Hurray for computers...

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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In the days of the wet darkroom, developing and printing black-and-white film offered more controls over the final image than working in color. Perhaps because of this, a large number of serious photographers did the majority of their work in black-and-white. (The Pete Turners, Saul Leiters, Ernst Haases, Joel Meyerowitzes and Stephen Shores were outnumbered by the Gene Smiths, Richard Avedons, Don McCullins, Dorthea Langes, David Vestals, Ansel Adamses, Henri Cartier-Bressons, Robert Doisneaux, Edward Westons, Paul Strands, Man Rays, Sebastian Salgados and Ansel Adams.) Not so today. The preponderance of digital photography and the raw file has made controling the digital color image not only easier, but offered a greater range of controls, than the b&w film darkroom. The question is “Is it worth it and do you do it?”

The answer is obviously different for different people. If you are primarily looking at images on a computer screen and sharing them via the web or email, there are probably variations enough between screens that trying to make the equivalent of “the fine art print” is futile, but there are adjustments that can improve even the screen image beyond the obvious ballpark adjustment to brightness, contrast and color values. If nothing else, brightening up what you consider to be the important subject area and slightly dimming and dropping the contrast of the other areas, even if it’s just “burning the edges” can produce a more effective image that draws the viewer towards what you think is important. Even when it’s obvious what is important, this simple adjustment can almost always improve a picture.

At the other end of the scale is the “framed exhibition print.” It can be big on the wall, but, truth is, if it’s a print of something important to you, it can be any size; you just want to make it as good as you can. And what processing steps do you take to make it the print you want? The answer - all of them. A lot of the good printers I know literally go down the menu of the program they use, look at every control and say could this control do something that would, in my eyes, make this picture better? Often the answer is no, but they check every possibility, and, in today’s digital darkroom, that’s a lot of options.

Then comes the point of the entire process, making the print. I have friends who have double giant monitors that are calibrated regularly and friends with only laptops and a prayer. But a screen is not a print. As much as it hurts, the answer to a good print is often throwing away the first print and making the changes you think necessary in a second print. If you’re famous, your gallery can sell the first print as an “ARTISTS PROOF.”

So where do you fall in line in this process. The two photographers that went out of their way to help me when I started were Gene Smith and David Vestal; so, of course, I am a print maniac. But I’ve seen family albums that were gawd awful by those standards. But content was king, and what was in those albums meant more to the owners than any photo masterpiece. What is important? I don’t know. But there are digital tools now available that allow controls in color that were only available in black-and-white in film. Do you think they are important? Do you use them?
 
After years of print making (b&w and color dark rooms, then computers), I’ve come to book making as my preferred way of showing my photography. I like how bookmaking forces me to think more deeply about my photographic intentions.
 
Jamie Pillers said:
After years of print making (b&w and color dark rooms, then computers), I’ve come to book making as my preferred way of showing my photography. I like how bookmaking forces me to think more deeply about my photographic intentions.
Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more. For years I've had a GBC binder that let me make books. With silver prints that meant dry mounting two photos back to back to make a conventional page. With inkjet there are papers printable on both sides. That said, I also like a small (8 1/2 x 11) portfolio case with single sided prints on a heavier than normal paper that certainly wouldn't be suitable for a book. That said, all this may be because the walls of the house are already covered with framed photographs and most of them were not taken be me.
 
this thread is a blessing. looking forward to the ideas of others, as i'm in a quandary about where to go from here (macbook pro, aging eyes, and mild color blindness).
 
Less is more for me. I don't do a lot of tinkering with my images. I've seen too many photos ruined by incessant over processing. The basic controls in Lightroom are more than enough for my purposes. Most of the time I just shoot JPEG B&W and do a few minor touch ups. Shooting Raw gives me color channels to work with local contrast and the ability to pull up deeper shadows but I seldom need much of these controls. I print everything but I'm too lazy to do anything else with my prints. They just reside in boxes to be shown to friends and family. These days there's little of the "showing" so everything just lays dormant.
 
Bill Pierce said:
In the days of the wet darkroom, developing and printing black-and-white film offered more controls over the final image than working in color. Perhaps because of this, a large number of serious photographers did the majority of their work in black-and-white. (The Pete Turners, Saul Leiters, Ernst Haases, Joel Meyerowitzes and Stephen Shores were outnumbered by the Gene Smiths, Richard Avedons, Don McCullins, Dorthea Langes, David Vestals, Ansel Adamses, Henri Cartier-Bressons, Robert Doisneaux, Edward Westons, Paul Strands, Man Rays, Sebastian Salgados and Ansel Adams.) Not so today. The preponderance of digital photography and the raw file has made controling the digital color image not only easier, but offered a greater range of controls, than the b&w film darkroom. The question is “Is it worth it and do you do it?”

The answer is obviously different for different people. If you are primarily looking at images on a computer screen and sharing them via the web or email, there are probably variations enough between screens that trying to make the equivalent of “the fine art print” is futile, but there are adjustments that can improve even the screen image beyond the obvious ballpark adjustment to brightness, contrast and color values. If nothing else, brightening up what you consider to be the important subject area and slightly dimming and dropping the contrast of the other areas, even if it’s just “burning the edges” can produce a more effective image that draws the viewer towards what you think is important. Even when it’s obvious what is important, this simple adjustment can almost always improve a picture.

At the other end of the scale is the “framed exhibition print.” It can be big on the wall, but, truth is, if it’s a print of something important to you, it can be any size; you just want to make it as good as you can. And what processing steps do you take to make it the print you want? The answer - all of them. A lot of the good printers I know literally go down the menu of the program they use, look at every control and say could this control do something that would, in my eyes, make this picture better? Often the answer is no, but they check every possibility, and, in today’s digital darkroom, that’s a lot of options.

Then comes the point of the entire process, making the print. I have friends who have double giant monitors that are calibrated regularly and friends with only laptops and a prayer. But a screen is not a print. As much as it hurts, the answer to a good print is often throwing away the first print and making the changes you think necessary in a second print. If you’re famous, your gallery can sell the first print as an “ARTISTS PROOF.”

So where do you fall in line in this process. The two photographers that went out of their way to help me when I started were Gene Smith and David Vestal; so, of course, I am a print maniac. But I’ve seen family albums that were gawd awful by those standards. But content was king, and what was in those albums meant more to the owners than any photo masterpiece. What is important? I don’t know. But there are digital tools now available that allow controls in color that were only available in black-and-white in film. Do you think they are important? Do you use them?
Click to expand...

There are definitely two schools of thought on some of this. You’ve got your SOOC believers on the one hand, and on the other hand you’ve got the craftsmen whose working methods are as you describe here: “ A lot of the good printers I know literally go down the menu of the program they use, look at every control and say could this control do something that would, in my eyes, make this picture better? Often the answer is no, but they check every possibility, and, in today’s digital darkroom, that’s a lot of options.”

It’s also a lot of work, but to some it’s more than “worth it”, it’s vital to the craft of photography. The combination of the dynamic range and color depth hidden in the RAW files of the most recent digital sensors with the processing tools found in the current iterations of Photoshop or Capture One opens up possibilities of realizing the potential of every single “capture” that dwarfs what the one size fits all SOOC algorithm coughs up.
And, yes, there are possibilities now open to mere mortals for realizing one’s “vision” through honing a given color photo that were not available in the WYSIWYG days of Kodachrome, E6, and C41. Black and White too, for that matter. The digital darkroom offers up more possibilities than were readily available in the film/wet printing world, but the possibilities for digital honing and craft are so endless that there is a bit of “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” quality to it. Twenty plus years ago, a friend of mine who owned one of the nation’s larger film processing labs told me, by way of warning, that “Photoshop isn’t a program, it’s a career.”
Fifty years ago most people dropped their roll of film off at the shop, wondering if any of their photos would “come out”, and picked them up a few days later, happy if some of them “came out”, and then went on with their lives; all the while Ansel Adams was spending entire days sequestered in a darkroom massaging a print. The parallels to today are unavoidable. The photographic possibilities, today, contained in a RAW file are much, much more than those decided for us by the SOOC result (“it came out!”) but there can be a huge cost in time to find them.

But there are digital tools now available that allow controls in color that were only available in black-and-white in film. Do you think they are important? Do you use them?

They are important, and they are actually more comprehensive and more powerful than anything that was ever available in the film world, and I do use them (poorly). It’s rewarding, all those hours in front of a monitor, tweaking, while my SOOC friends were spending the day getting drunk with loose women, twerking, because their pix had already “come out” the instant they took them.
Choices.

Happy New Year, people!
 
I almost always shoot raw format in digital, but I don't do a lot of tinkering with the images. If I was able to get a good exposure with a clean, unbunched histogram, there isn't a lot of adjustment that's needed in Photoshop/Lightroom/whatever. Mostly I just adjust the white balance, maybe tweak the levels a little, and rotate and crop if I didn't get the shot quite level.

Scanning film for me requires a little bit more work to remove dust and scratches, but again, I don't do much beyond making sure that the scanned histogram isn't all bunched up, then tweak white balance and levels as needed. I will add a little unsharp masking, but that's pretty much it. Sometimes I'll go nuts and convert a color image to black and white if I think it'll look better.

I'm sure there are a lot more things that I could do to bring out the best in my images and maybe this year I'll learn how to do that.
 
I'm a 'friend with a prayer' and I like it that way. I do about the same procedure with color either digital or negative:

Scan or download

If digital in goes to Make Tiff if a negative it goes straight to ColorPerfect.

Usually, in Color perfect there isn't too much to do: brightness, maybe gray adjustment, and a little gamma.

Then bring it to PSE and go to levels if I have a small color cast adjustment

Border the file, and save.

So, yes computers are great.
 
Lately I've found that I don't mind seeing a bit of colorful noise in my photos as long as it doesn't form a distracting pattern due to camera sensor artifacts. So I've taken to turning both Luminance and Chroma Noise Reduction sliders to "0".

I don't have a proper print-viewing station, so I judge color, contrast and brightness by viewing in bright sunlight and also in the dim lighting of my apartment, and when I come up with something which seems to work well under a variety of lighting conditions, I call it good.

My recent prints are small, usually 4x6 or 5x7. I got the idea after visiting an exhibition of Edward Weston's contact prints, and was really struck by the experience of viewing at close range. It's also a practical move for me, and gives me the freedom to grow bored with some photos and replace with others.
 
Funny thing is that my digital workflow is very similar to my darkroom workflow: Dodge/burn/crop. Adjust contrast and light. My Epson printer has been set up to the 3 different kinds of papers that I use (done by hand) and with a calibrated monitor I get the results I expect 90% of the time.
 
I came to photography via ORWO slides. They were awesome back then. Projected by primitive soviet made projector on home made screen from bed sheet on two wooden planks from home renovation leftover. Zero post processing. SOOC and great.

How over processed are Fred Herzog's scans from slide film? I went to his earlier exhibition and large prints didn't look over processed.

Over processing is primitive act. I like to do it with my cheese sunsets on FB and over processed bw on instagram in squares:).

If i want to see something crazy and pleasing as art where are impressionists and else.

Color photography to me is documenting of reality.
I always like some prints with content. Digital, film, color who cares...

Photography as art? It doesn't exist to me. But, IMO, every print brings photography closer to it.

The strong side of photography is in true reality been documented. SOOC is closest to true reality. Some cameras, lenses are more capable than other for SOOC.

I recently checked photos from Sigma DP1, DP2. Great made cameras... with garbage SOOC colors. Monochrome pictures are sharp, but very few could handle tonality without making it as dump-load of grey and over processed.

Over processed images in large quantities are torture for my eyes.

I liked Canon 5D and 50L SOOC JPEG1. They were good. And so are SOOC JPEG1 from E-PL1 and 15 f8 lens.
Import to LR from memory card. Save as JPEG1 on HDD. Find and click on print. Colors no good at print comparing to screen? Tweak in print settings and re-print.
 
Also a fan of books and small bound collections, and digital makes that very easily possible.
I sell my work as framed prints in galleries and elsewhere, and that's fine. But, maybe because I'm still a photojournalist at heart, the work I enjoy viewing (my own and others) and shooting are not singular "THE image," but ones that are part of a story or a collection greater as a whole. Yesterday in one thread I posted a photo of an architectural detail from a trip earlier this year. Who on earth would hang that up? But in context, it makes sense.

When people ask me for photo advice (which I don't care for; I feel like I still have no idea what I'm doing), I always say to put together a book, on Blurb or scrapbook or whatever. Plenty of photos I take that really don't deserve the effort of a matted frame and what little wall space I have, but deserve to be seen in print.


But as for digital and how it relates to the question: I'm also a print fanatic as one could imagine, and also embrace the so-called hybrid workflow. It seems photographers describe themselves with that term as though its a rarity, but I would guess that most of us who shoot film are, we just aren't as loud as some of the all-wet-process proponents.

The advances in digital editing software, at least the interfaces, have really aided in that. I used to spend hours reading or watching tutorials on people editing scans in Photoshop, adding curve layer on curve layer, then looking at my pile of negatives, and crying.

I'm using C1 right now, and can get a scan at least looking presentable in a few minutes. I can put in the work for something hang-on-the-wall worthy, but I also have more put-in-the-book keepers that wouldn't otherwise see daylight, be they digital or film, because they weren't worth the time. But I get what some of you are getting at—there's so many tools at hand that it's tempting to use ALL of them. (This is part of the reason I'm averse to some of the modern DSLRs–I don't need 51-point face-tracking AF and 2K video, but I feel like if I don't use it, I'm missing out on something I paid for!) What I do appreciate about C1, LR, and the like is how a lot of those complex tools are simply integrated. I don't have to have 8 layers of curves adjustments and unsharp masks when there's a Brightness and Clarity slider. The options are there, but if I don't need 'em, I'm not tempted to (over)use them. Some tools are analog to stand developing, or creating a physical unsharp mask in the darkroom—useful tools to have, but a lot of work and not necessary for each and every image.

And that reminds me of the process debate. The other day in a little tourist town I passed a gallery of a photographer with a big banner in the window: "NO PHOTOSHOP, NO FILTERS—everything straight out of the camera!" Dramatic if a bit garish photos of Olympic NP. It got me thinking why this methodology is a point of pride, while others might make note on how much post-processing they complete. Does one method or another count as 'cheating?' I don't have any answers but only more questions, though I suppose it comes down to what signifies authenticity, and what John Ruskin would call 'sacrifice' as a value signifier. Something that is 'too easy' is not valued.

In photojournalism school, I had one very strict definition of what 'authenticity' was (and that was SOOC; photoshop, I thought then, was for mediocre artists), and after grad school turned that on its head. But now we're getting into how to define art, and I won't go that direction!

Anyway. Won't comment on how Instagram/social media fits into all this beyond a technical comment. I do use IG to share work, and it's very effective in that regard. But man oh man, I swear everything color I post, looking sweet on a calibrated monitor, comes out overexposed, purple and unsharp on my phone. At least that's a style people seem to like...

(apologies for an uncharacteristically longer than my usually long responses, but Bill, you always pose great discussion topics—thoughtful, broad and open ended. I come to RFF once every few months for technical discussions/answers, but these always get my brain going. )
 
At a loss to define pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, “I know it when I see it.” Most of us here feel like we “know” when a photo has been overprocessed, and use that adjective a little more indiscriminately than we probably should; we say overprocessed when what we mean is poorly processed. You can poorly process a photo with one swipe of the saturation and contrast sliders to full blast and one click, in seconds, or you can spend hours carefully bringing out the best possible from any given file by subtle adjustments here and there. There is no such thing as “overprocessed” if the time spent yields the desired result, a result which isn’t in some cases available any other way.

And, SOOC isn’t unprocessed, nor is it necessarily closer to “reality” it’s just processed by someone other than yourself, the guy or team that decided on the processing algorithm that was going to be applied to your RAW file if you chose to accept their preferences.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but no photograph, film or digital is “realistic” or “pure”. It’s all mediated.
 
I love it when a fellow with a digital says he shoots "SOOC". Ask them where's the little x's and o's?
 
Your title says a lot!

What has photoshop done? Great software to go with the hardware.

Happy new year and my best to you for 2021.
 
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0712/nuts-and-bolts.html

I have Seven computers within arms reach as I type this. Meaning I have to get back to work. Write device drivers for one, write a new algorithm on another, run firmware on a third, this month marks 42 years of writing code for a living. Cross-Compilers on two to write code for the embedded processors.

I spent the 80s working in the Research Lab when digital imaging was a new thing. My "personal computer" cost $400K. It was fun to write code and see the results on the "Ramtek 9460", Animation on the "Ramtek 9465", and "Deanza IP8500". Then use a "Matrix Camera" to produce 8x10 Polaroid hardcopies and Panasonic TQ-2025 Laser Disk for stop-frame video. All required custom code for every low-level operation, Fortran-77 of course. I had one animated graphic that required one month to compute, on a Vax 11/780.

The past few weeks have been "use/Lose" vacation time. I still write image processing code, but just for my own use- don't get paid to do it anymore. On the M Monochrom- tend to use Lightroom to convert to JPEG, after I've run the DNG files through my own code. The M8- wrote custom code for color infrared images. Orange filter to block blue, leaves that channel IR only, histogram equalization to boost the channel. Looks something like Infrared Ektachrome E3 when done.

With everyone owning Digital cameras these days, you'd think more people would start writing their own code to process the images...

Much of the code I wrote in the 1980s was to transform the intensity values from the sensors into radiometrically calibrated data. That's about as close to reality as I've ever worried about. Just because I got paid to do it. I have the data sheets required to do this for the M8 and M9, but have no interest in doing the same.
 
Bill Pierce said:
In the days of the wet darkroom, developing and printing black-and-white film offered more controls over the final image than working in color. Perhaps because of this, a large number of serious photographers did the majority of their work in black-and-white. (The Pete Turners, Saul Leiters, Ernst Haases, Joel Meyerowitzes and Stephen Shores were outnumbered by the Gene Smiths, Richard Avedons, Don McCullins, Dorthea Langes, David Vestals, Ansel Adamses, Henri Cartier-Bressons, Robert Doisneaux, Edward Westons, Paul Strands, Man Rays, Sebastian Salgados and Ansel Adams.) Not so today. The preponderance of digital photography and the raw file has made controling the digital color image not only easier, but offered a greater range of controls, than the b&w film darkroom. The question is “Is it worth it and do you do it?”

The answer is obviously different for different people. If you are primarily looking at images on a computer screen and sharing them via the web or email, there are probably variations enough between screens that trying to make the equivalent of “the fine art print” is futile, but there are adjustments that can improve even the screen image beyond the obvious ballpark adjustment to brightness, contrast and color values. If nothing else, brightening up what you consider to be the important subject area and slightly dimming and dropping the contrast of the other areas, even if it’s just “burning the edges” can produce a more effective image that draws the viewer towards what you think is important. Even when it’s obvious what is important, this simple adjustment can almost always improve a picture.

At the other end of the scale is the “framed exhibition print.” It can be big on the wall, but, truth is, if it’s a print of something important to you, it can be any size; you just want to make it as good as you can. And what processing steps do you take to make it the print you want? The answer - all of them. A lot of the good printers I know literally go down the menu of the program they use, look at every control and say could this control do something that would, in my eyes, make this picture better? Often the answer is no, but they check every possibility, and, in today’s digital darkroom, that’s a lot of options.

Then comes the point of the entire process, making the print. I have friends who have double giant monitors that are calibrated regularly and friends with only laptops and a prayer. But a screen is not a print. As much as it hurts, the answer to a good print is often throwing away the first print and making the changes you think necessary in a second print. If you’re famous, your gallery can sell the first print as an “ARTISTS PROOF.”

So where do you fall in line in this process. The two photographers that went out of their way to help me when I started were Gene Smith and David Vestal; so, of course, I am a print maniac. But I’ve seen family albums that were gawd awful by those standards. But content was king, and what was in those albums meant more to the owners than any photo masterpiece. What is important? I don’t know. But there are digital tools now available that allow controls in color that were only available in black-and-white in film. Do you think they are important? Do you use them?
Click to expand...

First Happy New year to you and your family. Great topic BTW.

For me I was a darkroom rat. I have printed color and B&W extensively. Totally agree with you about the control aspect of B&W in the days of wet darkrooms concerning film. You could control contrast even before the print part of the process with B&W film by temp, agitation and time. When you started altering those thing in color negative you could get color shifts that could not be corrected.

You have so much control with digital color that you didn't have with film and darkroom only. I have Kodachrome transparencies that I have worked on in PS and pulled up shadows that I could have never pulled up even with masking when printing Cibachrome or even dye transfer.

I have to work with the computer for my pro work. I tried to resist as long as possible but in 2005 I started getting a lot of real push lost a couple of clients. I lost my darkroom (downsizing because of divorce) and lost a darkroon at a clients so was pushed into digital. My B&W digital is Leica MM.

I do not alter a lot in PS. I usually do what I could do in a wet darkroom with both my pro work and my personal work. Density, contrast, clean up spots, dust, sometimes a little retouching on portraits, color correction on color work, cropping, etc.

The darkroom though is something I really miss. I could go into a different world with the door closed, in total darkness or with the safe light on, away from everything. When working on the computer there are always distractions.

I still love film and I love digital. If I had a darkroom I would still be shooting B&W film in so capacity.

To me a photograph isn't finished until it is a print.

Allen
 
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