what's considered a digital looking image?

[icebear]

In Japan there is a little strange concept (at least to western minds) that a national treasure can also be a living person.
Mostly craftsman, like wood worker or potter or masters of calligraphy.
Years ago I was cruising through the traditional Japanese pottery department of one of the big department stores in the Ginza district and they had black tea bowls on display. There were at quite different price levels and to the obviously untrained eye of an uninitiated visitor, they looked pretty similar. That is not to say almost identical, unless you lifted them up and looked at the inscription at the bottom.

And now I come back to the topic :
If the viewer can't distinguish between the process, the craft or "art" involved when just looking at the result, then the way leads to the same result.
It's up to anyone to value one or the other result more because of how it was obtained but that doesn't mean there is more art involved.

And btw I bought two of the middle of the road, medium priced tea bowls and they serve the matcha perfectly fine for my taste buds😉.

"Art is what you can get away with" Andy Warhol

 

[Ranchu]

I There were at quite different price levels and to the obviously untrained eye of an uninitiated visitor, they looked pretty similar. That is not to say almost identical, unless you lifted them up and looked at the inscription at the bottom.

And now I come back to the topic :
If the viewer can't distinguish between the process, the craft or "art" involved when just looking at the result, then the way leads to the same result.
It's up to anyone to value one or the other result more because of how it was obtained but that doesn't mean there is more art involved.

What you're saying is that if you don't get it, nobody else does either? Clearly the Japanese (and others) can see the differences, and value them accordingly. Or are you saying they're pretending, it's a big scam?

 

[icebear]

What you're saying is that if you don't get it, nobody else does either? Clearly the Japanese (and others) can see the differences, and value them accordingly. Or are you saying they're pretending, it's a big scam?

1. No.
2. No.
You obviously like to twist things to suit your way of thinking.
Enjoy your life but don't expect others to bow to your wisdom😎.

 

[Ranchu]

1. No.
2. No.
You obviously like to twist things to suit your way of thinking.
Enjoy your life but don't expect others to bow to your wisdom😎.

That's what you said.

"In Japan there is a little strange concept (at least to western minds)"

"almost identical, unless you lifted them up and looked at the inscription at the bottom."

"If the viewer can't distinguish between the process, the craft or "art" involved when just looking at the result, then the way leads to the same result."

You dismiss the artistry of the artists, and the 'wisdom' of those who appreciate the differences you don't see.

Art/artist teaches you!

 

[back alley]

The only reason such nonsense is accepted, nodded over and repeated is because digital looks different, and for some, it just looks bad. Regardless of print, screen or whatever. People who shoot digital don't want to hear about that, and neither do the people selling cameras, software, or other crap.

this makes sense to you because you start off with and believe the premise that digital is inferior to film.
i don't buy your 'crap' because i believe that digital is different from film and that i like the difference and i prefer digital.

we can never agree.
and i can live with that.

 

[Ranchu]

this makes sense to you because you start off with and believe the premise that digital is inferior to film.
i don't buy your 'crap' because i believe that digital is different from film and that i like the difference and i prefer digital.

we can never agree.
and i can live with that.

Well fine. I apologize for the 'crap' statement, I'm sorry. You like digital better and that's entirely your call to make, with no need for justification. I get irritated by the reasoning of some/many. I dislike a dishonest argument, and I dislike being told I shoot film because of nostalgia, or because I want to be cool(er), or because I 'wasn't successful' with digital. I got eyes, I can see what's up!

😀

 

[back alley]

funny how much of our arguing here at rff is based more on our personal feelings/reaction to percieved insults than on what we are actually saying...me too!

i honestly don't care what people shoot, be it digital, film or paper and sunlight...i just want to feel equal to the next guy for my decision.

 

[Gordon Coale]

My fault, I should have looked closer. However, you're not going to convince me that all lenses are equally 'good'. Some are better than others, and some are really, really 'good'. Most are lousy.

How do you measure better? Most of the measurements of "better" do not consider the intended use. You can take the "best" (around here it seems to mean the sharpest) lens and take a portrait of a woman and you will have an epic fail. You need a soft lens for that usage. And if you take that sharp lens and use poor technique like shooting hand held and not on a tripod you have just wasted your money. You probably consider a 1930 vintage uncoated Elmar a lousy lens but some of the 20th century's most iconic images were shot with that lousy lens by people like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. Sharp pictures are way overrated. Go back and look at Robert Franks "The Americans". There are some positively unsharp and blurry images that could have been taken with any number of lousy lenses and they are some of the most influential images of the late 20th century.

This idea that people try to promulgate that nothing about the process has anything to do with the result is laughable. Read it again if you don't think so. See now? That's what you imply when you say 'it's only the image that matters'.

I didn't say that nothing about the process has anything to do with the results. The photographer makes many choices about lens, format, paper, and a myriad of other details to get to the image the photographer wants. It's the viewer that doesn't care about the process or how hard the photographer worked to get the image. To the viewer it's only the image that matters. When you go to a movie do you care whether it was shot with an ARRI or a Panavision or a Red or a GH2? I bet not.

The only reason such nonsense is accepted, nodded over and repeated is because digital looks different, and for some, it just looks bad. Regardless of print, screen or whatever. People who shoot digital don't want to hear about that, and neither do the people selling cameras, software, or other crap.

Your notion of film photography seems to be from a very narrow perspective, that of 35mm black and white printed on silver based paper. A platinum contact print looks nothing like that and it's film based too. In fact Frederick H. Evans gave up photography because all that was available after WWI was crappy silver based paper.

I don't think you can find a color printer out there who thinks printing chromagenic is better than digital. In some cases dye transfer can do a better job but even Ctein is closing his darkroom and going completely digital, particularly since he has run out of dye transfer materials and there is no more. Digital has been a revolution for color since we now have the control over color printing that even Ansel Adams could see was coming and he would be using if he were still alive. Photographers like Joel Meyerowitz are printing their old 8x10 color negatives digitally because it gets so much more out of the negatives. I've printed color in a lab and I've printed color on my own digital printer. Why any one you want to print chromagenic is beyond me.

 

[clayne]

this makes sense to you because you start off with and believe the premise that digital is inferior to film.
i don't buy your 'crap' because i believe that digital is different from film and that i like the difference and i prefer digital.

we can never agree.
and i can live with that.

The problem here is that people will not recognize nor validate the film/wet people's observations when they dislike how it makes them feel. It's all brushed under the rug with various hand waving excuses. That's why these threads usually go nowhere.

You asked what makes a digital print "digital". People spoke up, you don't like what you heard. I'm not saying you have to agree with all of it, but I think it's a bit lame when people dismiss all of it.

 

[clayne]

So if the viewer/consumer doesn't care, then everyone should just buy cheap knockoffs of anything ever made, right? We know this doesn't happen full stop, hence there are people who DO actually care about process, craft, and origination.

Additionally the discussion here was "what makes something look digital?" It wasn't "hey joe blow viewer who just looks at pictures, what makes something look digital?"

 

[back alley]

The problem here is that people will not recognize nor validate the film/wet people's observations when they dislike how it makes them feel. It's all brushed under the rug with various hand waving excuses. That's why these threads usually go nowhere.

You asked what makes a digital print "digital". People spoke up, you don't like what you heard. I'm not saying you have to agree with all of it, but I think it's a bit lame when people dismiss all of it.

...you don't like what you heard...

not true...the discussion changed from my original question...i asked what is considered a digital looking image?...and got some answers that were far from the question.

 

[Photo_Smith]

If the viewer can't distinguish between the process, the craft or "art" involved when just looking at the result, then the way leads to the same result.

I think this is a classic false dichotomy, if people can't tell the methodology you have no difference?

Surely you can see if someone sees things differently, even if the masses can't that means that product has value to those who can tell?

The fact that most can't tell the difference is irrelevant, the world is full of people who can't tell the difference between a camera phone and an SLR or care enough to look at those (to us) obvious differences.

You can't reduce things to the lowest common denominator.

 

[Mcary]

funny how much of our arguing here at rff is based more on our personal feelings/reaction to percieved insults than on what we are actually saying...me too!

i honestly don't care what people shoot, be it digital, film or paper and sunlight...i just want to feel equal to the next guy for my decision.

Joe,

I think in someways you're just to nice of a person 🙂 Me I really couldn't give a rat ass about what people think about my choices of gear and work flow. Sure I respect other people view points and opinions but in the end I make my own decisions based on my needs and desired and certainly not the opinions of a bunch of people on the internet.

One more thing don't feel bad because some people scoff at you for not doing real "Darkroom" printing. After all those same people are scoffed for using such an amateur format as 35mm by some people that shoot LF 🙂

 

[Ranchu]

I wanted to clarify this from earlier. Film doesn't only compress the highlights, it also has lower contrast is the midtones. From Basic Photographic Materials and Processes 2nd edition, Stroebel et al. I omitted the illustration, it's a film curve.


"Gamma is considered to be an excellent measure of development contrast because it is the slope of the straight-line portion that is most sensitive to development changes. It can also be used to predict the density differences that will result in the negative for exposures that fall on the straight-line section. For example, the curve in figure 4-22A exhibits a gamma of 0.50, which means that the density difference in the negative will be one half that of the log exposure.

[...]

The contrast of color negative films is generally determined by measuring the straight line portion (gamma), which typically lies between 0.50 and 0.60."

So, you get 2 stops of brightness range recorded for 1 stop of film density in the straight line portion, and more than that in the highlights because of more compression. With digital you will only ever record 1 stop as one stop.

So that's why it looks different.

 

[Godfrey]

"Basic Photographic Materials and Processes, 2nd edition" is from 1990, a 23 year old book. Digital imaging sensors are not covered, they didn't exist then in any mass production quantity. A *tremendous* amount of development has occurred in digital sensor development in the ensuing quarter century.

...
So, you get 2 stops of brightness range recorded for 1 stop of film density in the straight line portion, and more than that in the highlights because of more compression. With digital you will only ever record 1 stop as one stop.

That assumes digital cameras which process the data collected by a sensor through the A-D converter as linear values. Most current digital cameras include A-D converters combined with large-bit-depth signal processing routines that generate raw data with about a third to one stop compression on the high values, achieving actual capture intensity quantization quite similar to film.

What's different is the behavior right at the saturation (limit) point. Film always blocks up on some variant of a 2D differential equation's curve, there is never a true hard limit. Digital sensor quantization to discrete number values always comes to a hard limit at the saturation point: the graph always goes flat in a one unit step. But the effect of this clipping is small when a) proper exposure settings are used and b) appropriate adjustments to the gamma curve are incorporated in raw conversion processing into component space.

The real challenge with digital capture is in applying proper exposure and then processing for Zone 2 to 5 properly in high contrast situations. Current raw processing software combined with modern sensor technology is getting very good at this.

G

"Digital cameras are amazing in what they can do. They're more limited by the mathematics of image processing than anything else. Film is mostly limited by the physics and chemistry of the recording medium. Both are ultimately limited by the vision and ingenuity of the photographer."

 

[Ranchu]

That assumes digital cameras which process the data collected by a sensor through the A-D converter as linear values. Most current digital cameras include A-D converters combined with large-bit-depth signal processing routines that generate raw data with about a third to one stop compression on the high values, achieving actual capture intensity quantization quite similar to film.

What's different is the behavior right at the saturation (limit) point. Film always blocks up on some variant of a 2D differential equation's curve, there is never a true hard limit. Digital sensor quantization to discrete number values always comes to a hard limit at the saturation point: the graph always goes flat in a one unit step. But the effect of this clipping is small when a) proper exposure settings are used and b) appropriate adjustments to the gamma curve are incorporated in raw conversion processing into component space.

The real challenge with digital capture is in applying proper exposure and then processing for Zone 2 to 5 properly in high contrast situations. Current raw processing software combined with modern sensor technology is getting very good at this.

G

It's a good book.

I'm failing to see where you disagree that film records 2 stops of exposure as one stop of density in the midtones, and digital records one stop as one stop. Are you saying 'someday' digital will do this?

 

[back alley]

'someday' a key but as yet unspoken word in our discussion...

digital sensors are being improved/changed/re-invented on a near daily basis...
and films are being discontinued at an almost similar pace...
someday, this issue will be a moot point...

 

[Ranchu]

Maybe, but not today.

😉

 

[clayne]

I don't think you can find a color printer out there who thinks printing chromagenic is better than digital.

What? They're not mutually exclusive. The vast majority of drugstore prints are done on RA-4, digital or film origination doesn't matter. Many many c prints are also done on RA-4 for exhibition. Your implied vision of the inkjet factory cranking them out is far from reality.

 

[clayne]

It's a good book.

I'm failing to see where you disagree that film records 2 stops of exposure as one stop of density in the midtones, and digital records one stop as one stop. Are you saying 'someday' digital will do this?

It's basically the same ole digital hand waviness about "oh it's so insignificant it doesn't really matter" that most of the digital guys have lulled themselves into. It isn't insignificant and the mediums are not near each other.