The Online Photographer

Film Friday(?): Film Simulations

I want to thank J. Paul Thomas for opening a little window for me that I was unaware of (and I'm not unaware of much in the photosphere, even though I choose not to follow a fair amount of it). He wrote:

The first 50 years or so of my life were the film years. My retirement on a limited income coincided with the advent of digital, which was a Godsend for me as it is much more economical than film. After some trials I settled on Fujifilm cameras. I totally agree with the concept that film imposes a limit on flexibility and perfection; and, consequently, is somehow more satisfying. Now I have found my solution. Fujifilm offers beautiful film simulations built into their cameras, and Richie Roesh, on his blog Fuji X Weekly, offers wonderful fine-tuning of these simulations. Now I shoot in JPEG only, accept the results and avoid hours processing raw files. For me this is an economical alternative to film which I find most satisfying.

Cool. Isn't it great when you arrive at a working method that satisfies?

I spent some time looking at Richie Roesh's Fuji X blog, and it really is a journey through the past. I knew a lot of the visual signatures of those old films pretty well, and a lot of the simulations really do come close, or close enough, at least, to provide a sort of intermittent view of the originals...some shots better than others; but, even in the not-quite-so-close cases, it's a bit like Dr. Johnson's walking dog: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

But mainly with the color emulsions. I don't think quite so much with the B&W. Some of the B&W "film" looks seem made to look like scanned film, a common mistake. Scanned B&W negative film doesn't look like the film looked or was meant to look, because the response curve of the film was meant to be added to, and counteracted by, the response curve of a paper—negatives had to be printed, remember. The real look of a B&W film was of that film printed on photo paper. In trying to emulate the look of a B&W film, one should only look at prints on paper as the visual reference.

(I'm not saying scanned film can't be made to look good, but the craftsperson must know how to manipulate or modify the file. ...As I hasten to add, lest I insult anyone inadvertently. In any case, when you look for examples of a given film online, you often don't know what you're looking at: a scan of a print, a scan of a negative, a scan of a negative manipulated to look like it would have if it had been printed, or a scan of a negative manipulated to simply make it look better in the eyes of whomever modified it. Not very satisfying for informational purposes.)

Of course I have no problem with anyone who wants to pursue the path of making digital look like film, so by all means, if that's your bag, carry on.

It's a big but and I cannot lie
But, here comes my take on it. (My personal take...I'm not pronouncing from on high.)

First, I can imagine why people might want to make digital look like a film visually. The No. 1 reason might be be because they have a large archive of work on an old film and they want their new work to match the look of their old work so it can all look appropriate when shown together. That's a great reason.

That continuity can be very important, if you conceive of your lifelong output as one large body of work, like Elliott Erwitt's as limned in the great tour-de-force book Snaps. As another aside, this is a subject I don't think I've ever talked about, but the advent of digital significantly interrupted my life's work as a photographer, precisely because it interrupted the continuity between older work and newer work. If I could have skipped from film to digital as it exists today (or as it's been over the last five to eight years maybe), I would have been fine, but of course I had to journey through the entire painful birth and growth of digital technology. And-or, if I had simply continued working with film through thick and thin, that would have been another way to achieve continuity—many photographers did it that way. Eugene Atget used the same camera and materials from when they were current to when they were virtually obsolete. But of course in my case, my work as a photographer wasn't my main work. My main work was teaching and writing about it. So I wasn't a gold miner, metaphorically speaking, I was the entrepreneur back in town who sold equipment and supplies to the gold miners. So I couldn't just go my own way and continue shooting 35mm Tri-X through all those years like the grizzled old prospector wandering through the hills with his burro. I had to know what was happening in digital. And to do that you need to get your hands dirty in it.

To get back on track: other reasons why you might want to make your digital shooting mimic the visual signature of a film: a pleasant feeling of nostalgia (Richie Roesch's blog is subtitled "Nostalgic Negative film simulation," so there's his reason, stated clearly); contrarianism; or perhaps you just like the look better. All valid reasons. There could be more.

Liberator
All valid reasons, but...

...But it wouldn't be for me. I conceive of digital as an advancement of color photography. It's not "just as good" as film—it's better. And not just better in terms of convenience, that great driver of most of the history of photo-tech. Although it certainly is better in that way. No, better as in better. I see it as a liberation of color photography. A liberation from the strictures, constraints, inconveniences and limitations that color photography suffered throughout the history of color in all those years "B.D.," before digital.

Yes, various film-era color processes had their charms and were treasurable—I loved dye transfer prints, and I loved Kodachrome as we discussed a while ago when we visited Nathan Benn—but both of those media, just as "fer instances," came with significant drawbacks. Dye transfer was so difficult to master that most of the world's master dye transfer printers not only could fit into a large living room, at one point they did fit into one large living room—Ctein let us know about the gathering and we published a picture of it long ago, a group portrait (I can't find it now; it was probably on the old blog that Amazon Canada made me take down. I'll ask him if he has a link). And of course Kodachrome in its native state was best viewed in a darkened room projected on a screen, and anyone who lived through the era of home "slide shows" will a.) have nostalgic feelings about it, b.) claim that it was inimitably brilliant when it was at its very best, although it only rarely was; and c.) realize full well that it was hardly the most convenient way to view photographs. Indeed more like the Rube-Goldbergian opposite. (Does anyone still know who Rube Goldberg was? He was a cartoonist, before my time by the way, who pictured many unnecessarily complicated machines to do everyday tasks. Some of the Wallace & Gromit claymation cartoons were similar. That was more my son's generation.)

Personalize it
But here are the good observations that J. Paul Thomas's Fujifilm film simulations and Richie Roesh's Fuji X blog lead me to. First, that we've gotten to the point that shooting JPEG-only with Fujifilm's built-in simulations in the X cameras is indeed a viable way to go. I've been experimenting with it myself, or trying to, in between horrid, wet, drab, clammy-cold gray days. And, it demonstrates that, if you wanted to, you could devise a personal-signature recipe that makes color look like you personally want it to look, and you could bake it into your always-on camera settings, and blissfully ride off toward the sunset with it like the cowboy at the end of the movie. That is, don't make it look like a specific film; go one step further, and make it match your taste. And don't do it picture-by-picture—just set up your camera with your personal recipe and leave it that way.

That's valid too. Well, everything is valid, as long as you're not hurting anybody.

Personally, I'm liking the "PRO Neg. Hi" and the "MONOCHROME+Ye FILTER" simulations in my new-to-me Fujifilm X-T4. Both would still need a little tweaking frame-by-frame, but that's me. When and if  I get a good shot with either ("if" because I've been shooting raw since Bruce Fraser was alive, and old habits are hard to shake), I'll post 'em and we can discuss this whole JPEG-only shooting option further.

Is this post really a "film Friday"? Maybe not, kinda; but sorta. It's all good.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tim Walters (partial comment): "Re 'you could devise a personal-signature recipe that makes color look like you personally want it to look.' FWIW, that's exactly what I do, but with a Lightroom preset. I've never been able to understand why the in-camera JPEG approach is supposed to be an improvement over this."

JTK: "Re ' Scanned B&W negative film doesn't look like the film looked or was meant to look, because the response curve of the film was meant to be added to, and counteracted by, the response curve of a paper....' Which is why I scan the old family prints, rather than negs. They tend to look much better. Sometimes I tweak them a little, dust spot them etc., but the family love looking at them."

John: "In the past it was suggested there were two versions of art history—Ektachrome or Kodachrome."

Mike replies: I love that. Too funny. I took a few art history courses looking at slides in a darkened room.

John Krumm: "I've made at least two dives into the Fuji-verse and film simulations via Richie's (and others') recipes. Always seems fun at first, then kind of tiresome once I realize I only like the recipes in some cases. I usually end up going back to a very slightly modified version of a basic Fuji profile (like your PRO Neg Hi). In the end, it's almost a relief to shoot Nikon now and not worry about the profile!

"Film is totally different. I'm shooting a roll now (I think a British B&W film called Kent 400) on a new-to-me Nikon F100. It's a lot of fun because the camera is a lot of fun, but I'm taking lots of stupid shots I shouldn't waste film on. The F100 makes me think I should just buy something like a D810, which are going for pretty cheap these days. Viewfinder fun, and digital convenience. Turns out we had it really good just a few years ago."

Mani Sitaraman: "To me (as my kids are wont to say when proffering an opinion) B&W photography was, and remains, the process of creating physical objects known as prints. Images? In this digital age, it's hard to remember that there is a difference between a mere image and a picture, a photograph, or painting. I have—on my desk as I type—a superb warmtone print of my parents greeting some public official. It was printed in Germany in the mid 1950s, likely taken on sheet film or perhaps on 120 film, and is a thing of beauty in itself. Aaah...Portriga!"

Sroyon: "Perhaps also of interest to you and TOP readers: Dave Etchells wrote a very in-depth guide to Fuji simulations, including how they tried to replicate the tonal rendition and grain structure of different films. I should say, I'm not so sure about 'In trying to emulate the look of a B&W film, one should only look at prints on paper as the visual reference.' Here's a counter-point: the majority of film photos that we see online, at least from the last 15 years, are, I suspect, scans of negative (or positive) film and not of prints. For example, I've seen way more scanned Acros than printed Acros. Now Acros may have been originally designed with a silver-gelatin print as the final goal, but for people like me who came of age in the digital era and later gravitated towards film, film scans (and the "scanned look") feel no less authentic than prints (and the 'print look'). And I'm someone who makes darkroom prints at home!"

Richard Tugwell (partial comment): "I import my Fuji raw files into Lightroom and I can see the Fuji film presets fine in the Develop module."

John Camp: "I have a small collection of well-known black-and-white photographs. Some are sharp by any standards; others are not, although they retain their impact and charm. One of my all-time favorite photos is 'Running White Deer' by Paul Caponigro. It's a gorgeous print showing a speed-blurred herd of running white deer against a forest background—the camera was held still, allowing the deer to blur. But the forest isn't really sharp, either, by digital standards. I don't know if it was the lens or the focus, but it just isn't quite sharp. Which is fine by me, but you might hear some critical comments from the digital folks, used to modern lenses and digital sharpness. (Or maybe the photo is just so good that we wouldn't hear any criticism at all.) I also have 'Satiric Dancer' and 'Chez Mondrian' by Andre Kertesz, both of which are very soft, and both are really excellent photos, well-printed.

"And maybe that's one of the differences between digital B&W that even film simulations can't get to—the simulations, in our modern cameras, don't look like famous B&W's because they're too perfect. Maybe we don't need film simulations, but Ansel Adams, Andre Kertesz, Paul Caponigro, Berenice Abbott, Robert Capa, David Burnett and James Nachtwey simulations. (The Nachtwey simulation software would be very expensive because it would come with a helmet and body armor.) I've been working some with Lightroom and B&W, and you just can't make it look the same as the guys we grew up with. It remains stubbornly digital."

Joe in L.A.: "One more thing to add to the conversation of shooting Fujifilm cameras straight to JPEG. My X100V allows me to bracket three film simulations. That is, I can take one shot, and it will provide me with all three simultaneously. I often do this, with Provia/Standard, Classic Chrome, and Acros. I usually choose between the two color simulations depending on how vivid I want my greens (largely in nature images), but I always have a monochrome option as well. The downside is if I have a large shooting day, say during a vacation, I can be overwhelmed with three times the images on my computer."

In the Era of Tech, Ignorance is Ordinary

Your camera can probably do things you don't know it can do.

Here's something that a lot of you will probably think is funny. I never knew that [this next has been corrected —Ed.] on my Mac with a Microsoft keyboard, Alt (Option) + backspace deletes the previous whole word, and that Command + backspace deletes a whole line. (YMMV.) Just learned that this morning. My first reaction was, huh, who knew? But then I immediately thought, Mike, a lot of people probably knew, that's who.

You might roll your eyes and laugh at my ignorance (I don't mind), but...are you sure you know every shortcut that might be useful to you? The Option + backspace is a keyboard shortcut. There are also shortcuts for working in files and applications, and another whole set of them for working in browsers on the internet. Do you ever look at lists of shortcuts and fish around for something new that might come in handy? (I guess I don't.)

Expanding on this a little, do you think you know everything useful your computer operating system is designed to do? I probably don't even have a complete grasp of the basics.

I damn sure don't know everything Photoshop can do. Furthermore, I'm secretly convinced no one does. That's right...my superstitious, primitive, ignorant folk belief is that there is not one being in the Universe who knows everything Photoshop is capable of. The people who design it sure don't, because they keep adding other ways to do things it can already do. I don't think even AI can know. As in Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Nine Billion Names of God," perhaps the Universe will end as soon as any single being masters Photoshop completely. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars will go out. I'm joking. Kinda joking. Also a tiny bit...not.

I never took a computer course. That's somewhat bizarre even to me. Everything I know I just...picked up. That's like telling a young person to go out and learn as much stuff as they can for four years and then giving them a college degree.

The pertinent point is not just that your camera can probably do things you don't know it can...but that our baseline, default attitude toward cameras in general and our own specific cameras in particular should be that they can probably do things we have not yet discovered. This should probably be just a normal, ongoing, everyday assumption. It's probably true.

Mike

UPDATE three hours later: Wow! What a coincidence. As if to illustrate this very post, a little while ago (after this post was written and published) I opened an email from Kirk. It was a link to an article called "What Science Says About Walking 10,000 or 20,000 Steps a Day," from NEWSWEEK, which he found on Apple News.

I wrote back and said:

Hi Kirk,
Let's see, if the average adult takes 2,252 steps per mile (that comes from from "Howdy Health" by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension), 7,500–8,500 steps (your article's recommendation) is 3.33–3.77 miles per day. According to an article called "Walkability Index for Elderly Health: A Proposal" at ResearchGate, an average >65-year-old (like me) walks 2.1 miles per hour, so that's 1 hour 35 minutes to 1 hour 47 minutes.

I guess that's do-able.

But really, the only way I could practically accomplish it is if I were to buy a treadmill and put it right behind my desk, and get up from sitting throughout the day and accumulate steps incrementally. That way I would not be prevented by weather (which should not prevent me from walking outdoors, but does), and I could read or watch video content as I walk (preventing boredom, a significant factor in exercise plans for me historically...).

After sending that, I went off to look for some kind of technology for counting steps...

...And learned, to my surprise, that not only will the iPhone I already have count steps for me (on an app called Apple Health that comes with it—it's white with a little red heart), it had already been doing it. Opened the app and there were my steps for today, my steps per day for days and weeks past, and even comparisons between where I am today versus where I was yesterday and where I am this year compared to last! 

Wow, talk about technology being able to do things we don't know it can. Cool coincidence.

Original contents copyright 2024 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Anthony: "Though I've been using Adobe Lightroom for the greater part of fifteen years, I would guess I only know about half of what it's capable of doing. And I just started using Photoshop again after a bit of use ten years ago, and I'm up to maybe 10%. I tend to treat tech on a need-to-know basis, with some good instruction manuals (and YouTube) at the ready. Works for me...."

James Bullard: "I walked 13,586 steps so far today according to the pedometer app on my phone. Five miles of that was in the halls, stairs, and indoor track at the state college in town. As a veteran they let me use the facilities for free. I do that 4–5 days/week. I could use the treadmill but as you observe, that's boring. If nothing else set an alarm and get up every half hour to do some kind of exercise/stretching (mix it up) for five minutes. You'll feel better for it."

Ken: "I only need to know enough to be able to do what I want from my camera, computer, or Photoshop. Otherwise, I'd spend far more hours than I have available to master skills and / or tools I don't have a use for. Life is too short for that. Besides, the devices would likely become obsolete long before I can master everything. But more power to those who have an insatiable desire to learn everything there is to learn from their devices and tools."

MikeK: "You know, I'm not sure I knew those ones. Having had to train people on various bits of software (including Photoshop) over the years, the thing that shocked me most is how little people know and use shortcuts, and just how bad a lot of people are with computers in general. The amount of people who don't even use cmd/ctrl + c/v/x/a for their copying and pasting needs always dismays me when I realise the basic presumption of computer competence is unfounded, and I'm going to have to show people the basics of using a computer as well as the software."

DavidB: "Re 'Your camera can probably do things you don't know it can do'.... This is one of the reasons I've been a fan of Thom Hogan's books on how to use Nikon cameras."

Trevor: "I use DaVinci Resolve for video editing. It has a 4,000 page manual, but fortunately also has excellent video tutorials."

Moose's Verticals

Moose, a longtime reader, has kindly and helpfully supplied modified versions of two pictures recently posted here.

Moose prefers corrected verticals, the lack of which bothered him in both pictures. To illustrate his point, he provided pages where you can see the version I posted and his corrected version by hovering your mouse:

First example

Second example

I really don't mind either of his versions. However, I prefer partially corrected verticals, even in view camera work; both of these pictures have received partial correction in my versions. I feel that we expect to see convergence when looking up at a building, for instance, and when it's entirely missing it looks awkward. "Perfectly" corrected keystoning in tall buildings often looks to me like it is keystoned the opposite way, as in this example from Flickr.  Although you may prefer that, to my eye it looks slightly wider at the top than at the bottom, and I don't like that effect. I will most often make corrections in the "Geometry" tab in Photoshop that go part of the way but not all the way to perfect. My goal (as with most corrections) is to make sure the geometry or perspective or rectilinearity or whatever you want to call it doesn't call undue attention to itself—I want it to look natural, but leaving in some camera vision makes sense to me. Like I say, I think Moose's versions are okay, and neither would bother me if I came across them as someone else's work. But I still prefer my versions, in both cases. YM, like Moose's, MV.

Moose's assumptions have led him into a couple of further problems, however. If you look at the first one and go back and forth. Notice how the objects along the bottom of the frame are compacted. The house in particular becomes more squat, and loses its proportions. This might just be a consequence of him having to work from a small published JPEG, and it might be something he could avoid if he had the full file to work with.

However, in the "Mennonite Boys" picture, I had a memory of the scene that made his version look not quite right to me. So on a trip to Watkins Glen a couple of days ago I swung past Dundee to look at the location again. And, sure enough—that telephone pole on the left is not straight in real life! It's tilted. I took a carefully correct picture of it in the daylight, then compared it to a protractor on my computer screen, and I would estimate the tilt to be about 12–13 degrees. So, here, Moose's desire for rectilinearity has led him into literal error! That telephone pole needs to slant in the picture for it to be accurate.

However, note that this is not to say he's wrong, necessarily. If the picture looks best to him that way, then that's the way he would correct it, and he would still be right...for himself. We just differ in our preferences, is all. Neither of us is right or wrong. Straightening a crooked telephone pole is just as much an option as removing a small distraction in post or making any other small editing change in the image. The idea is to make it look right for your definition of "right," whatever that might be.

There's another editing choice in that second picture that's interesting. Another reader said he would crop out the small cluster of lights along the right-hand border. Well, I like that cluster of lights and I wanted it in the frame. But when I did the vertical correction, I lost about half of it—so I grabbed it in Photoshop and restored it to its former place in the frame by moving it over a little. 

One's man's meat, and all that.

One final point. In explaining it to me, Moose justified his preference for straight verticals in terms of what was normal in view camera work. With a view camera, you can correct geometry in-camera. He's right, and, if that goes a ways in explaining how his preferences evolved, it may go some way toward explaining how my preferences evolved too—because I was a 35mm photographer until around 2003 when I got my first digicam. And 35mm photographers have to learn to live with the sometimes wopplejawed geometry the fixed lens captures. If you try to make everything rectilinear, it will just drive you crazy. It's much better just to learn to live with what the camera gives you.

To each his (or her) own.

Big thanks to Moose for providing the illustrations and hence the grist for this discussion!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Allan Graham: "I have to admit that I did the same thing as Moose. As a student, long ago when we still used the pencil and technical pen, I was trained in architectural perspective drawing, in which verticals are never permitted to converge. It's difficult to un-train the brain. And for photography in those days, not being able to afford shift lenses, we resorted to tilting the enlarger base board and using the smallest lens aperture we could get away with."

Mike replies: Ah yes, and some enlargers actually had adjustable lens stages to make that trick easier!

B&W Over the Years

First off, as the kids say nowadays, this is the first GIF I've ever made. After working online since the late 1950s (perhaps I exaggerate). Proving that you can teach old photo-dawgs new tricks. Even if those "new" tricks are already like 25 years old—GIFs first became common in the late '90s and early 2000s.

These are a couple of images I made back in 2006 (hi, Nari and Mark! Mark is as skinny as a rail now, by the way) to illustrate the difference between old look B&W and new look B&W. I could probably do better now, but I had these and I wanted to see if I could make a GIF in Photoshop. It's not just a change in contrast...the curves are different and the spectral response is different.

The very small point for today: current digital B&W doesn't just reflect changes in the technology. Tastes have changed. People are trying for a radically different look now. It's a matter of what's in fashion and also a matter of what's being modeled as the generally acceptable standard. As I've said before, Shorpy.com is an excellent way to calibrate your eye to the look of old-style tonality, although it's also conflated with the look of large and medium format film. I love it.

Dorothea Lange, Young family, penniless, hitchhiking on
U.S. Highway 99 in California...., November 1936.
Via Shorpy. Rolleiflex TLR medium-format neg.

Check out this one I found the other day. I love Dorothea. Things sure were slow back then, though, weren't they? Imagine having motion blur problems in sunlight that's casting hard shadows! Unless she made some sort of mistake. Wow.

Here again is my simple trick for instantly improving the tones of many digital B&W pictures: open Curves. Grab the straight line of the Curve in the middle. Pull it upward a bit in a direction perpendicular to the Curve, to suit visual taste.

Viola, as Phil Davis never used to say (he misspelled "voilà" once and I used to tease him about it, which he didn't think was at all funny): increases shadow contrast, raises the often radically lowered middle values, and softens the contrast of highlights, all at once. This is just B&W Tonality 101, nothing for you experts out there.

Anyway, if you're not seeing that GIF change every five seconds, please let me know, and the old dawg shall go back to the drawing board.

Mike

Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith—it's actually my favorite too (I got mixed up before). I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H can do it all.

Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Here's How I Do B&W Infrared: Part 1

Words and illustrations by Ctein

[Since we're in the middle of a print offer featuring five of Ctein's expertly crafted digital IR prints, I asked him to explain his IR equipment, methods, and workflow. The resulting article was so long we decided to break it into two parts; the second half will appear tomorrow. —Mike the Ed.]

Let's start with first principles—my artistic philosophy. As I've written often, it's (deceptively) naïve: I want to make prints that show you what I saw. When I think, "Oh, look at that!" I want you to have the same reaction for the same reasons when you see one of my prints.

The naïveté is deceptive because any of you who have tried doing this know that it's bloody difficult to transform what the cameras sees into what you see. For a wide range of values of "bloody difficult"—sometimes it's terribly easy and on occasion it's impossible. It's my goal, regardless.

This creates a bit of a problem. I don't see in the infrared! Consequently, my goal gets a bit meta-. I want to make prints that show you what I imagine I'd be seeing if I did see infrared. It's no longer purely about understanding human visual perception; there's an element of imagination and a fair dose of physics knowledge in the mix.

It really helps that I can see what the camera sees in the infrared! I can't imagine doing infrared photography without an electronic viewfinder or screen preview (a.k.a. live view). No, I can imagine it, and it would be an exercise in frustration. I'd look at a scene, make a wild (albeit educated) guess as to what it looked like in the infrared, make a photograph, and look at the results on the screen on the back of the camera.

A lot better than in the film days, but still....

I started playing with black-and-white infrared digital photography back in 2008–2009, and you can see that work if you scroll to the bottom of this section on my website.

Back then I was using a Fujifilm Finepix all-in-one camera (I hadn't abandoned film yet) which had a weak-enough IR-blocking filter on the sensor that I could add a visible light blocking filter to the front of the lens and photograph solely in the infrared. At a very low ISO—single digits! But it worked, and the results were quite nice. I'm especially fond of this one:

Ctein, Buena Vista Park Path

Once I moved to more "dedicated" digital cameras, in the Olympus line (where I have stayed to this day), this trick stopped working—their IR blocking filters were too good. But I was hooked, so when I got my second Olympus camera, I had my Olympus Pen digital converted to pure infrared by LifePixel.

That was a real step up in quality, plus now I could photograph at decent ISO's! "Thunderhead over the Sierras" is another of my early favorites, made with that converted Olympus Pen.

Ctein, Thunderhead Over the Sierras

I've had three cameras converted by LifePixel and I've been delighted in every case. The company is responsive, helpful, and affordable, with conversions running between $200 and $300 (and sometimes they have sales). If you don't see your camera on the list, inquire. I cannot recommend these folks too highly.

They will even sell you an already-converted camera if you don't have a spare one to convert. That can run a lot more, because you're buying the cameras as well as the conversion, but an older used model may not cost any more than converting one of your own cameras. New cameras with lenses start at about $450 but most will clock in in the high hundreds for just the body.

About the conversions. LifePixel offers several different options. Go with a straight infrared conversion, unless you are positive you want to play with full spectrum photography. I thought about going that route and then realized that if I also wanted to do pure infrared photography (what I cared about most), I'd have to invest in appropriate filters for all my lenses—a.) inconvenient and b.) expensive!

Once you've made that choice, you'll discover that there are more options. I strongly recommend the Deep B&W Infrared conversion with the 830 nm cut off. It provides a much purer result than the Standard Infrared (720 nm) conversion. It costs you a stop of sensitivity, but with modern cameras (especially with image stabilization) this really isn't a problem.

LifePixel will also program in a custom color calibration (at least they did on my Olympuses) that produces a neutral preview and JPEG. Makes visualizing what you're doing a whole lot easier. I really do like these folks!

In case you're wondering, my current infrared camera is an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II. If I ever replace my E-M1 Mark II with a newer model (no, the Mark III and M1X didn't do it for me), I’ll likely get that converted to IR and sell the E-M5.

Lenses

Okay, you've got a camera body, now what about the lens? This is hit or miss: conventional lenses are not corrected for aberrations in the infrared, nor do the anti-reflection coatings work very well there. The latter is the bigger problem. Poor reflection suppression results in large amounts of flare, a pronounced hotspot in the center of the field, and ofttimes images of the diaphragm blades. You will find that many lenses are simply unusable.

In addition, optical corrections may be a factor. This does not correlate with how well a lens works in the visible light. A lens that is good under normal circumstances may crap out in the infrared.

In any case, there will be differences to take into account. For example, my 12mm ƒ/1.4 Leica DG Summilux is unbelievably good for normal photography, even wide open. The aberration suppression is unbelievable. This is the lens I used for the aurora photography on my website; just take a look at those pinpoint stars! It's still very sharp and well corrected in the infrared—happy, happy me—but it has pronounced curvature of field. Fortunately, I always use this lens at ƒ/3.5–4.5 because outside of that range flare and/or internal reflections become intolerable, and this produces ample depth of field with a 12mm lens. I further cut the error in half by setting the focus window two-thirds of the way to one side of the frame. Works well enough!

In case you're wondering, the three lenses I use for infrared photography are that 12mm, the Panasonic 42.5mm ƒ/1.7, and the Olympus M. Zuiko 75mm ƒ/1.8. They all have their quirks in the infrared but they're all acceptable.

My favorite by far, oddly enough, is the 12mm. Why is that odd? Because I've never been particularly in love with wide-angle lenses. I've always gravitated to the long side. My standard always-on-camera lens for normal photography is the 42.5mm Panasonic. That would be the equivalent of 85mm in 35mm format. I rarely use anything shorter than that. But in infrared? The 12mm is my go-to lens. Don't know how to explain it, it just looks right. That was a big surprise, and it was one of the things that drove me to buy the Leica lens, because Olympus's 12mm lens is pretty punk.

Fine, I've got my equipment. Now I'm off to make photographs!

The viewfinder view is great. Decent contrast, a little bit flat because of lens flare, but good enough for me to evaluate a scene. The image is nice and neutral. When I look at the resulting photograph (well, actually the preview JPEG, as I photograph in raw) on the camera screen, it looks flatter than it did through the viewfinder, but still tolerable. Mostly I depend on what I see in live view; I only go to post-exposure chimping in IR to check focus and sharpness.

I import my raw files into Adobe Bridge and that's where the fun begins. Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of my saga!

Ctein

Book o' the Week:

Ernst Haas: New York in Color 1952–1962. "When Haas moved from Vienna to New York City in 1951, he left behind a war-torn continent and a career producing black-and-white images. For Haas, the new medium of color photography was the only way to capture a city pulsing with energy and humanity. These images demonstrate Haas's tremendous virtuosity and confidence with Kodachrome film and the technical challenges of color printing."

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Today at B&H Photo

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

Peter Komar: "I'm fairly positive that LifePixel will now have a surge of orders for camera conversions. The IR images from Ctein’s website are gorgeous and just ooze silver like traditional darkroom prints but we all know are now inkjet printed, oh he has mastered that as well. Thanks for the print sale and posting the detailed and informative essays on the IR process, can’t wait for part II."

Polarizing Filters on Digital

Does anyone have experience with using ordinary polarizing filters on a digital camera? I really have very little experience with them, even on film. I'd like to hear from you if you use them, or if you've experimented and decided against.

All I know is that I have a pair of good prescription sunglasses that have polarized lenses that I use as driving glasses, and I really like them. They don't appear to be "colored" at all—they're more or less just neutral-density filters. But the way they enrich colors, cut haze, and, especially, render clouds, is quite addicting. I don't always remember to put them on when I'm driving, but on good days—meaning, bright, clear days—I'll usually go for them because they enhance my enjoyment of looking at the landscapes passing by. I'm wondering if or how much a similar effect might translate to digital sensors.

Item second in regard to filters
TOP reader Sroyon Mukherjee (he comments using his first name) has written a very thorough article called "Colour Theory for Black and White Photography Part 1: Digital and Analogue Filters" over on Hamish Gill's 35mmc. It's a deep dive (even if you don't continue into Part 2), but even if you don't read every word, many of the illustrations are excellent and thought-provoking, and well presented. Well worth enjoying. The article is more like a book chapter than a blog post but it's worth scanning through it (my smaller computer balked at it, archly informing me that "This webpage was reloaded because it was using significant memory") and you might well like to return to it for a thorough perusal.

Sample illustration from Sroyon's article

One thought it inspired in me was that black and white really requires a point of view as regards tonality. Maybe we can get by in color just "going with our guts" and picking whatever seems nice with any particular picture, but the tonal differences with B&W are so marked and so different in their effects that we really need to make some fundamental decisions about tastes and goals. It used to be easier; we'd just settle on films, developers, papers (FDP) and filters we liked, and let the tonality play out as it naturally did; but digital is so much more plastic that radically different effects on the same file are possible and we need to have a firmer sense of what we're after in order not to get lost. For instance, the blue-filter devil-child in the above illustration. I would never use a blue filter with humans; then again, I never have owned a blue filter. The only thing they're good for is as a demonstration of what not to do.

I always recommended keeping a small pile of prints and magazine clippings with tonality you liked near at hand in the darkroom, to use to calibrate your tonal palette in your mind before or during working. Still good advice. Maybe better advice now than it used to be, even. Tonality is tougher than color; it has a wider range, and a broader range of expressive effects are potentially admissible and acceptable.

Anyway: recommended. Nice job. And Sroyon must be young, because that was a lot of work.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

The Apple Watch Series 6. This is a portal to Amazon from TOP.

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Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Martin Doonan: "I used to use polarizing filters extensively (when I was shooting a lot of landscapes in bright light) on digital. They work the same as with film because the incident light is 'corrected.' There are creative ways to use them, too, for which I think digital has an advantage (chimping, live view, etc). For example: a polarising filter can be used to eliminate reflections from the surface of water to 'look under the water' so to speak. But the effect can be tuned as a rotating polarizer enables this to be tuned so you can see partially below the water, maintain some surface effect. Quite easy to get right with digital, much trickier with film."

Jim Metzger: "I will not be the first to say this…you need a circular polarizer, not a linear polarizer for digital sensors. I use Nikon or B&W and have observed no color cast, just intensification of color. I have used them on artwork reproduction and the artists are very happy with the results. Polarized sunglasses will darken the LCD screen on the camera and sunglasses in general will distort the colors in a scene, and I do not use those. I also go so far as to get my prescription glasses without UV filter coatings."

David Rayburn Haynes: "I use polarizing filters on my digital cameras and find the results to be the same as when I used them on film cameras—reduced glare, accentuated colors, increased contrast, and so forth. I rarely use color filters with digital cameras. I find that the Photoshop 'black and white' filter provides much more control."

Brian Geyer: "I find polarizing filters vital, and use polarizers frequently in pursuit of the wildlife and nature subjects that I seek. The benefits are identical, regardless of whether shooting ’chromes or digital images. I'm a Nikon user, and generally find it best to avoid matrix metering when using a polarizer. I auto-bracket the exposure in 1/3rd stops after first setting a fixed +0.3 stop of compensation, using center-weighted manual metering. I've standardized on using B+W's premium series of 'KSM' MRC circular polarizers. Other brands and grades may be equally effective, but do be sure that you use a circular (not linear) polarizer. Polarizers provide the only practical way that you can easily cut through glare and thereby enhance color saturation. I find a polarizer essential in lots of daylight outdoor settings, including city-scape scenery."

Bryan was the founder of Really Right Stuff (RRS). —Ed.

Sroyon: "Thank you Mike for linking to my article; it's an honour to be featured on TOP! I should really thank Hamish too, for giving me the freedom to go down whatever rabbit-hole I like and write about it—at great length! And yes, I'm one of those annoying millennials who enthuse over film photography and darkroom work, without knowing what a drag it was (or some of it was) back when film was the only option and not a fun alternative and luxury :-) .

"Re polarising filters, I have a circular polariser for my 'landscape lens,' a Sigma 10–20mm ƒ/3.5 for Nikon APS-C-sensor DSLRs (I bought the lens off eBay and the filter came with it). But it's new to me and I haven't really tested it yet. I read a book called Light: Science and Magic which has a good discussion of polarising filters, culminating in a remarkable example (at least it seemed remarkable to me): page 47 of this (legal) PDF. I'm not sure if it was recommended on TOP or somewhere else, but I liked the book in general, and learned a lot from it."

Rob de Loe: "Circular polarizers are needed with cameras that have mirrors. Linear polarizers work with mirrorless. I use polarizers extensively because I often work near water. They let me decide very precisely whether or not I want reflections, and how much. Usually you need some reflection to show it's water, but I don't like so much reflection that you can't see bottom in shallow water bodies. Unfortunately my lenses have front filter threads ranging from 39mm to 82mm, so I have to carry five filters.

"Black and white is my thing, so I'm going to enjoy reading Sroyon's chapter. On film, I was much more accepting of whatever decisions the film manufacturer made about how to represent colour with luminosity. I did carry a set of colour filters, but found them a bother and never got much beyond Deep Yellow and Orange. Digital changed all that. Digital laid siege to Castle Tone and sacked it. Tones are what I say they are now. This is why I have no interest beyond technical curiosity in monochrome sensors. I make the call on how colours are represented, and I now have so many different ways to do it in Lightroom (none of which include someone else's presets). Despite talk of sacking, I have my own guardrails. I use the 'Toupee Rule': if what I've done with tones sticks out (or worse, like bad HDR, draws the eye to itself for its wrongness) then I've gone too far. It's not about tones being 'natural' or 'faithful' (compared to what, and to what?). Instead, for me it's about tones being pleasing and balanced. My choices should make sense relative to what's in the scene."

Irony of the Week

1932: Group ƒ/64 has its first group show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The public packs the house. The name of the loosely affiliated group of like-minded friends "refers to a small aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures great depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background" (Wikipedia).

2021: Common cameraphones render almost all pictures "evenly sharp from foreground to background," so almost every digitographer on the World Wild Web with a larger-sensor camera shoots almost every picture wide open most of the time, regardless of the subject, with no thought to what ought to be in focus or not, presumably to signify he has a camera better than the ones in phones.

(A further irony: I'm the one poking fun.)

Mike

P.S. At that Group ƒ/64 show in 1932, everyone's prints cost $10 (about $190 now) except Edward Weston's, which cost $15 (about $285 now). seven or eight years ago, Matt Witkovsky, chair of the photography department at the Art Institute of Chicago, told me that "a good Weston" was going for about $800,000 at that time.

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Kenneth Tanaka: "Cute irony, indeed. The ultimate in democratic focus has arrived...on your telephone, no less! (As for me, I'm more often trying to get more depth of field into many of my images, not more bokeh!)

"Re: Weston prints, yes they're still pricey and I suspect that his most seminal prints approach the figure that Matt noted. But the market has cooled a bit and there seem to be more prints out there for sale, mostly for much less money. For example, one of his vintage dunes prints is currently on auction at Sotheby's with a top estimate of 'only' $150k."

John Krumm: "I guess the further irony is that those smartphones mostly do it with fixed-aperture, fast lenses, and they use computers to mimic larger sensor background blurring, while the larger-sensor cameras sometimes use computers to achieve focus stacking for good front-to-back focus. Like with this shot of the Golden Gate Bridge."

Mike replies: That's lovely. Is that yours?

John Krumm: "The photo of the bridge belongs to Cookdog, real name not known. I just happened upon it in an image thread in the Z forum. People were surprised to see an image of the bridge from a new perspective, since it is photographed so often."

Mike: I was too!

John Robison: "I believe that Golden Gate image really proves the point that the most important equipment for a photographer is between his ears. What a great shot."

David Aiken: "Another irony. In 1932 when photographers chased more depth of field, their problem was getting more depth of field because large format cameras required longer focal lengths. Now a lot of people are chasing less depth of field because of the shorter focal length lenses they use with smaller formats. Ansel Adams would be using a small format camera today, in order to get the depth of field he wanted. Why aren't the people chasing shallow depth of field today using large format cameras?"

Mike replies: It would certainly be the most logical way to get the most bokeh, eh?

Arg: "That link you provided for the ergonomic mouse—if you scroll down a bit, it says 'frequently bought together'...and lists the left-handed version!  :-)  "

Mike replies: That actually makes sense—it's because sometimes people who are battling RSI regularly switch mouse hands from left to right and back again.

Common Problems with Digital Black and White

I love B&W—first love, highest loyalty, greatest pleasure—but I don't like most of the digital B&W I see.

Why? Not because it's digital. There's nothing wrong with the tools. The problem is merely in the fashions, styles, or conventions that have taken hold and become current and conventional.

Herewith, a brief rundown of my gripes. Bear in mind that I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the digital images I see on the Web taken as a whole.

Soot-and-chalk: The term is St. Ansel's. Curious, because he was not known for middle grays! But despite the dramatic appearance of his prints, he went to great lengths to tame contrast and get a full scale in his prints. "Soot-and-chalk" refers to a tonal scale that pushes too many of the lighter tones into pure white and too many of the darker tones into pure black. It can be used as a personal style; Daido Moriyama for example*. The reductio ad absurdum is a picture with almost nothing but black or white in it. Although even that can be used effectively, for instance in the most famous picture by Bill Brandt. However, most digital photographers whose work I see don't have a solid grasp of tonal range, and simply don't know how or why to get detail in the darkest and lightest tones or where to draw the line or what the aesthetic impressions they are imparting might be. As a general rule, the music of tonality is in the mid-tones, and in finding whatever the right amount of detail in the highlights and shadows might be.

Too sharp: Oversharpening is a typical failing of digital in general—and it's worse in B&W. It results in a razory harshness that imparts an acrid or acidic "flavor." (If you will.) B&W film in certain developers had an edge effect—light tones got a bit lighter near a tonal boundary with a dark tone and dark tones got a bit darker near a tonal boundary with a light tone. That could give even prints of gentle tonality a sort of 3-D effect. It's curious that over-the-top sharpening in digital results in "haloing," which is sort of a Devil's version of a similar thing. The general rule is that sharpness should be natural and not etched and harsh.

Depressed mid-tones: This was an effect you could get with Agfa Rodinal in the days of film. It was a developer said to provide "acutance" (I could get more acutance with plain old homemade D-76 [ID-11]: just dilute it 1:3 and stand back while Rodinal gets out-Rodinal'd.) People pursued that effect, seemingly never noticing that all their mid-tones were pressed downward in the tonal scale. That is, without changing 0 and X, what should have been rendered as Zone VI was rendered as Zone V, Zone V as Zone IV, etc.

Well, that's what happens with almost all digital conversions. Don't know why, but all the mid-tones are depressed, which gives me a feeling like the flu, or the fog of despond.

Hyped-up local contrast: There's usually "a slider for that." In Nik Silver Efex 2 it's called "Structure." In Photoshop it's known by the term that came from film, "Unsharp Masking"...except with sheet film, you actually used an unsharp mask, and it required special equipment and about a day's work. Now it takes roughly five seconds to do...and another split-second to overdo, which most people, especially the overanxious, do do. Speaking of doo-doo....

All of the above: And if all four of these shortcomings are found in the same shot—as they all too frequently are—the effect is like punishment. Flee!***

It's worth reminding ourselves that these are not rules. Any effect can be expressive if it's skillfully, tastefully, appropriately, or deliberately applied. Remember when I was bitching about dogs' noses being out of focus**, as a way of complaining about people who reflexively use too wide an aperture? Well, I even managed to find an example of that woeful effect that's delightful—check it out. In that picture the out-of-focus blur only emphasizes the extreme gloss of the ceremonial shoes—and to me gives the picture a tinge of the dizzying feeling of a wedding day. Nicely done.

But for the most part, I don't like looking at digital B&W. In general it's terrible and gives no pleasure. The exceptions mostly prove the rule. My advice: digital is a color medium****, so stick to color. Unless you know what you're doing. [UPDATE: See Sharon's comment in the Featured Comments, below.]

Mike

*James Maher wrote a trenchant brief description of the importance of "Stray Dog": "Moriyama’s most famous photograph is the 1971 Stray Dog, which took on a life as a symbol for post-war Japanese culture. In a culture that had been defined by order and purity, for a photographer to identify himself with, and celebrate the idea of a stray dog, was a profound shift. It brought underlying cultural feelings to the surface of alienation, darkness, self-hatred, and despair. He showed both himself and Japan as a stray dog, roaming for scraps of identity in an uncertain and quickly changing world."

**You see what I did there. "Amused myself, and that's half the battle" —Craig Ferguson.

***No, not the bass player. I mean "RUN AWAAAY!!" —King Arthur.

****Yeah, I know all about how sensors really work; the statement stands.

Original contents copyright 2019 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:

Christopher Mark Perez: "In the late '70s/early '80s I was a B&W print tech in Hollyweird and know well what you are talking about, but never really knew how to get close to the original effects with digital. You've written several very good columns on how to improve digital B&W images. I've taken your thoughts and ideas and examples closely to heart and am much much happier with my own work in this area as a result. Thank you."

robert e (partial comment): "There are vicious cycles at work. Aspiring photographers see legendary B&W work, but as compressed jpegs on web pages, viewed on uncalibrated laptop screens, and use that as their model. There's also the tendency of our short-attention-span habits to favor graphical impact over nuances requiring sustained attention. Which also suits the compromised gamuts of uncalibrated consumer tools."

Mike replies: I agree with what you say except the part about seeing "legendary B&W work." I suspect most just see lots of random B&W work on their computers. Some good, most not. They mimic what they see as a whole, because they assume what they are seeing constitutes a standard for acceptable work.

Mike Plews: "May I suggest one more? It would be trying to replicate the effects of a red filter by pulling down the blue level until the sky turns black. A little of this can be a good thing but too much and you run the risk of nasty edge effects. I have a couple (ok more than a couple) prints that look like someone outlined the horizon with a sharpie. I didn't notice it at first as I was so tickled with the overwrought fake filter effects I was getting. Out here in the scenic Loess Hills of Western Iowa this could be described as a 'bet you thought you were skinning a fat hog' type of situation."

Mike replies: That is one expression I've never heard before. But then, never been to Iowa, more's the pity.

John Camp: "The critical question you didn't answer: Can this be fixed? Or for people like you, will digital B&W always suck? Is the effect you're looking for confined to chemically developed B&W? Have you tried to match a good print? I have a B&W photo of yours hanging on my workshop wall, an apple nestled in grass, and the whole process was digital right up to the printing...is that a final judgment?

"(The reason I love that photo is because the grass is green and the apple red (I think) but they share the same B&W tonality. In addition to the general aesthetic quality, there's like a subtle color-based tongue-in-cheek joke there...maybe only understood by painters.)"

Sharon: "I agreed with your post until you threw in the towel on digital black and white prints. They are difficult but not impossible. Frankly most photography you see is crummy, just like most art. It doesn't mean it isn't worth the effort to try and get a good black and white pigment print. The process is improving. Every print is no longer green or magenta—the ink is capable of producing a more neutral print now."

Mike replies: Yes, I think you're right, and although I don't often do this, I take it back. Because of course there is good and even great work being done in digital B&W, and I certainly haven't seen much of all that's out there, even though I see more than most people do. After all, the title is merely "Common Problems." It's too easy for people to think I'm damning them, and throwing their babies out with the bathwater, and that's neither good nor fair on a site that's intended to be supportive of photographers of all levels. So I apologize.

Zack Schindler: "Here is some of my B&W work. I would love to know how to make them look better. Have never really been satisfied with how they look. One Two Three Four Five Six."

Mike replies: A small sample, but some of it strikes me as nicely seen work. As to how to make them look better, and only since you asked, let me start by asking you a question. Here's your original:

Does the following look better or worse to you?

Depending on how you like that, I'd use it as a starting point for getting to a rendition of this picture you liked better and by extension, getting you to a point where you're more satisfied with your technique in general.

The above comparison is in part a fool's errand, because B&W is very dependent on subtle differences of tone and density, and trying to convey that with JPEGs on the Web is analogous to trying to convey tone of voice in a short text. I didn't change much here, though. All I did was keep your sky the same but lighten the image overall, and change the curve shape of the lower tones. Your tones are heavy—inky—and look exaggerated, which to me is in conflict with the gentle, pensive mood of the scene. It's just an old man looking out over the water; why kick up the Wagnerian pomp and bombast?

Plus, your light looks like no light I'm familiar with. I'd go for a look like late afternoon light on a clear day with slightly hazy sunlight. I try resist understanding pictures in terms of technical measurements. I try to understand the feeling, the mood, and to relate those things to the feeling and mood of real light I know. What are we looking at here? What are we showing? What did it feel like to be there? There's a point at which the picture will snap into a feeling of "rightness" for you. If that's what you learn to go for, that's how you develop a personal style.

I straightened your lamppost just because I saw the distortion too much, but there's no necessity to do that.

Martin D: "Agreed with all three criticisms, but not with your conclusion. I do only digital these days, and only B&W. Excessive contrast, over-sharpening, depressed mid-tones: I certainly agree on the first two and probably on the third one too. I commit these crimes on a daily basis and try to reshape myself into someone at least does not commit them by default. Over-sharpening is the worst offender. Somehow we seem to be able to detect this immediately in other peoples photographs, but not in our own work. The problem is I think less in the actual nature of the digital image but in the psychology of the digital editing process. Over-sharpening is the weakness inherently associated with digital B&W picture making—the answer is not to give up on B&W, it is to develop the perceptive maturity that allows us to see in our own work what our untrained eye can only see in the work of others. Digital is still fairly recent; it may take us a few decades to become naturals in the new visual world. Let's start now."

Rodolfo Canet Castelló: "This is the kind of post I enjoy the most, those dealing with visual education. In Spanish we say lo que pica, cura (what smarts, cures). This post smarts to those who, like me, love B&W and try to make perfect prints. Let's hope it cures as well, by making us to look for better editing."

Brian Stewart (partial comment): " The relativities have changed. In the film era, I found good B&W easier than good colour. YMMV, but this is my experience. I could develop and print my own B&W. Doing the same for colour was not an option, and having someone else do it for me was either too expensive or resulted in poor quality. In the digital age I find that this has reversed. I can do good colour very easily myself, but good B&W is more challenging. For the vast majority of us without a monochrome sensor, we shoot in colour and convert to B&W. There are just too many options. We have way more control and we need to learn how to master it."

Mike replies: I think you've said that better than I did. That "reversal" you're describing is very pronounced IMHO.

[See the full Comments section for the complete text of partial comments.]

David L: "Unfortunately there is a lot of awful black and white photography, in both film and digital, out there on the web and social media for millions to see and be misled. And then see others try to emulate that awful stuff. There are of course great examples of carefully crafted images with wonderful tonality. But they are the minority. Myself, after shooting large- and medium-format film for decades and knowing its characteristics and strengths, I can generally manipulate a digital file to look fairly good. It's much more than the simple click to monochrome in the software, neither quick nor easy. As in any pursuit, you have to put in the work."

New Backup Plan (?)

Dateline, Sunday March 31st — Today is World Backup Day, in case you haven't already guessed the reason for the recent topics. (Also because I got a stonkin' new Mac Mini which is awesome, brilliant, slick and fast.) I'd link to WorldBackupDay.com, but they're probably getting slammed, because the site has not been responding for a while. Maybe they took World Bandwidth Day off to go to the beach. —Mike

So here's the backup solution I've decided on...as of, um, this minute. See if you approve. I'm not too slick on this stuff. (Warning: I do not think this is a very interesting post. You might want to treat World Backup Day as a holiday.)

This is the second time I've tried to get serious about backup. The last time I was helped by a well-timed boot in the rear from Bill Tyler. That was back in February of '18, which, as Peggy C. noted, was the last time we talked about this subject. Back then, Bill challenged me to sign up for Backblaze before sundown, and I did.

Here's the latest plan. See if ya folla.

1. My Mac Mini has a 512k SSD. That drive holds everything except photos and music.
2. The Mini's SSD drive will be backed up to my Time Capsule router as usual, via Time Machine. (Time Machine is the name of the automatic backup software that comes with every Mac. The AirPort Time Capsule, which Apple no longer makes, is a wireless router that includes a hard drive or hard drives for...well, for backups via Time Machine.)
3. Next, I'll return the two new WD My Passport portable drives I got yesterday. No longer part o' the plan.
4. For the photos and music, I think I'll continue using my existing 2TB WD My Passport portable drive (which is named "Passport One"). I've already had one fail and I know they're not terrifically robust, but if one fails I'll just rotate another one in. I currently have two of the little portable drives, and new ones are cheap enough. (They're bus-powered and about the size of a pack of cards.)
5. A reader who wishes to remain anonymous donated (nice word for "gave me as a present") an AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad 4-bay storage enclosure he was no longer using. (Pretty nice.) His insight was that vibration reduction and proper cooling help hard drives live longer—the AKiTiO is solid and has a big low-speed fan in the back. He told me he had persistent problems with his hard drives until he stripped them out of their single enclosures and put them in the AKiTiO, at which point his problems stopped.
6. For the enclosure I got two slow (5400 RPM) 3.5" 4TB hard drives. I researched madly till late at night and ended up buying two of these from B&H Photo*. They were on sale for $84.99 each when I bought them.
7. With the two 3.5" drives, I've decided not to go with RAID 1, based on the advice I got here yesterday. Instead I'll take Rodolfo Canet and Trevor Johnson's advice and use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 (MacOS only. But it's on sale for World Backup Day! Twenty percent off) to back up the Passport One drive to each of the two drives in the AKiTiO every time I download a card. That way new shooting will exist in three places before I even remove the card from the slot.
8. The Mini and Passport One will both continue to be backed up to Backblaze as before.

So here's the upshot:

• Mac Mini: backed up on Time Capsule (kept on a shelf halfway down the basement stairs) and with Backblaze offsite backup.

• Passport One drive with all my photos and music on it: backed up on the two identical 3.5" drives in the AKiTiO and also on Backblaze.

So I'll have:

• Three copies of the boot drive disk—the original in the Mini plus one backup in the house and one in the Cloud.

• Four copies of the photos/music external drive—the one attached to the computer for everyday use, the two identical clones in the AKiTiO, and one in the Cloud.

So what say ye? Approve?

I know that some of you are probably going to say I need one more offsite disk, solemnly rotated in and out of a safety deposit box at the bank, but really, my photos aren't that great.  :-)

Mike

*By the way, best not to buy hard drives from Amazon. As you probably know they tend to stick things loose in a roomy box with a couple of symbolic air pillows thrown in. Not smart with hard drives not to use careful packing.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Want to help?

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

Neil Swanson: "So I wonder, how long does it take to upload a 2TB drive to Backblaze or a similar service? It would take seemingly ages to go from drive to drive but to a 'Cloud'?"

Mike replies: Per Backblaze: "Ideally, Backblaze should be able to complete your initial backup within 30 days, and that’s OK. Be patient, especially if you have a lot of data. Backblaze will complete your initial backup as soon as possible." I think mine took about 10 days or two weeks, something in there. But it happens in the background, so it's not any hassle.

Bruce McL: "Nice backup plan. As a retired Mac IT guy I approve, with one addition. Buy one more drive for your enclosure. Have Carbon Copy Cloner make a clone of your system SSD to the new drive once a week, or have it update the clone every night if you want. Get a small capacity, fast, spinning 3.5" drive—1TB 7200rpm HDDs are cheap, under $50.00. I don't quite trust Time Machine to recover everything after a catastrophic failure of a system drive. It can work, but it's a messy process. With a CCC cloned drive it's easy. Plug the backup drive into any Mac. Go to System Preferences: Startup Disk and select the backup HD. After a restart, everything from the system drive will be there and will be functional. If your SSD suddenly died, you could be back at work in minutes."

Mike replies: Bruce, is there any risk of having all my local drives in one non-RAID enclosure? I thought last night that maybe I'll just streamline things and put the media on a separate drive in the enclosure, instead of on the 2TB My Passport portable. So I'd have four drives in the enclosure—one fast 2–4TB drive for media, the two slow 4TB drives for media backup, and the one you suggest, a 1TB fast drive with the backup of the System on it. 

William Whitaker: "So, today I have to drive everywhere in reverse?"

Mike replies: Don't get your back up.

Michael T.: "Whatever you end up doing it is important to test it from time to time. For example, see if you can boot your Mini from the two external backups. If not you need to understand why and remedy. Same with backups of your photos and music. It is also a good idea to occasionally run the repair function in disk utility on your backup drives. I run carbon copy and find it to be easy to use and quite robust. Good luck!"

Mike replies: CCC recommends that you restore several random files every now and then just to make sure everything's working smoothly. I'll also try to remember to learn how to boot from the backup once everything's set up.

Kev: "This has been a very useful topic, thanks Mike. I'm moving from a mini to the new MacBook Pro, and it’s changed things a bit in terms of storage and back up, so your thoughts are very timely. Also the commment made re. Time machine as a backup tool - I’ve always been a CCC guy, only had to use it once to recover from a borked main disk, and it was faultless and easy. Recent change of machine made me give time machine a go, and it has proved useful when I accidentaly wrote over a crucial file, but I think I'll follow advice and also ensure I have a weekly clone with CCC. Excellent stuff, and you explained it better then I could, as currently I have the plan sketched out on a piece of A4 paper as it was getting so complicated!"

Bill Poole: "Passport-style drives are not really adequate for continuous use. The drive gets too hot when run continuously. Heat shortens drive life and these drives are not specified for long life to begin with. They are good for clones that are off most of the time, and for data transfer. One option is to get a drive in a better case such as sold by OWC (available on Amazon). The better option these days for any external drive that will run continuously is the Samsung T5 line you mention in your subsequent post. The two clones should really be staggered in time, perhaps by a week. Otherwise you may find both clones and the cloned drive all have the same problem, perhaps something like ransomware. One of the clones should be offline, in a small Pelican box, in an ESD safe bag, with a desiccant. And it goes without saying that everything runs off a UPS."

Timo (partial comment): "As long as the system makes sense to you—and is something you do regularly—it seems fine. It mirrors my understanding of contemporary computer set ups: that is, one has a small, fast boot disk with the OS and programs, connected to larger but slower data storage, in our case photos, that use conventional Winchester drives. So each side of that Thunderbolt connection needs a back up strategy. But a few notes/tweaks:

1. On the boot side of things:

• I agree with others who think you should have a bootable clone of your Mini's internal drive. Carbon Copy Cloner (essentially a nice GUI wrapper for the UNIX 'rsync' command, but with customizations) is terrific for this. So one 'task' the left-hand pane would be a clone of your boot drive. I might suggest you spring for one of those Samsung SSDs on sale today. Plug it in, and schedule the task to run every night at 2 a.m. or so. Now you're really covered if the Mini's internal fails, and if you bought the SSD, the boot from the clone is fairly speedy (whereas a boot from a 5400 rpm external drive is painfully slow). Best of all, it's set and forget
• The first CCC clone takes awhile, but subsequent clones compare what files have changed and only copy the newer stuff, cutting back up times dramatically
• Keep using the Time Capsule and Time Machine, but think of this more as a system for recovering files accidentally deleted or corrupted. In back-up jargon this is 'versioning,' and it's nice to be able to 'go back' and fetch something from before a user-error. However, whole system restores from Time Capsule back ups are flakey and/or time-consuming enough to not be worth it, except as a fallback, in my opinion

2. On the data side of things:

• I think you'll need a TB3 —> TB2 dongle to hook up that AKiTiO to your new Mini
• you will probably need to 'exclude' your new drives in the AKiTiO from your Time Capsule, or it will fill up prematurely (depending on how much data you have, of course)
• the Thunderbolt 'pipe' between your new 5400 drives and the Mini is really fast, such that the drive platter speed in your new drives will be the limiting factor in terms of speed
• I personally find the copy-to-two-drives a bit of overkill for one problem (drive failure) but less-than-ideal with regards to human error. I might change the copying such that one of your new WDs is a copy of the passport photo/music drive, and the other WD is a trailing copy—something only done weekly. (And one can use CCC to schedule this weekly copy.) So, if you muck up something on your music/photo drive, and inadvertently (or automatically) copy that muck-up to one AKiTiO back up, you still have an older version to recover a file or three from.
• I learned from kind of crazy Reddit threads about 'shucking'—essentially buying cheapish Best-Buy-branded external hard drives, and 'shucking' them out of their enclosures in order to use the drive inside in your own enclosure. The advantage is cost, and, as your benefactor who put drives in his AKiTiO noted, it's also good not to have to rely on the commodity-price drive controller bundled with the external drives on sale. At any rate these drives in external enclosures often go on sale for prices one-half or less of bare drives (but also with less warranty)."

DavidB: "Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, Third Edition.

"It examines a variety of strategies, programs, and hardware for cloning and archival. Worth the $15 price."

Mike replies: I just read the sample—I especially like that he "took control" of his Take Control books from the original publisher, as recounted in the "Read Me First" section.  :-)

John Camp: "I've often wondered why people need such huge-capacity drives. I know there must be a reason, I just don't know what it is. A 1TB drive like the one you illustrated could hold (I think, I may be wrong, I'm not a numbers savant) up to something like 13,000 uncompressed raw photos from my GX8's. Yet Geoff needs a 2TB drive! To me, that's inconceivable. On a full 2TB drive, If I looked at each of my GX8 photos for ten seconds each (and if I had that many) it'd take me virtually two entire work weeks just to page through them. That's a lot of #@$%! photos."

Ken Tanaka: "In answer to John Camp’s puzzlement over why hard drives have reached, and exceeded, such enormous capacities the answer is simple: VIDEO. The incorporation of cinema-class 4K video facilities into still cameras has mandated lightning-speed cavernous memory cards and these ginormous tiny portable drives. Certainly, larger still image file sizes also contributed to this trend but not with the force that video-in-still-cameras did. Video is also responsible for increasing the complexity of camera menu systems, a recent complaint campaign here."

Mike replies: I also think that 2TB isn't all that much. Take John's figure of 13,000 photos per terabyte, Geoff's 2TB drive, and Geoff's statement that he has 25 years' worth of digital images archived on one drive. As I do the arithmetic (never my strong suit, n.b.), 26,000 photos over 25 years is close enough to 1,000 photos a year, and with two weeks for giving it a rest (and making the arithmetic simpler) that's only 20 photos a week. I'm a light shooter but I don't think I've ever shot less than 20 exposures when I go out to photograph with a digital camera in my hand. I'll do that much just to warm up.

I have about 80,000 Plus-X, Tri-X, and P3200 35mm negatives from my younger days. Granted, I keep everything, even the rankest junk, because of the way negatives are filed and stored. But that was all done between 1980 and 2000. So that's 1,040 weeks, meaning I shot an average of just under 77 pictures a week during those decades, which is, in turn, just over two rolls of film per week. That's not very much at all.

iPhone Anomaly

Look what Ned Bunnell found...very interesting.

I won't give away the game because you should look at the first picture and see what you notice. Ned explains everything in the post at Instagram.

After wrestling with film and darkroom work for decades, I always had a strange affection for anomalies. I'd notice things that were often invisible to other people, like signs of bromide drag in exhibited prints. And like Ansel with his "black sun," I actually made a few pictures that featured technical accidents. One, for instance, features a flat-filter reflection that mirrored a full moon in the middle of a lake.

So far I haven't developed any affection for digital glitches and flaws, though. My problem with portrait mode on the iPhone 7 Plus (I can't afford to keep up with the very latest iPhone camera, alas) is that I can't seem to remember to turn it on.  :-)  But that's clearly my fault.

Mike
(Thanks to Ned)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Here’s the situation

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

Scott Abbey: "Ha! Portrait mode appears to be no better at masking than I am!"

Tam: "I have seen this with those favorite iPhone portraiture subjects, cats. Shoot the photo in Portrait Mode at the right angle and with the right background, and the background gets computationally blurred...except a halo between kitty's ears."

hugh crawford: "This is funny.

"I'm surprised that this works so well. Or at all even. First of all it's supposed to somehow make a check that there is a person in the photo, then the depth mask on the X, XS, and XSmax , is one quarter the resolution of the photo i.e. 1/16 the pixels, and the mask is half resolution or 1/4 the pixels. The XR has only one rear facing camera (when did all film cameras become 'rear facing'?"), so it does not do depth maps except with the 'front facing' camera—you know, the one that points behind you. The XR makes do with an algorithm that recognizes a person-shaped thing with face-like features, and then does some really impressive edge detection to make its mask.

"My guess is that the new Sony time-of-flight depth mapping camera will show up in future iPhones to make this work in a less kludgy way.

"The first three minutes or so of this video explains it.

"After swearing off writing code for the last few years (except for a little program to lay out 6,500 photographs in a book) I got sucked into playing around with the Apple camera API this last week. Right now I am playing with a little app that saves the intermediate masks etc. to use in Photoshop.

"I have also been playing around with the new iPhoto application in Mojave, and it lets you muck around with the portrait mode fake DOF on saved photos, and even turn portrait mode off. This leads me to believe that all the masks and meta-data are included with the saved images."

Dori: "It happens with the Pixel 3 too. That's the current state of fake software blur. It might get better but don't expect it to be the same as an optical one. Just know the limitations of the software and keep those original files saved."

Moose: "'...Very interesting.' But not in the least surprising, at least not to me. As someone who regularly creates different bokeh, subject background separation, etc. by blurring backgrounds, I'm deeply aware of how difficult masking subject from background can be. When I read about this capability, I automatically dismissed it as unlikely to be reliably useful. I do notice how it applies a gradient to the amount of blur, which is also something I do, to emulate the differential in blur with depth. It's not badly done, but not ideal, either. Doesn't appear to be simple Gaussian blur, as that would not result in the edginess of the bokeh in the most details areas, the farthest background, top center, for example. On the other hand, I know many people who enthusiastically shoot away with their smartphones and are very pleased with results that I would immediately dump. Am I denying myself simple pleasures? Well, only in favor of the deeper pleasures of an image well captured and turned into a pleasing printed or web image.  \;~)>  "

adam palmer: "Another phrase for that is bad Photoshop. (I know it never made it to Photoshop but it's the same problem.)"

Digitizing 35mm Slides and Negatives

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

-

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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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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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)

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Only shallow sometimes
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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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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
Give Mike a “Like” or Buy yourself something nice

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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!

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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!

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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...."