Digital black-and-white

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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Once again, in the last thread, we see the statement that digital files can’t produce good black-and-white prints. This can be true if you just convert to monochrome. To replicate the tonalities we have grown use to in silver prints we have to decrease the contrast in the shadow and highlight areas and increase the midtone contrast. There are a number of ways this can be done in programs like Photoshop and Lightroom. Increase clarity (midtone contrast), increase contrast (which increases the “S” shape in the curve, something different from changing grades or variable contrast filters in silver printing) or changing the curve yourself controlling the changes in the highlight and shadow areas to suit your own tastes for a specific image. If you are unfamiliar with these techniques, I suggest Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2, an add-on for these programs and Aperture, that can emulate specific b&w emulsions, provides understandable slider controls for the tonal manipulations and tosses in some local controls, film borders, e.t.c. as a bonus.

Remember, it’s all in the curves. Any other thoughts or tips on digital black-and-white?
 
Control the ratio of Red, Green, and Blue, and you have almost infinite control over the "look." It's like using color filters with real B&W film, but even more flexible. Most image processing programs have a way to do this, some are easier to use than others. Photoshop has the channel mixer. Picture Window Pro (which I use) has Transformation, Color, Monochrome.

I also use Paul Roark's 3MK printing, which uses black ink only. It allows the full paper white to show through, and adds a tiny bit of texture that the eye interprets similar to fine film grain.

I don't try to copy the look of real film. I do try to make the digital B&W look as good as I can. And since I grew up with Tri-X and Plus-X, there's a bit of the spirit of those films in what I try to do.

--Peter
 
It's perfectly feasible to get very nice digital b/w shots. Done it many, many times. As Bill states, it's all in the curves.

The one drawback I see is that pure white is pure white with digital, even with the much increased flexibility of RAW files. I have shot zillions of concerts and with the extreme contrast there, this is a limitation you will bump into quickly. Highlights will blow out without any hope at recovery.

In contrast (pun intended), you can brutally overexpose film in these circumstances, and still get away with some highlight detail. I overcooked some Tri-X recently, and although I could not salvage any highlights in the (16 bit) scans, I could get a somewhat decent wet print from those negs, even with my limited darkroom experience.

And having been exposed to classic b/w prints all my life, my brain is simply conditioned towards a classic silver look, and it perceives most digital b/w as 'fake'.
 
I like quite a lot of the digital b+w that I am seeing lately. The conversion software is getting better and I think a lot of people who used to do simple grayscale or desaturate conversions have started realizing that digital b+w needs the same hard work and attention (and maybe even a bit more) as color. The only thing that I see too often is overburned unnatural looking skies. "Easy on the clouds, people" would be my tip.
 
Aside from good editing techniques, for me the single most important thing in digital BW is to pretend that the RAW image I'm capturing is actually BW. Sometimes I loose focus that I'm trying create a monochrome image and I start visualizing in color, especially if I sneak a peak at the color display.
 
The single best plug-in for black & white is ALCE2. It stands for "A Local Contrast Enhancer". It is beyond amazing the before and after effects. None of my photographs are seen without having this judiciously applied when I'm "developing".
 
I think another big problem is the difference in spectral sensitivity, between b/w film and digital...

As an example, a red jacket photographed with Tri-X will look very different than digital converted to b/w.

The difference is even more severe with an orthochromatic film like Adox 25, which has less red sensitivity than modern panchromatic b/w films and a sensor.

On film the reds will show up very dark. The digital conversion will probably show up much lighter.

And that is not a trivial thing to emulate. It can be done, but you would basically have to profile the film and sensor and then generate a matrix to perform a 3d color transformation. It's the same principal as an icc profile. So, you would need a special plugin for Photoshop that performed this transformation, or you could roll your own in a program like Nuke, but you're to need to know how to program and also generate your curves from samples.

It's a big problem in the movie business. It's next to impossible get a production insuranced, if you intend on shooting on bw stock. The thinking is that if the movie crashes and the insurance company has to take possession, they don't want to be stuck with a black and white film, which they view as box office poison. So, with a few very rare exceptions, everything is shot color and then converted to black and white.

'The Man Who Wasn't There' was shot on color stock and converted. The cinematography is absolutely superb (Roger Deakins), but to my eye it looks like color converted to black and white. Not because of the contrast, but because of the difference in spectral response. The opening shot is of a rotating barber pole. Barber poles are red and white and on b/w film the stripe should be dark. In the movie it's a medium gray. Skin tones and lips are a constant problem...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchromatic_film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthochromatic

http://www.adox.de/english/ADOX Films/Art/ADOX_Films/page1/page1.html
 
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Harry Lime said:
I think another big problem is the difference in spectral sensitivity, between b/w film and digital...

As an example, a red jacket photographed with Tri-X will look very different than digital converted to b/w.

The difference is even more severe with an orthochromatic film like Adox 25, which has less red sensitivity than modern panchromatic b/w films and a sensor.

On film the reds will show up very dark. The digital conversion will probably show up much lighter.

And that is not a trivial thing to emulate. It can be done, but you would basically have to profile the film and sensor and then generate a matrix to perform a 3d color transformation. It's the same principal as an icc profile. So, you would need a special plugin for Photoshop that performed this transformation, or you could roll your own in a program like Nuke, but you're to need to know how to program and also generate your curves from samples.

It's a big problem in the movie business. It's next to impossible get a production insuranced, if you intend on shooting on bw stock. The thinking is that if the movie crashes and the insurance company has to take possession, they don't want to be stuck with a black and white film, which they view as box office poison. So, with a few very rare exceptions, everything is shot color and then converted to black and white.

'The Man Who Wasn't There' was shot on color stock and converted. The cinematography is absolutely superb (Roger Deakins), but to my eye it looks like color converted to black and white. Not because of the contrast, but because of the difference in spectral response. The opening shot is of a rotating barber pole. Barber poles are red and white and on b/w film the stripe should be dark. In the movie it's a medium gray. Skin tones and lips are a constant problem...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchromatic_film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthochromatic

http://www.adox.de/english/ADOX Films/Art/ADOX_Films/page1/page1.html
Click to expand...

+1

I also find that the renditions of digital BW are "too smooth". It's tough for me to put this into words but if you look at a BW from film then a BW from a digital camera the digital image looks "smoother".

I'm not a chip or programming guy so all I can think is these sensors are programmed to smooth out the information that the sensor receives prior to providing an image. It's a problem in my eye. It's like someone saying I'll just "smooth" that over. My thinking is don't make decisions for me. My guess is this is all done after a considerable amount of market research by camera manufacturers and sensor makers into "which image is most pleasing to the eye". This bears nothing to do with a representative image it's a construct of information thru post processing in camera.

Someone will probably provide technical information to refute this but I feel like Neil Young when he said digital/CD files were flat compared to music from analog / vinyl
 
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jan normandale said:
+1

I also find that the renditions of digital BW are "too smooth". It's tough for me to put this into words but if you look at a BW from film then a BW from a digital camera the digital image looks "smoother".
Click to expand...

You are picking up on the lack of acutance in most digital images.
This is a result of.

- The AA filter in front of most sensors that kills micro detail.

- Bayer pattern interpolation to generate the final image. Foveon sensors to not have this problem and the images are very sharp, with good acutance.

- Overly aggressive noise reduction.

- Lack of grain. Adding some grain can actually make an image appear sharper, because it gives your eye something to lock on to.


The M8/M9 do not have an AA filter in front of their sensor and at 18MP the M9 is quite sharp. Leica also performs very little or no noise reduction in camera. I like their approach, because it allows the user to have full control over how much detail they are willing to remove.

Combine that with Leica glass and strong micro contrast and you have something special. The M-series also use a CCD vs CMOS and some people claim that CCD's generate more filmic images.
 
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The biggest problem with digital b&w is for it to look appealing and 'credible' it has to look like b&w film, which pretty much kills the whole point of digital b&w with its crazy long time post processing or plug-ins that make one feel like a cheater.

When b&w film is no longer available or its too expensive then I might be forced to shoot digital b&w... Or if the sensors have pixels that are on the same size as a film grain, which means hundreds of megapixels.
 
Images on TV and the movies look so bad these days, I don't think most people know what a B&W image is supposed to look like anyway. I can't watch the stuff on the tube and at the theatres. If digital converted to B&W floats your boat, fine, but it is a far cry from what a B&W shot should look like. If we're simply talking about an image on a monitor, then digital converted to B&W looks "good enough" I suppose, but it's a far cry from what it could look like. And of course you're not going to get any beautiful fiber prints digitally. To me the whole subject of digital B&W is a dead issue. A lot of people try to talk it up, but it is inferior to B&W film in so many ways. Maybe people seem to feel they've got a ton of money in the digital technology, so they want it to be the best.

That smoothness people talk about in digital files is a lack of detail in the shot. Probably not bad for portraits, but again, it isn't as good as film, and I for one refuse to cover my eyes, turn off my brain, and pretend that it is.
 
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GSNfan said:
The biggest problem with digital b&w is for it to look appealing and 'credible' it has to look like b&w film, which pretty much kills the whole point of digital b&w with its crazy long time post processing or plug-ins that make one feel like a cheater.

When b&w film is no longer available or its too expensive then I might be forced to shoot digital b&w... Or if the sensors have pixels that are on the same size as a film grain, which means hundreds of megapixels.
Click to expand...
Yes I share this point. Well said.
 
I respect all of the above opinions and agree with most if not all. I suppose for the purist, digital BW will never do. That's OK. Some of my feeble attempts at digital BW have been very satisfying and others not. Indeed the results depend on many factors. Assuming correct exposure, contrast and color balance seem to be the two main factors that make or break a digital BW image (IMHO). Even though I have enjoyed photography for 50+ years I am still very much a novice when it comes to digital imaging.

Mike
 

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It’s often easy to tell the difference between silver and b&w inkjet prints. Viewing the print at a steep angle can show on many papers that the ink is on the surface of an inkjet print rather than under a gelatin coating. This is not obvious when the prints are framed under glass and your judgement is based on tonality, sharpness, e.t.c.. On my NYC apartment walls there is a mixture of framed silver and b&w inkjet. No one, and that includes a number of excellent photographers, has ever been able to tell which is which. I have shown museum curators and gallery owners a mix of prints. In some cases I was asked to show silver. After the prints were put away, I have asked some of these folks if they realized they were seeing a mix of silver and inkjet. The answer was no.

You can control the color and tonal conversions in a digital black-and-white, if you wish, to mimic silver. Asahi, some while back, ran some tests to see what folks thought was “sharp.” This led them to working on 35-MM lenses whose MTF curves held up very well to 30 lines per mm and then fell off. Yes, anti-aliasing and a Bayer array does effect sharpness, just not quite as much as a lot of folks think. The degree of anti aliasing is up to the manufacturer. Get a full frame DSLR and you are not going to have much of a problem. I expect the situation will continue to improve. if you are comparing your final print results to those from a 400 speed 35-mm film, the anti-aliasing/Bayer argument falls exceptionally flat. Start shooting 4x5.
 
I've seen prints from 100MPixel Monochrome cameras. No color Mosaic filter. They are amazing. At work I used to have a Tektronix Phaser IISDx Dye Sublimation printer. The prints are amazing, have held up for almost 20 years and going.

Most of the images in the LFI issues are monochrome. If Leica introduced a monochrome version of the M9 along with a dye-sub printer to match up with it.... amazing.
 
GSNfan said:
... digital b&w with its crazy long time post processing or plug-ins that make one feel like a cheater.
Click to expand...

Crazy long like the hours spent in the darkroom first developing and then printing the film?

As for 'cheating' with plugins, I suppose that comes down to perspective. I don't really see it as any different to choosing a certain film for it's characteristics - like tri-x for grit or neopan 1600 for heavy noir. I mean - both the film and the plugins are available to anyone, and both are just a means to an end...
 
It can be done and you can have a print too!

It can be done and you can have a print too!

I agree with Bill, you can make a great b&w image digitally and now you can even have a traditional silver gelatin print made as well from the same digital file.

With a pluggin like Silver Efex Pro 2 you can address virtually every issue posted in the forum so far. SEP 2 also has built numerous profiles that emulate different film types including the film's bias to different wavelengths of light, the grain pattern, and overall contrast. SEP 2 also allows the photographer a level of control far superior to the traditional wet darkroom and it is repeatable.

Now on to printing. That great black & white digital file you created with SEP2 can now be printed on real light sensitive photographic paper. There are companies (full disclosure: like the one I work for) that can take a digital file and using a laser expose traditional fiber baryta photo paper. The print you get is identical to any you can make in a traditional darkroom. In the end you have a hybrid process that combines the best of modern tech with the traditional beauty of a silver gelatin print.

FYI the company mentioned above is www.digitalsilverimaging.com
 
OK, pop quiz. One of these is digital, one is on colour film converted to b/w in Photoshop and one is on b/w film. Which is which? All of them are toned to confuse you, but there is a clue if you look hard enough.

fix6.jpg


trig.jpg


choral3.jpg
 
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