 'artist's hat' and 'critic's hat' there is also the 'reporter's hat.' The question is what degree of processing—if any—of a raw image is permissible for documentary use. And since the print or other presentation medium of the documentary photo will look different from the raw, on-screen file (or basic print if film is used), what 'corrections' can or should be made? That discussion could fill a couple of books, or a month of columns."

Mike replies: I think I disagree, for one simple reason: I'm a photographer talking to other photographers. That is, it would "fill a couple of books, or a month of columns" only if one's purpose were to formulate an enforceable code of how others must behave. For instance, if you're a news organization setting standards for permissible behavior for stringers in a thoroughgoing and legally defensible way.

How it becomes easy to answer is when we're talking about how we want to handle it ourselves, for ourselves. The answer then becomes that you should be as true as you can be to what you saw at the scene...even if you decide you're talking about the effect that the scene had on you, which is what Adams meant when he said a photograph should be "...the equivalent of what I saw and felt." 

That is, it depends on whether we're defining it for others, objectively, or whether we're defining it to guide our own practices, subjectively.

My position has always been that a photojournalist is a reporter with a camera, but it's the person, not the camera, doing the reporting. The statements made with the camera should be true according to the person, not just according to the camera.

Henning Wulff: "Some years ago (over 20) I had a very good business for a while doing composites of architectural models and aerial siting shots. I'd done these for years, but doing them on film, printing them correctly, cutting out the model and pasting everything up, drawing in the shadows, rephotographing everything, printing and retouching again had been incredibly time consuming and few clients were happy with the bill, and I generally wasn't happy with the results. So, Photoshop to the rescue. I had used it from version 0.9 and was quite familiar with it. Being an architect as well, I knew the requirements of the construction industry as well as the rules of perspective. I also knew photographic lighting, loved aerial photography and could put it all together. It was a skill set that no one else in Western Canada had at the time, and I made a lot of money. Now to the point: After I inserted the new building and did all I could to integrate and blend it into the surroundings, I then took the building and made it a little crisper, a little brighter and a little more saturated than the surroundings, but just a little so that most would not notice, but enough so that your eye would be drawn to the project in question. Subtlety was the key—when my clients realized this, my orders took off."

Mark Hobson: "Re 'it just fell out of the camera that way': In his book Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams wrote, 'I think the success of a work of art can be measured not only by its freshness and the diversity of the elements it reconciles, but also by the apparent ease of its execution. An artwork should not appear to have been hard work...I think that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that Beauty is commonplace.'"

JK: "I've found this subject to be a sticking point with students. Many of them now seem to expect and even want images to have an obviously processed look. A conventionally good B&W or color print is likely to strike them as 'flat,' 'dull,' or 'plain.' I like to the think that the pendulum will eventually swing back to naturalness but right now it's all rather discouraging."

Markus Spring: "'Don't sweat it' was a tip I think I got from Carl Weese years ago when I was in my beginnings of raw conversion and post-processing. Despite being (usually) not the person to accept advice easily, in this case I followed the advice and still do. Probably my exotic raw converter (AfterShot Pro, formerly Bibble) helps me in this as its toolset is not as unlimited as the Lightroom/Photoshop combo (using Linux, I sometimes resort to the Gimp), but I've accepted those limits and enjoy the speed—and for my quite 'straight' style of photography I have all the tools I need. Not exaggerating any post-processing was and still is my guideline, both for my own pictures as well as those from others. HDR I dislike when it looks like HDR, and of all those Instagram-filtered images only a small percentage finds acceptance: it's too much like instant-sauce for my taste buds."

What Should a Color Photo Look Like?

A crowd gathered to watch a recent cockfight in the countryside near Viñales.
Photo courtesy the New York Times, photographer uncredited.

Please take a look at this portfolio—"Cuba on the Edge of Change" at the New York Times. I'm just curious: what do you think of what you see from a purely technical standpoint?

When I used to teach fine printing, I, along with other teachers of photo printing, used to recommend keeping some "guide prints" handy, to "calibrate your eye," so to speak, before you went into the darkroom. Intended to be models or examples of what an ideal print should look like, these could be original prints by famous photographers or expert printmakers or prints of your own that were particularly good. One of mine (I had several) was actually an advertisement clipped from a fashion magazine (of Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova, which didn't hurt).

But in those days, the materials to some extent dictated how they "wanted" to look, if you'll forgive the expression. That is, the way the materials functioned best was partially baked in at the factory. I developed a good gut sense of what any negative "wanted" to look like. You had a certain amount of leeway in printing, of course, but with B&W it was almost always best, and certainly easiest, to get it right in the negative. In fact, in my printing classes, the very first thing students did, first class, first day, was to go into the darkroom and make prints from "perfect" negatives that I'd prepared in advance. I wanted them to see what they were aiming at—and experience the pleasure of printing when printing was easy—before they had to struggle with exposure and development of film.

Now, of course, the prevailing mode of photography is digital imaging in color, and the end result is much more plastic or malleable. So what should digital color photographs look like, ideally?

I'm curious as to how close these 14 pictures come to your own ideal, and, if they don't come close, how they differ from what you like or expect to see.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

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DxO With Older Image Files

John Lehet at his most recent solo photo show in
New Hampshire, October 2015

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Written by John Lehet

When you and I last spoke in person, Mike, at my last show in New Hampshire, you expressed surprise that I used DxO. I use it mostly for the reasons you point out in Tuesday's post, "Ah, the Night Sky (Old FF Dynamic Range)." While sensors have certainly improved a good bit, demosaicing and noise reduction algorithms have improved more quickly. So if you shot RAW in the past, your images can have an improved second life. Some of the images of mine that you saw hanging were made with older, lesser sensors and lenses, but I was able to coax some quality out of them.

I know that the other premium raw processors have their adherents, and probably for a reason, but I  settled on DxO as soon as I tried it. It was the first time I could reduce noise without degrading image quality. Also, DxO's deconvolution-based approach to lens correction corrects for lens flaws in lesser lenses of my relative youth.

Not only are my older RAW images from 2004–20xx getting essentially better sensors; it is also as if they are getting re-exposed with better lenses. I have to admit that I was ignorant in settling for some pretty mediocre Nikon zoom glass early on, especially on some trips where I made some good images. DxO doesn't help the bad bokeh, but it improves the sharpness and microcontrast as well as the noise so much that I have taken the time to re-process all the images on my site (over 250 of them!) since I started using DxO about a year and a half ago. This has taken a ridiculous amount of time, but it has made some much better images.

When I go to rework an image, I'm often quite startled at how much better the modern version is, to the extent that I'm embarrassed to have my old ones still on the site. They are mostly gone now. The benefit of using DxO is far less dramatic on the files from the D800e with primes than on 2007 files from the D200 with a zoom. The DxO difference does show up in the Micro 4/3 files even with good modern lenses, and it's possible those files will get even better in the future as software improves.

Robert Harshman said in the Comments yesterday that DxO, PhotoNinja, and ACR can each "do things the others cannot, and based on needs one may be much better than the other." I'll second Robert's comment: try DxO on older images.

John

©2015 by John Lehet, all rights reserved

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Ah, the Night Sky (Old FF Dynamic Range)

Ah, the night sky. It contains a multitude of heavenly bodies....

Lest you we thinking that old sensors are as good as new, those aren't actually stars. That's shadow noise.

With the Nikon D750 dispatched back to LensRentals from whence it came, and the sun out, I enlisted Butters to help with a high-SBR trial. (SBR is "subject brightness range," which should be pretty self-explanatory.) He likes lying in the sunlight, and he's essentially white. About the highest natural SBR you'll encounter in the wild (with "lit" subjects, not counting pictures with light sources or reflections in the frame), is dappled sunlight on the ground in the woods, but this has got to come close. That top shot is the Sony A900's shadow noise at 200%.

More recent sensors generally do much better.

This is the same shot HDR'd to the max in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). I don't normally use true HDR so I don't know any particular tricks as to how aficionados would do it. What I did was peg the Highlights slider, then increase the Exposure until the highlights looked okay. Then I pegged the Shadows slider, then added Noise Reduction until the "night sky" effect went away in the shadows, then added a little Clarity. Quick, crude, and dirty...

...But I was impressed. If I were printing this I'd back off till the HDR look went away, but I must say I'm impressed with what ACR can do with A900 files now. Detail isn't softened much despite the high NR, and the shadows open up well...not as well as a modern sensor would do, but then this is an extreme situation. As Geoff Wittig wrote in his comment to the previous post, "I've recently gone back to some of my older digital images captured more than 12 years back with the original Canon EOS-1Ds. Yes, anything above ISO 200 shows pretty dreadful noise. But it's amazing how well the files actually stand up with some careful processing. And it's remarkable how much better Photoshop CC is for 'developing' these files than the release I was using back then. No question I can print a lot larger with new images shot at 50 mp, but it's the whole imaging chain that matters in the end...."

Sensors have definitely improved, but, as with Geoff's 1Ds, modern processing tools actually make the older Sony A900 into a better camera than it used to be.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Sal: "Mike, can you explain what you mean by 'pegging' a slider?"

Mike replies: Pushing it all the way. (Sorry for not explaining.) A physical meter needle is said to "peg" when it hits a predetermined point in its range, particularly the limit...originally because there was often a physical peg that prevented the needle from moving past it.

Take Time

Do you do post-processing every day?

What I was suggesting in the "Processing Strategy" post a few days ago was that on the first pass working on an image, stay loose, take it easy, work fast, and don't stress—get it mostly right. And then step back and stop working on it. Then, let it "ripen"—live with it for a while, think about it; "feel your way into it" as a friend of mine says. If an image still has power / interest / energy for you after some time has passed, that's when you spend the time to really work on it, to more closely calibrate it with "just right" or "perfect."

In the Comments to that post, Adrian Malloch had this to say, in part:

"Just looking," and the passage of time, has been a necessary part of my slow-photography practice too. However, the impatience of my commercial clients who, despite having had the proofs for three weeks, suddenly want 37 selected images graded and processed urgently, means that their poor planning becomes my rushed processing.

My sympathies. I suspect all pros know that feeling. In fact, "pro" work in general means getting to good results quickly and efficiently...rushing, usually.

I made the case for this once in back in the old days talking about home darkroom work vs. commercial labs. The custom fine printers were generally much better printers, and faster, because they did it all the time and had to make good prints quickly, spending the least possible amount of time and materials. Where the custom lab guys fell down is precisely in that they were forced to use...the least possible amount of time and materials! That's why the home darkroom worker could sometimes make a better print. What they lacked in fluency and practice they could make up for in time and care. Where the custom lab guy might have no more than seven minutes and two sheets of paper to make a "finished" print, the home darkroom worker could take four hours and twelve sheets of paper if she wanted to.

Where the home darkroom workers fell down is that they didn't work often enough to stay "fluent." They never pushed themselves to learn how to work quickly and efficiently. Never had enough reason to.

Do you post-process at least a few images every day?

If you don't, you should. Just to keep your hand in. Regularity makes for fluency. Even if it's not an image you're going to keep, spend a few minutes fixing it. (Even if it's not yours. As I think I mentioned a while back, I sometimes snag random images off the Intertoobs and fix 'em. Why? Just to keep my hand in.)

This is a picture I processed yesterday. It's kind of a bleh, meh, second-tier shot. I don't like it, would never print it, and consider it an also-ran. So why bother with it at all? Because I want to get good at B&W conversion, and that mostly means exercising my judgement of tones on a regular basis. I want to practice on skies, and on questions such as, how dark a gray should the lake be in this shot, taken at dusk, to "read" like the scene really looked and felt to me? This is practice, pure and simple. Like a pianist playing scales.

Really, the ideal way to master post-processing (or darkroom printing) is to learn to work both ways—fast and slow.

When you first work on a new image, act like a professional—work quickly and fluidly. Pretend your client wants 37 images delivered yesterday. Get to a good-enough result fast. Then move on to the next one.

Later, act like an artist or hobbyist...bring your full judgment to bear on those (no doubt fewer) pictures that still interest you. Study the file; determine what it really needs; question everything; work slowly and fastidiously. Be a craftsman (or -woman). Take your time. Get it just right. Not close but just right.

Speed and fluency is the great advantage of the pro. Time, thoughtfulness and detail-orientation is the great advantage of the amateur.

You need to learn both ways of working to really get good.

Mike
(Thanks to Adrian M.)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Jay Pastelak: "You're so right about looking at what one has done. As a teacher, I have many students who don't really look at what they have (or have done: in a final critique I once had a student bring in a comped piece in which a label was unintentionally flopped). As a result, they have no idea what to do to the file in processing. I'm not sure if their lack of looking is merely a result of their inexperience or a manifestation of a cultural notion that the technology will get it right. It's one of my huge frustrations in teaching because I can't seem to find a way to teach them to look. And brother, have I tried."

Mike replies: I know what you mean. My former teacher, now friend Paul Kennedy, who taught lighting at the Corcoran School of Art for years, once told me that the hardest thing about teaching lighting was getting students to actually look at what the lights were doing. They were much more comfortable following setup diagrams and so forth. He had an exercise where one student would slowly move a hot light, and the other student's assignment was merely to look at what happened to the light on the subject while the light was moved.

Michael Martin-Morgan: "Quite so. Most people when they play on a computer choose a video game. My video game? Photoshop—great fun!"

Kenneth Tanaka: "In a typical week I do some form of post work perhaps three of seven days. Other days I'm either doing camera work or other things.

"After nearly 20 years working with images I'd like to offer two thoughts outside what's already been noted. First, contrary to the old chestnut, practice will not make perfect when it comes to image refinement. In the absence of some external feedback or aesthetic guidance chances are good that practice may make you worse. In today's digital environment it's very easy to succumb to 'trying' one set of filters and HDR widgets after another. Bit by bit (sorry) your images begin to take on a kitschy, cartoonish appearance where the treatment overthrows the whole message of your images. Unless you force yourself to remain tethered to some aesthetic model constructive to your visual goal it becomes easy to lose sight of what you're trying to accomplish. Learning short-form and long-form treatment routines, as Mike suggested, is essential. But you must first find rails best for your work.

"To that end, make every effort to see good printed work whenever possible. Work whose treatment you not only find appealing but that accomplishes the kind of visual messaging you feel you need. Learn the master art of restraint. It's very, very hard to find such work within the amateur photo sites. I strongly recommend museums and galleries whenever possible. Online, sites such as Lens Culture and L'Oeil de la Photographic are excellent places to see a broad range of work and treatments.

"Second, and this may seem radical, consider partnering with someone who does post-processing, and perhaps printing, professionally.  Paying an experienced retoucher, or even a talented art student, to put the finishing touches on your images can be tremendously enlightening and more productive for some projects."

Joe Holmes: "Ken Tanaka's advice, 'consider partnering with someone who does post-processing,' is spot on. Every time I've worked with a professional post-processor or printer I've seem them bring out my images in a way I could not. And I picked up their techniques each time—invaluable! But even non-pros can show you tricks you hadn't considered. Watching a friend work an image is worth a hundred YouTube videos."

A Processing Strategy

Just thought I'd mention that the most important part of post-processing for me is simply looking—looking at what you've done. I never "sweat" post-processing on the first go-round—I  work quickly and fluidly to get it "mostly" right. I don't worry about it much or fret over it. In my view, it doesn't make any sense to labor and suffer over processing an image your first time working with it, because you don't know how you feel about it yet anyway—how would you even know what you want to do?

What I like to do is get it mostly right on the first pass, and then live with it for a while. If it "catches" in my brain and I find myself going back to look at it repeatedly, then after a week or so I'll be more familiar with the picture and how it's working, and I'll have more of an idea of what I want it to look like. That's the time for the careful—and time-consuming—post processing. On the second pass, I never start with my first result—I start over from a duplicate of the raw file and do it all over again. I like the opportunity to work from the top with a clearer idea of where it is I want to end up.

On occasion I'll make two or even three different quick versions to look at to help me decide which direction to go.

For instance, in the previous post, the top picture already doesn't look quite right to me. But the second picture is having the opposite impression on me—I'm sensing that that one's close to where it needs to be. These kinds of feelings about processing decisions tends to take some time to "settle."

This approach does derive from fine print making. The natural thing to do when making prints is to make a "good enough" guide print without fussing over it too much, then put it up on the wall for a week and study it. By the end of that time your ideas about what it should look like will have gelled, or become clear. At that point, I start all over again knowing much better what I want to do.

Working quickly on "first passes" has an additional benefit, in that, over time, you learn to see quickly what files need and which way you want to go in realizing the picture. It gives you a certain freedom, ease, and fluidity with post-processing decisions.

Mike

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Photoshop vs. Printer-Managed Color Printing

Written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

I promised last week in my P800 review that I would follow up with a detailed explication of my test results regarding printing from Photoshop using custom-made profiles vs. using printer-managed color. If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, read the section of that review entitled, “Color management and profiling” along with the first featured comment. That should bring you up to speed.

Before I dive into my results, I'm going to issue a bunch of caveats as well as respond to some commonly asked questions about my “conversion” (ahem) to printer-managed color. Then we can get to the nitty-gritty.

First, and this is really important, printer-managed color won't be a superior approach if you're running Windows. What I'm recommending only works under Mac OS, which allows you to specify the output printer color space as AdobeRGB. Under Windows you're limited to sRGB, which throws away way too much of the color gamut of the printer. Some people have proposed various hacks to circumvent Windows' sRGB limitation. They may or may not actually work. If they do, they're exploiting loopholes (effectively, bugs) in the code. There's no guarantee they'll continue to work in the future.

Printer-managed color is obviously unsuitable if you're having to coordinate with outside clients who aren't running exactly the same set-up as you are. For example, you can soft-proof even if you're running printer-managed color (I'll get back to that), but the results won't be exactly the same as when you're running with profiled color. If you're working with someone else who needs to see soft proofs, what they'll see on their monitor won't be quite the same as what you see.

Similarly, if you're running a whole bunch of different makes and models of printers in one environment and you need them all to behave as consistently similarly as is possible, you need Photoshop-managed color. You can't be having each printer's own drivers calling the shots, with their individual idiosyncrasies.

Finally, I'm confident of my results when Epson x880series and P600 and P800 printers are being used. That's all I tested. Printer-managed color might very well be superior with other printers as well. Or not. I suspect it is with many, but you'll have to run your own comparisons to determine that.

Okay, those are the limitations in scope. Understand that for me this is not some theoretical discussion. I am so convinced of these results that my future work will be printed with printer-managed color. You get to decide for yourself. It's a tough decision; it took me years to get to this point. Old habits die hard.

I get asked three big questions about this:

Q: Don't you have to give up soft proofing?

A: I find soft proofing a useful approximation of what a print will look like, with an emphasis on the word “approximation.” A soft proof fails to convey the nuances of the print for me and the precise interrelationships of the tones and colors on paper. All it does is give me a ballpark estimate. This is not a monitor limitation. It's true I'm running only a calibrated sRGB monitor, but the differences I see have nothing to do with the color space.

Consequently, I find that choosing any appropriate canned profile (whether provided by the printer or the paper manufacturer) works well enough. Different profiles make subtle differences in the on-screen rendering. The differences are small compared to the discrepancies between what's on the screen and what I see in a print. So, no, I don't care that I'm not using exactly the right profile for creating the soft proof; the ballpark estimate I'm getting isn't much different.

Q: Doesn't this mess up if you're using a non-Epson paper?

A: I mostly print on non-Epson papers. On all the ones I've tried, choosing the closest Epson equivalent in the printer driver works just fine. I imagine there could be subtle rendering differences between different papers on the market of the same type, but they're a lot smaller than the differences between printer vs. Photoshop-managed color.

Q: You're throwing away the part of the color space the printer can reproduce that is outside of Adobe RGB. That's a bad thing!

A: That would be true if there were no downside to retaining the entire color space. In this case, there is—worse distortion and incorrect rendering of tones and colors. What it boils down to is, do you want the maximally large color space, or do you want the most correctly rendered color space? Because, you can't have both.

To make an analogy, it's like choosing between two sound systems, one of which can output 200 watts and the other of which can output 500 watts. The 500w system is good, but the 200w system has much lower distortion. Which one do you buy? Me, I'll opt for poorer performance on the extreme transients in exchange for less ongoing distortion.

That's the situation I find with printing. Those outside-of-Adobe RGB colors have much less of an impact on my photographic prints than the distortions created by custom profiles.

Now, on with the show!
For each of the photos, I made five prints—four with my custom profile and the one Andrew Rodney made for me, with both perceptual and relative colorimetric rendering and one using printer managed color. Some photos I tested on the 3880, some on the P800, most on both. Just doing my part to make the paper and ink manufacturers rich. Here's what I found with five of the dozen representative-of-my-work photos I used for testing:

• Xmas Spirit—This one is totally a torture test, but it's not atypical of photographs I do of artificial light sources (not just Christmas lights). There's plenty of out-of-gamut color in the magenta-reds, greens, and cyan-blues.

Relative colorimetric rendering fails badly with both custom profiles. It slams those primaries into the wall, with poor color and tone discrimination. It's especially noticeable in the large red areas. Perceptual holds much better separation, but distortions show up in the near-saturated colors. They don't stand out strongly, but they're there.

Printer-managed color does the best all-around job. It holds better gradation in the saturated areas than the custom profiles did with relative colorimetric rendering without introducing the outright distortions that perceptual rendering did. It retains subtle gradients with better fidelity and more delicately that either profile with either rendering intent. It does a better job of holding detail as well as tonal and color variations in the yellow-orange part of the spectrum (especially obvious in Pooh). I've observed this in other test prints of things like sunsets, with all those golds and yellows.

• Stream Bank near River Polly—This is one of my standard photographs, very typical of my nature photography. I even use it to optimize ColorMunki profiles. It has very small spots of out-of-gamut color in the dark greens with my profile, none with Andrew's.

It was interesting how little difference there was between mine and Andrew's profile. With the custom profiles, perceptual looked better than relative colorimetric rendering. I don't think objectively the custom profiles are inferior to the printer-managed color. Printer-managed color is slightly closer to what I created on the screen, so technically it's more accurate, but it would only be subtle tweaks of curves and hue saturation layers to make the prints interchangeable. I'm calling it a draw.

• Grasses in Liquid Sky—this is another one of my calibration photos because, although the blue sky colors aren't out of gamut, poorly calibrated printers and poor profiles render them distinctly too violet-magenta. I've seen this problem pretty consistently for years across printers and photographs for sky-bluish stuff. I could guess it has something to do with how the RGB space gets transformed into the CMYK space for output, but I really don't know.

I got mixed results on this one. On the 3880, printer-managed color slightly beats out either custom profile, although Andrew's is a bit better than mine. On the P800, printer-managed color is little worse than either custom profile and mine is better than Andrew's. In other words, the order is exactly reversed. I should mention that any of these prints are much better than any print from a factory-canned profile, either for the printer or from a paper manufacturer.

• Ripples in Stream—There are no out of gamut colors, but a good range of fine color and detail cover a large fraction of the color space.

Much like "Stream Bank," any of the prints would be aesthetically acceptable, but printer-managed color was more accurate, in particular in holding the correct hue in the orangish reds and the cyans-to-blues that dominate the lower half. The overall effect is that printer-managed color makes the print more (correctly) vivid, and the different areas are better differentiated.

• Tiffany Dome, Chicago—A lot that's out of gamut here—the blues and the olive green ribbons in the dome glass, almost every bit of the golden glass in the "sun" light.

All the prints render the golden glass more orange than it appears on the monitor (I can see that in the soft proof). Andrew's profile with relative colorimetric rendering does the best job of holding the hue, but it produces the worst overall result—differentiation is absent in the out-of-gamut areas and the print looks flat and lacking in texture. All four profile/rendering intent combinations do a worse job than printer-managed color in holding detail in the sun lamp, in producing accurate shades of blues in the dome and in keeping the greens olive-colored instead of pushing them towards a darker, pure green. Printer-managed color is a clear win.

For the heck of it, I printed out this photo at full 17x22 size on the P800 with printer-managed color, to compare with my earlier 3880 print made with my custom profile (perceptual). OH MY. It is soooo much better. Between the extended density range and color gamut of the P800, plus the better handling of the out-of-gamut colors by printer management. Hard to describe—it's like the difference one sees between looking at an Adobe RGB and sRGB rendering. The print looked great before; now it looks better than great.

I played with several more photographs, but eventually better becomes the enemy of deadlines, and they didn't tell me anything the earlier tests hadn't already. My conclusions are that, except in uncommon cases, perceptual rendering is going to be superior to relative colorimetric if you're using a custom profile. It shows more artifacts in the comparison prints from mine and Andrew's gradient torture-test files, but those artifacts rarely up as a problem in real photographs.

Far more often than not, though, the very best results are going to come from using printer-managed color. "Grasses in Liquid Sky" was the only photograph where the custom profile was of clear benefit, and that was only on one of the printers. Sometimes (rarely) printer-managed color is spectacularly better. Most of the time the differences are small. In the few cases where a custom profile is doing better, the differences aren't large.

Whew! I'm done. I'm going to go back to making pretty pictures and pretty prints.

UPDATE, Saturday: Quite a few of you have said that you can get AdobeRGB color out of printer-managed color under Windows. I'm not in a position to check that out; I'm not even in a position to argue with you. What I said about Windows' sRGB limitations comes from Adobe's printer guru. I'm not saying he's infallible (neither would he) but he knows so much more about this than I do. I can't argue his case. It would be like Mike trying to stand in for me in an argument about physics. I just don't know enough.

Instead, what I'm going to give you folks is a simple 20-minute, two-print test that will tell you if you really are getting AdobeRGB color out and not just sRGB color. For this you need an image file with a really wide range of colors and tones. Preferably something that was done in ProPhotoRGB space. You want something that comes as close as possible to filling up the printer's entire color space. If you don't have any such photograph of your own in your collection, grab Andrew Rodney's torture test file. This is a 16-bit ProPhotoRGB file, and it will destroy any printing system out there. (Don't be distressed by any weirdnesses or artifacts you see in prints made with this file–– it's designed to break things, and those things will almost never matter in a real photograph.)

Make two prints from that file, using what you believe to be sRGB output to the printer and AdobeRGB output. You should see a very clear difference between the two, with the “AdobeRGB” print having a greater color range (that is, producing more intensely saturated colors at the extrema) than the sRGB print. If you do, then you've got a hack that works. At least it does until such time as Microsoft rewrites their code. If you don't, then no matter what the settings in your printer software are telling you, that “AdobeRGB” data is still going through the Windows' sRGB bottleneck.

That's all I've got. Have fun!

Ctein

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

Michael Perini: "Simpler is better, and your results seem very encouraging.

"You mention an Adobe RGB workflow. In your introduction to Andrew Rodney's piece you recommend ProPhoto RGB (which most of us use): '...if you're working in ProPhoto RGB color space. And, really, you should be, because most if not all digital cameras can produce colors that fall outside of Adobe RGB.'

"So do your recommendations hold for a ProPhoto RGB Workflow? Thanks."

Ctein replies: Michael, yes. Most of my work is in ProPhotoRGB space. The Tiffany Dome photograph is a good example of that. It contains a lot of colors that lie outside of Adobe RGB gamut.

In fact, this is a place where soft proofing is useful and accurate. Under the View menu in Photoshop, the third item down is “Gamut Warning.” If you click that, the screen grays out any colors that are outside of the space you're simulating. You can pick AdobeRGB as the “Device to Simulate” under “Proof Set up” (the top item under View) and you'll see what colors in your photograph actually do lie outside of AdobeRGB space.

There may not be any. Some digital photographs fall entirely within AdobeRGB space. Just because your camera can capture colors outside of AdobeRGB space doesn't mean that there necessarily are any in any particular photograph. But, one never knows in advance, and it could change when you start messing with the photograph in Photoshop, which is why I recommend converting from RAW into ProPhoto RGB space.

Product Review: Epson SureColor P800 Printer

Written by Ctein

[Note: This is going to be longer than your usual TOP post. There's a lot to talk about. If you feel it's “longior, non legi,” don't say I didn't warn you!

P.S. Two important illustrations were missing from the first post of this article (under the nighttime snow photograph). If you didn't see'em before, refresh and scroll down. —Ctein]

The new Epson SureColor P800 printer (currently specially priced at $995 from B&H Photo after the mail-in rebate) is the 17-inch wide model in Epson's new line of printers that run from 13-inch wide through 44-inch wide. The print quality should be similar or identical on all of them. I reviewed the P800 because it's the direct successor to my current standard printer, the Epson 3880.

The big deal about the Epson SureColor P800 (hereafter simply referred to as the P800) is Epson's new Ultrachrome HD ink set. It's the same set of colors as in the x880 series—MK,PK,LK,LLK,LM,M,LC,C,Y—but they've been reformulated for an increased density range. More density range means richer blacks, more tonal range to work with in the print, and higher maximum saturation in the colors. This, of course, is what got me most interested in this printer. More on this anon; much more.

There are couple of other new features to the printer that I liked. You can tether it to your computer with the standard ethernet or USB cables, or it can connect over your Wi-Fi network. I didn't relish stringing another cable across my office, so I gave the Wi-Fi option a try. All of my testing was done on my 27-inch 5K retina iMac running the most current versions of Mac OS X (Yosemite) and Photoshop CC (2015). Wi-Fi worked perfectly. I performed the usual setup dance: first install the printer software on the computer, then turn on the printer. I next selected wireless connection from the touchscreen on the front of the printer. The printer looked for the Wi-Fi network, configured itself appropriately, and that was it! The printer was installed on the iMac and also accessible from any other computer in the house that was on that network. Easiest setup I've ever had.

Another feature I especially liked was that you can tell the printer whether it should be able to automatically switch between matte black and photo black inks depending on the print medium, or whether it will require you to manually initiate the switch (in which case the software will prompt you that the printer needs your attention). Why do I like this? Because I have, on occasion, accidentally chosen the wrong print medium, or decided to, say, print out an invoice that just came in while I'm in the midst of working on photographs, forgetting I'm set up for the latter. With the “convenience” of automatic ink swapping, I am rewarded by wasting five or more minutes of my time switching between inks, not to mention a few dollars worth of ink going down the drain. The first time I made this mistake with the P800, which happened pretty quickly (in my defense, I was making a lot of test prints under a lot of different conditions) I switched the printer over to manual. It's pretty good proof against the particular kind of fool that I am.

No doubt that there are a bunch of other features that will matter to other people. I didn't use them, so I won't report on them.

One negative change: the printer ships with smaller starter ink cartridges. Oh, they're not a whole lot smaller, probably 20%. The printer seems to require less ink to charge the system initially, so I'm likely getting close to the same amount of usable ink from the cartridges that ship with the printer as I did with the 3880. But, really, it feels kind of cheap on the part of Epson—would it have killed ya to have given me the full 80 ml cartridges? Really?

There, I got in my gripe. On to the prints, which is what we all really care about.

Print quality
The first thing I looked at was the ink droplet pattern, because that was really easy–– one test print. I was curious to see if the P800 was a big improvement over the x880 series the way the x900 series is. The pattern didn't look substantially different from the 3880, not in the league of the 4900. But, my particular review unit checked out at the high-end of the quality/uniformity range of 3880 printers that I tested a while back.

The dot pattern was very uniformly spaced, invisible to my eye even under the closest inspection. That is not true of my 3880, which falls in the middle of the quality distribution. I don't know if this is typical of the P series or if I just got lucky on this test unit. This could be a case where “your mileage will differ;” no way I could say without testing a couple of dozen of these printers. The P800's sharpness was slightly better than 3880, but that might just be due to more uniform dot pattern. (Any Epson people reading this, feel free to chime in with observations, on or off the cuff. Hint, hint.)

So much for ink droplet patterns and print sharpness. Let's talk about density range, what the fuss is about.

The short version: it is consistently better on all papers, both matte and gloss/semi-gloss, than the 3880. I don't have a reflection densitometer; to my eye it looks like about a 0.2 density unit improvement in the shadows. There is distinctly better separation in the lower tones (below value 20) but pretty much no difference in the midtones and highlights. It's an extended shadow range.

This is my standard grayscale test target:

You can download a variant of this for your own tests.

The following illustration shows an enhanced version of the lower half of the rightmost column in my test prints, which prints values from 0 up to 32, just the darkest shadows. I kicked the brightness and contrast way, way up in the scanner software, so there are lots of scan artifacts and blotches.

These comparison prints, on Canson Baryta Photographique (my preferred paper) give you an idea how much further down the blacks extend with the new printer. The black arrow shows the matching steps between D-max on the 3880 print and the P800 print (around value=15). The darkest steps, down to the last 2 or 3, are visually distinguishable in the P800 print under strong illumination, even though they merge together in the scan; the printer does hold separation in the shadows.

The improvement in density is especially noticeable with a paper like Epson Ultra Premium Matte, a lower grade matte paper with relatively weak D-max. A P800 print on this paper has better blacks that a 3880 print on Epson Hot Press Bright, a much better quality of matte paper. Of course, a P800 print on the Hot Press looks better still, but this printer is a great equalizer among matte papers.

What does 0.2 d.u. mean, visually? With a semi-gloss paper like my Canson, a typical high-end inkjet print has about the same density range as a high-quality darkroom print. A dye transfer print, the gold standard, would typically have 0.4–0.5 d.u. more density range than the best darkroom print (that can vary). The P800 pushes well beyond what one can get in a conventional darkroom print; it's about halfway to the density range of a dye transfer print. It's going to encourage me to try digitally printing some of my photographs that simply don't print well without the density range I could get out of dye transfer, notably my "Jewels of Kilauea" series.

I'm jazzed.

The higher density range also means you can print richer colors and a larger color gamut. The maximally saturated primaries can get more saturated. Understand that this does not mean that your print, overall, is more contrasty or more saturated. It's about the range you have to work with. Think of it as like getting a new digital camera with a longer exposure range than your old one had. Your photographs aren't more contrasty, overall, but you can capture more of the extreme brights and darks.

Will you see this in your prints? It'll depend upon the kinds of photographs you make. The improved density range has only a minimal impact on photographs that don't have important shadow detail. If you mostly photograph high key, you'll never see a difference. Similarly, unless your photograph has colors that push the limits of the color space or of saturation, the extra range this printer provides will be less important. In some of my photographs, I could see very little difference between the 3880 and the P800 unless I looked very carefully. In most there was some improvement.

In some, the difference was profound. Photographs like this one:

and especially this one:

...printed much better with the P800. When I made that series of nighttime snow photographs, I remember telling Mike that I had to work very hard to hold separation in the shadows and still print the photo down dark enough that it looked like a night scene. I was hoping that future printers would let me do a better job. This printer does. I was satisfied with the rendering I achieved on the 3880, but I like what I can do with the P800 a lot better.

These two scans enlarge a portion of this photograph near the right edge:

I've brightened the image and enhanced the contrast the same way I did with the gray scale scans, so you can see the difference in the shadow rendering between the 3880 (upper) and P800 (lower) prints. That is a subtle improvement in the print, but it makes a big difference in conveying the fine detail and producing a sense of depth in the shadows.

Am I going to go back and reprint my whole portfolio now that I have a better printer? Hell no. Better may or may not be the enemy of good, but it is certainly the enemy of deadlines and of making new work. I'll be selective. But, I will be reprinting some of my portfolio. It's worth it.

Now I move on to a more controversial subject (cue ominous music):

Color management and profiling
The main reason this review took so long to get done is that Dave Polaschek, Andrew Rodney and I continued our investigation of color management and profiles, and it turned out to be rather more complicated than expected.

Well, some weeks and well over 100 prints later (whew!), I've reached my conclusion. Printer-managed color is the way to go with an x880 or P-series Epson printer running under Mac OS. A majority of the time it produces better results than Photoshop-managed color with a good custom profile. Sometimes it's massively better. Otherwise, it's usually a tossup. A very small fraction of the time, the custom profile works better, but never fantastically better.

Why is this so? I have no idea. I can spout all sorts of logic and theory that says this should not work anywhere as well as it does. But as I repeat, ad nauseum, “Data trumps theory.” I've got an awful lot of data now.

If you're really obsessive, I suppose you can run out a bunch of test prints of each and every photograph you do, to compare printer-managed color to custom profile color (remembering that you need to try out both relative colorimetric and perceptual rendering intent). Am I going to do that?

Naaah. It'll be printer-managed color and that's that, unless I look at the print and decide something is wonky.

I will likely explore this topic in more detail next week in a column. I would prefer to not, repeat not, argue about it in this one, especially if it's a rehash of what we discussed before.

Here are the settings you need to know. When you pull up the printer control panel, choose “Printer Manages Colors” under Color Handling. Then click Print Settings… . Select the Color Matching submenu and click “Epson Color Controls.” Click the Printer Settings submenu and under Color Mode choose “Color Controls > Adobe RGB.” Choose the paper type that most closely matches the one you're using (it doesn't matter if there's an exact match—I rarely use Epson papers).

I reprinted one of my recent favorite photos on the P800 using printer-managed color. This photograph looks great with my usual custom profile on the 3880, but it's got a lot of out-of-gamut color (including pretty much the whole “sun” lamp) and it pushes the brightness range per print. Wow, was there ever a difference! It's hard to find a way to put into words (and it is, of course, impossible to illustrate here) but the P800 print is much more alive. The color is more accurate, there is separation and texture in the extremes of tone and color that's missing in the 3880 print. The latter looks flat, compared to the new print. I loved the old print. I love the new print.

Printer-managed color won't be good under Windows. Windows limits you to sRGB color space when printing in this mode, and that's just not enough. Stick with custom profiles for Windows. What about other printers, models and makes, on the Mac side? I have no idea; you have to run your own tests. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances.

Conclusion
I've put in a request to buy my review unit. Not because I'll necessarily save much money buying it that way, especially with Epson's current $200 rebate through the end of October, but this printer is performing well and, noting my earlier comments on product variability, I'm getting a nice tight dot pattern out of this printer. I don't want to leave that to chance. And I don't want to have to pack up and return a printer and then unpack and set up a new one. Because, really, I am replacing my 3880 with a P800 either way.

Don't misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with the 3880, and if the P800 hadn't come along I'd still happily continue to use it. If you can grab one (new or used) for, say, 50–60% of the price of a P800, do so. Otherwise, there's no question in my mind that the P800 is worth the extra money.

Ctein

[The P800 from B&H Photo is currently $995 after the mail-in rebate. The smaller 13-inch P600 is around $570 with the rebate. IMPORTANT! The P800 rebate offer is good through October but the P600 rebate offer ends September 30, so you've only got a week on that one.]

Ctein is TOP's Technical Editor and a longtime professional custom printer.

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Bill Mitchell: "What is 'printer managed color'?"

Ctein replies: Bill, when the Print Settings control panel in Photoshop comes up, under "Color Management" there is a "Color Handling" setting. You can choose either "Printer Manages Colors" or "Photoshop Manages Colors" The latter lets you (well, requires you) to use a printer profile selected from the menu below that. The former shuts down Photoshop's control of the color and leaves it all in the hands of the Printer Control panel that pops up when you click "Print Settings...". In other words, it's a completely intuitive interface. Not.

Craig Arnold: "A wonderfully timely post. I've decided it's time to retire my older Canon dye printer. As my favoured print size is A3+ I don't have to have the P800, but it's not much more than the P600 and the bigger ink tanks make it a bit silly to go for the P600. However I am somewhat conflicted over the choice between the P800 and Canon Pixma Pro 1. Do you have any experience of the Canon?

"Also, there is much Internet angst over 'pizza wheel' marks on the P800 prints. I presume this is only with certain papers, but have you seen such a thing?"

Ctein replies: Craig, Sadly, no recent Canon experience. However, I just made a usage agreement with them for four of my photos, so I'm hoping they'll send me sample prints over time.

I've not experienced pizza wheel marks with any of my 3880's or the P800. I'm pretty sure the technical explanation is that the gods favor me and punish others because they are not so pure of heart and noble of spirit as I.

How Do You Fix Aliasing in High-Res Camera Photographs?

Written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

(Author's note: Please read the already-posted responses before commenting. Thanks!)

I am mining the group-mind that is the all-knowing TOP readership.

If you're using a camera that lacks an anti-aliasing filter and if you've had to deal with aliasing in any of your photographs, how did you deal with it?

(Okay, I mean aside from deleting the photograph.)

You've got this photograph you really like. It's exhibiting annoying aliasing. How did you fix it in Photoshop or whatever?

This question comes out of a conversation I had with Richard Anderson a few days ago. I was explaining to him why I was leery of any of the new non-anti-aliased cameras because I'd already had enough problems with aliasing in my photographs from working with them in the past. (If you've never had such problems, I'm happy for you, but that's not relevant to me.)

He thought there were Photoshop techniques for fixing this. I didn't know of any, and we couldn't find them with Google or Adobe Help searches (unfortunately "aliasing" has a strong attractor having to do with rendering type and vector drawings).

I turn to you. Are there post-capture techniques for fixing this? If so, it could change my mind about considering such a camera in the future.

Tips on printing
Totally different subject (well, not entirely): Pascal Jappy in France just posted a very nice interview he did with me by phone about printing. It even contains a useful tip or two that I haven't written about before that may be helpful to folks who've been unsatisfied with the quality of their digital prints. Check it out.

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

UPDATE, Monday: Well, that got resolved faster than I expected!

A couple of points of note: it's hard to get the answer to a question if you don't know how to ask it. “Alias” as a search term is a big fail. “Moiré” works great. But if you (like me) think in terms of the former rather than the latter, it's a stumper.

(Not the first time I've encountered that problem. I still haven't mastered writing macros in Excel because Visual Basic uses such a radically different vocabulary that I can't even figure out how to phrase some questions. Instead of being able to search for specific points that stymie me, I'm forced to read whole chapters of books in the hopes that the information I need will fall out.)

Something else—the moiré adjustment brush setting isn't available before Process Version 2012. The files I was looking at with this problem predated that. They opened up with PV2010 as their default in ACR. No moiré adjustment! It's a good argument for converting to PV2012 on raw files that haven't been massaged into their final form. There'll be tools you didn't even know existed. (Important note: don't do this if you've got a raw conversion in pretty much final form, because there are no exact equivalencies between a lot of the functions in PV2010 and PV2012. The latter is superior, but it's different.)

As for the moiré tool itself, I'm lukewarm. In the real world (as opposed to studio) subjects where I see the problem, it's in areas where there's lots of fine detail of high contrast. When the tool is applied to those areas, it fixes the aliasing, but it also wipes out saturation and flattens out the color overall within the brush radius. Sometimes this isn't a problem; other times it's a big one. I know, I'm preternaturally sensitive to color. Well, that's who I am. For me this is a half-fix.

Still, that's an improvement. It only leaves me half-leery of these cameras instead of totally leery.

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Peaking Photoshop Performance

Not enough RAM and a conventional hard drive will cause
performance to slow down just a tad.

Written by Ctein

[Author's note: I'm hard at work on the third edition of my book Digital Restoration from Start to Finish. It'll be out sometime early next year (I think). Meanwhile, here's an excerpt for your enjoyment and edification.]

Whether you're using Photoshop or some other image processing program, maximizing its performance is especially important when doing photographic restoration. It's easy to generate huge files, bigger than what you're likely to be working with from a digital camera. For example, an 8x10 photograph scanned at 600 PPI in 16-bit color yields a 30 megapixel, 180 MB file. I'll be talking about Photoshop, specifically, but if the image processing program you're running can make use of a scratch disk when it runs out of RAM, the same general advice will apply.

Here's the non-technical version: Stuff your computer with as much RAM as it will support. RAM is cheap. Less than 8 GB will badly cramp your style. Working on a large and complex restoration, double that is barely adequate. My 27" i7 Retina iMac has 32 GB of RAM, 24 GB of which are allocated to Photoshop. You want to leave enough RAM free for other machine functions so that they don't choke—75% is a safe amount to give Photoshop. I can still run out of RAM in Photoshop on occasion…but it's a lot less common now than it was on my old system, which only had half as much memory.

Next, after maximizing your RAM, get an internal SSD (solid state drive) and use it for your operating system, applications including Photoshop, and the scratch disk. You should also put the photograph you're working on there. That doesn't require a very large SSD. A 256 GB SSD will handle this with plenty of room to spare. You can put all your data files and photographs that you're not working on on a different drive. Of course, there's nothing wrong with getting a big one and putting everything on it, including all your data files, but they're a lot more pricey.

A hybrid or “Fusion” drive doesn't really cut it for photo restoration. They marry a small solid-state drive to a conventional hard drive. That speeds up activities that demand accessing only a few gigabytes of data, like launching and relaunching applications, working with text and spreadsheets, and so on. The thing is, the scratch files that your image processing program will generate when it runs out of RAM are huge. They'll swamp the solid-state part of the hybrid drive, and then it performs no better than a conventional drive. Don't get me wrong; they're a distinct performance improvement over a traditional hard drive—but nowhere near what you'll see with a pure SSD.

Practical comparisons
Now I shall get geekily specific. Those of you who don't care, you can skip to the end. You won't miss much.

To convey to you a sense of just how much difference sufficient RAM and an SSD can make, I ran a set of benchmark tests using Lloyd Chambers Photoshop benchmarking actions. They're designed to stress the heck out of Photoshop. For these tests, I used the medium scale benchmark, diglloydMedium, because the small one simply ran too fast on my new machine to do accurate timing, and it didn't push huge amounts of data to the scratch disk.

I first ran the benchmark with Photoshop allocated its full 24 GB of RAM. That's enough RAM that Photoshop didn't have to use the scratch drive. It ran diglloydMedium in a little over 11 seconds with a maximum CPU usage of over three cores (300+%), and it ate up about 15 GB of RAM.

Good enough. Then, what happens when Photoshop runs out of RAM, as it will on an under-equipped computer? I cut the Photoshop allocation back to 4 GB of RAM and ran the same benchmark with the iMac's internal SSD as the scratch drive. Even though data transfer to the scratch disk peaked out at over 900 MB/sec, the time to execute the benchmark almost tripled, to 30 seconds, and CPU usage barely exceeded 100%.

Next I took the SSD out of the picture. I changed the Photoshop scratch disk to a fast external conventional hard drive. This, by the way, is the way you should be running if you don't have an internal SSD as your system drive. If your system drive is a regular hard drive, putting the scratch files there only sets you up for what's known as “drive thrashing.” The disk head has to bounce all over the place to keep up with the competing demands from the OS, the running programs, and the scratch space, and that slows things down horribly. Not a problem with an SSD.

With 4 GB of RAM and a conventional hard drive disk, performance just cratered. The runtime was two minutes with a peak data rate of 150 MB/sec to the drive. CPU usage barely got to 30%.

In summary, running with insufficient RAM and a conventional hard drive slowed the benchmark by a factor of ten!

'Nough said?

Ctein

Photo-writer, sci-fi novelist, photographer, and physicist Ctein is TOP's Technical Editor.

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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