why do we have a digital b&w thread?

content

content

I have never been an overly tech side guy when it comes to photographs.True there are some ? on duplication of image achievement.The visual aspect of the images no matter the equipment used is more important to me.

So let the stoning begin😱
 
pixel counting, lens critiquing all have little to do with photography and yet everything. Mostly photography is about a personal interpretation of a moment as seen by a photographer. Some use digital, some pin hole, some toy cameras, some use large, format, some 35mm. Then there's the image quality from the source and finally "the print"

Most people have no idea how a photographer made a photograph until they are told. Enjoy the image, that's what this game is about.
 
denizg7 said:
yay and another thread transcends into film vs digital , when originally it was about a thread and not about film vs digital..
Click to expand...

"i am trying to generate an intelligent discussion regarding the viewpoint that digital does a poor job of black and white."

And as answer to why the thread exists and is so popular is very easy the vast majority of photographers uses digital. The "shortcomings" of digital if they really are "shortcomings" (after all shortcomings can be used creatively) don't matter anymore as the masses use digital and are accustomed to the look. The look of B/W is still popular and many of the digital users used to be B/W Film photographers and one of them created the thread to showcase his work done with the "new media".

Dominik
 
jan normandale said:
pixel counting, lens critiquing all have little to do with photography and yet everything. Mostly photography is about a personal interpretation of a moment as seen by a photographer. Some use digital, some pin hole, some toy cameras, some use large, format, some 35mm. Then there's the image quality from the source and finally "the print"

Most people have no idea how a photographer made a photograph until they are told. Enjoy the image, that's what this game is about.
Click to expand...

I don't think I've ever told you this Jan but I love you 😀 😀 😀 😀

Cheers,
Dave
 
I wonder if many of the complaints about digital B&W being so bad are the result of people trying to make their Digital Black and White look like film?

To me film and digital are two different mediums, each with strengths and weaknesses. In my mind art comes from mastering the medium, its strength and weaknesses (sometimes turning the weakness into an advantage!) and then combining it with a vision. It makes as little sense to me to add artificial grain to a digital B&W image as it would for a painter to try and make an oil based painting look like it was painted with water colors. Now I will grant there are occasions when this does make sense, but for most digital images?

Lets celebrate the fact that we now have two very different mediums to master, each with its advantages and disadvantages (well actually more than two, but you know what I mean).

Just my thoughts.

--
Bill
 
i'm not trying to stir up anything...

i am trying to generate an intelligent discussion regarding the viewpoint that digital does a poor job of black and white.
Click to expand...

If you were trying to start an intelligent discussion of B&W digital, you sure chose a lousy way to open it.

When considering digital capture, B&W is a rendering process not a characteristic of the capture medium like it is with film capture. Both that, and differences in the way the medium works, affect the outputs in very strong ways.

There are two complaints I hear all the time:

- The biggest complaint I hear is "it doesn't have the dynamic range that film does!" which is just nonsense. I've measured film and digital dynamic range many many times. It is rare that I find any film which has more than 8-9 stops of dynamic range without extraordinary processing chemistry and methodology applied. The best I've found is 11 stops. Modern digital sensors consistently achieve 10 to 12 stops of dynamic range with proper exposure, sometimes even more.

So what's different that causes all the angst? Film has a characteristic density curve approximated by a partial differential equation of order 2: it rolls off gently at the toe and shoulder with a 'mostly linear' range in the middle area where we place our exposure for best effect. Different chemistry and different processing methodology can shift this in small ways beyond the film's basic characteristics, but overall the perception in use is that it is easy to get a lot of latitude with an imprecise exposure setting due to the soft roll-offs at toe and shoulder.

Digital capture sensors have an utterly different exposure curve. At the shoulder, there is little roll off ... once the photosites are saturated, the highlights just clip. At the toe, the curve is very soft: "too little" exposure and the bottom limits of dynamic range are a value judgement of "how much noise is acceptable" or "how little detail is still image rather than noise". How this tonal curve is rendered depends upon the skill of the person doing the image processing.

The long and the short of this is that making the best exposure with digital capture takes more work and more precision than making the best exposure with film capture. And rendering the digital capture to a monochrome photograph takes more skill and judgement beyond that (although one should not trivialize how much skill it takes to render a good B&W negative to an exhibition quality print either ... it's just that darkroom users are more familiar with the mechanics of the process than they are with image processing workflow).

- The other big complaint that I hear all the time is that printing B&W images digitally is difficult and not up to the same quality standards as darkroom printing.

This was actually quite true ... "was" being an important operative word here. Printing B&W in the darkroom is a process much like film capture ... the chemistry of the media itself set the dynamic range and tonal limits, with a certain amount of tweaking available through chemical manipulation and process methodology. Darkroom printing as a sophisticated art has about a 170 year history of technical and aesthetic development.

Printing to a digital inkjet printer is a radically different process AND media mix ... and until about 2004-2005, the technology was simply not there yet. In 2004-2005, the first grayscale inkjet pigment-based inks and fine art, archival grade papers designed to take them started to appear, and the new generation of inkjet printers with super fine density print heads and ultra-sophisticated drivers started to appear at affordable prices. The watershed moment for me, after a decade of working with I can't tell you how many different odd printing setups, was the Epson R2400 with its K3 pigment inkset, and the introduction of papers like Somerset Velvet, Epson Exhibition Fiber, Crane Museo, and others designed for these printers and inks. At that point, the technological basis of what you can get into a print finally outstripped what can be done in a chemical darkroom. (Brooks Jensen at LensWork Publishing did some DR testing on the Epson Exhibition Fiber and Harmann papers against top notch wet lab papers and process a couple of years back. He reported that the best dynamic range of all of them was achieved by an Epson 4880 on the Harmann paper.)

Of course, again we have a new technology against an old, settled, mature technology. People don't like to change from what they're comfortable with.

I was in the somewhat unusual position of having worked extensively with digital image capture and processing, developing the technology itself as it were, during my stint at NASA in the 1980s. I couldn't wait for high quality digital capture and image processing, image printing to appear at prices that I could afford for my personal photography (the system I was using at that time was on the order of $25 Million worth of equipment). I started experimenting with my own fine art digital printing in the middle 1990s and digital capture photography in the late 1990s. Funny that the cameras caught up first ... my Canon 10D of 2003 produced photographs that finally convinced me I didn't need a medium format camera any more to achieve the technical quality I wanted ... but it wasn't until the Epson R2400 arrived in 2005 that I felt good about the prints I made digitally. Since then, I haven't seen any point to a darkroom, wet lab print other than for truly alternative processes, and the sensors have gotten both better and better as well as cheaper and cheaper.

But that said, there's still nothing in digital capture that competes with 6x6 film format that I find affordable ... not for the basic ability to create good B&W, but for the other characteristics of a big format capture and the qualities of FoV and DoF. And there is a point to simply enjoying the film cameras and their working methodology still. So I continue to shoot 6x6 film even if I can achieve on par or even better captures with my digital cameras. I don't print in a wet lab at all anymore, however ... so all my film work is essentially converted to digital after capture and negative processing.

I have yet to see anyone show me their wet lab prints that clearly demonstrate anything superior to what I am able to achieve with digital printing today. And even though I still love shooting with 6x6 film and my film Leicas and Nikon F, I can't say that the images they create are actually better technical quality than my M9 or even the Ricoh GXR and Olympus E-1 that I use more of the time.

Ok, so that's my response. I've got my flame retardant teflon suit on, as usual, so I'll just smile at all the nastygrams I'm likely to receive. I'll just sit and wait for the flood ...

G

​
 
jan normandale said:
pixel counting, lens critiquing all have little to do with photography and yet everything. Mostly photography is about a personal interpretation of a moment as seen by a photographer. Some use digital, some pin hole, some toy cameras, some use large, format, some 35mm. Then there's the image quality from the source and finally "the print"

Most people have no idea how a photographer made a photograph until they are told. Enjoy the image, that's what this game is about.
Click to expand...

+1 Jan - agree
 
Godfrey said:
If you were trying to start an intelligent discussion of B&W digital, you sure chose a lousy way to open it.

When considering digital capture, B&W is a rendering process not a characteristic of the capture medium like it is with film capture. Both that, and differences in the way the medium works, affect the outputs in very strong ways.

There are two complaints I hear all the time:

- The biggest complaint I hear is "it doesn't have the dynamic range that film does!" which is just nonsense. I've measured film and digital dynamic range many many times. It is rare that I find any film which has more than 8-9 stops of dynamic range without extraordinary processing chemistry and methodology applied. The best I've found is 11 stops. Modern digital sensors consistently achieve 10 to 12 stops of dynamic range with proper exposure, sometimes even more.

So what's different that causes all the angst? Film has a characteristic density curve approximated by a partial differential equation of order 2: it rolls off gently at the toe and shoulder with a 'mostly linear' range in the middle area where we place our exposure for best effect. Different chemistry and different processing methodology can shift this in small ways beyond the film's basic characteristics, but overall the perception in use is that it is easy to get a lot of latitude with an imprecise exposure setting due to the soft roll-offs at toe and shoulder.

Digital capture sensors have an utterly different exposure curve. At the shoulder, there is little roll off ... once the photosites are saturated, the highlights just clip. At the toe, the curve is very soft: "too little" exposure and the bottom limits of dynamic range are a value judgement of "how much noise is acceptable" or "how little detail is still image rather than noise". How this tonal curve is rendered depends upon the skill of the person doing the image processing.

The long and the short of this is that making the best exposure with digital capture takes more work and more precision than making the best exposure with film capture. And rendering the digital capture to a monochrome photograph takes more skill and judgement beyond that (although one should not trivialize how much skill it takes to render a good B&W negative to an exhibition quality print either ... it's just that darkroom users are more familiar with the mechanics of the process than they are with image processing workflow).

- The other big complaint that I hear all the time is that printing B&W images digitally is difficult and not up to the same quality standards as darkroom printing.

This was actually quite true ... "was" being an important operative word here. Printing B&W in the darkroom is a process much like film capture ... the chemistry of the media itself set the dynamic range and tonal limits, with a certain amount of tweaking available through chemical manipulation and process methodology. Darkroom printing as a sophisticated art has about a 170 year history of technical and aesthetic development.

Printing to a digital inkjet printer is a radically different process AND media mix ... and until about 2004-2005, the technology was simply not there yet. In 2004-2005, the first grayscale inkjet pigment-based inks and fine art, archival grade papers designed to take them started to appear, and the new generation of inkjet printers with super fine density print heads and ultra-sophisticated drivers started to appear at affordable prices. The watershed moment for me, after a decade of working with I can't tell you how many different odd printing setups, was the Epson R2400 with its K3 pigment inkset, and the introduction of papers like Somerset Velvet, Epson Exhibition Fiber, Crane Museo, and others designed for these printers and inks. At that point, the technological basis of what you can get into a print finally outstripped what can be done in a chemical darkroom. (Brooks Jensen at LensWork Publishing did some DR testing on the Epson Exhibition Fiber and Harmann papers against top notch wet lab papers and process a couple of years back. He reported that the best dynamic range of all of them was achieved by an Epson 4880 on the Harmann paper.)

Of course, again we have a new technology against an old, settled, mature technology. People don't like to change from what they're comfortable with.

I was in the somewhat unusual position of having worked extensively with digital image capture and processing, developing the technology itself as it were, during my stint at NASA in the 1980s. I couldn't wait for high quality digital capture and image processing, image printing to appear at prices that I could afford for my personal photography (the system I was using at that time was on the order of $25 Million worth of equipment). I started experimenting with my own fine art digital printing in the middle 1990s and digital capture photography in the late 1990s. Funny that the cameras caught up first ... my Canon 10D of 2003 produced photographs that finally convinced me I didn't need a medium format camera any more to achieve the technical quality I wanted ... but it wasn't until the Epson R2400 arrived in 2005 that I felt good about the prints I made digitally. Since then, I haven't seen any point to a darkroom, wet lab print other than for truly alternative processes, and the sensors have gotten both better and better as well as cheaper and cheaper.

But that said, there's still nothing in digital capture that competes with 6x6 film format that I find affordable ... not for the basic ability to create good B&W, but for the other characteristics of a big format capture and the qualities of FoV and DoF. And there is a point to simply enjoying the film cameras and their working methodology still. So I continue to shoot 6x6 film even if I can achieve on par or even better captures with my digital cameras. I don't print in a wet lab at all anymore, however ... so all my film work is essentially converted to digital after capture and negative processing.

I have yet to see anyone show me their wet lab prints that clearly demonstrate anything superior to what I am able to achieve with digital printing today. And even though I still love shooting with 6x6 film and my film Leicas and Nikon F, I can't say that the images they create are actually better technical quality than my M9 or even the Ricoh GXR and Olympus E-1 that I use more of the time.

Ok, so that's my response. I've got my flame retardant teflon suit on, as usual, so I'll just smile at all the nastygrams I'm likely to receive. I'll just sit and wait for the flood ...

G

​
Click to expand...

This was supposed to be a non film vs digital thread😀

Anyway film has a much wider dynamic range scientific fact. The problem is the paper which doesn't have the same amount of dynamic range again if I were to us something like Saltprint/Platinum Print LF and contact print I'd have more dynamic range than any digital or analogue medium in existence.
But this isn't supposed to be a digi vs analogue thread and as has been said before each medium has it strength and weaknesses and they should both be cherished for their differences.

Dominik
 
I think half the reason people think digital B&W is awful, is because we are used to looking at B&W images made from film, and since B&W digital images look different from film images, some think it's "awful," because it doesn't look like what they're used too. As my Mom used to say: "When people say 'I know what I like', they're really saying 'I like what I know'."

Other than that, I 'm staying out of this fight. I shoot both film and digital, so I'll stay neutral.
 
Godfrey said:
There are two complaints I hear all the time:

- The biggest complaint I hear is "it doesn't have the dynamic range that film does!" which is just nonsense. I've measured film and digital dynamic range many many times. It is rare that I find any film which has more than 8-9 stops of dynamic range without extraordinary processing chemistry and methodology applied. The best I've found is 11 stops. Modern digital sensors consistently achieve 10 to 12 stops of dynamic range with proper exposure, sometimes even more.

So what's different that causes all the angst? Film has a characteristic density curve approximated by a partial differential equation of order 2: it rolls off gently at the toe and shoulder with a 'mostly linear' range in the middle area where we place our exposure for best effect. Different chemistry and different processing methodology can shift this in small ways beyond the film's basic characteristics, but overall the perception in use is that it is easy to get a lot of latitude with an imprecise exposure setting due to the soft roll-offs at toe and shoulder.

Digital capture sensors have an utterly different exposure curve. At the shoulder, there is little roll off ... once the photosites are saturated, the highlights just clip. At the toe, the curve is very soft: "too little" exposure and the bottom limits of dynamic range are a value judgement of "how much noise is acceptable" or "how little detail is still image rather than noise". How this tonal curve is rendered depends upon the skill of the person doing the image processing.
Click to expand...

This is just an evasive way of saying film actually does have more range, with digital you spend the dynamic range to hide the clipping and the noise with a curve, with film the curve is included, and the DR.
 
Paul Luscher said:
I think half the reason people think digital B&W is awful, is because we are used to looking at B&W images made from film, and since B&W digital images look different from film images, some think it's "awful," because it doesn't look like what they're used too. As my Mom used to say: "When people say 'I know what I like', they're really saying 'I like what I know'."

Other than that, I 'm staying out of this fight. I shoot both film and digital, so I'll stay neutral.
Click to expand...

+1 Your mom seems to be a very smart lady
 
Ranchu said:
This is just an evasive way of saying film actually does have more range, with digital you spend the dynamic range to hide the clipping and the noise with a curve, with film the curve is included, and the DR.
Click to expand...

Your response is incorrect. The digital sensor has more dynamic range, I would invite anyone who thinks otherwise to provide proper evidence from a authoritative source that articulates the testing methodology and objective data to prove otherwise.

Film is easier for someone unskilled in digital image processing to master. That's all.
 
Yeah, well, you know what opinions are like. Put a film shaped curve on a flat digital file and you'll have more contrast than the film the curve came from. You're welcome to imagine whatever you want.
 
In my mind, the main reason, is to respect people who shoot B&W the hard way - striving to get the best quality with film, which as we all know, is more costly, difficult to master, and takes up much more time.
One day perhaps, the digital B&W will cover all the space which it is still dividing it from film - particularly bigger format film, and the game of quality gap will be over. There will still be people shooting film, but it will become an esoteric hobby, like doing cyanotype, platinum prints or daguerrotypes today.
As to what is happening now - I do not intend to blame anybody for making digital B&W photos, it would be like blaming a Sunday morning acquerel painter for not being Van Gogh. If they like it, let them do it.
However, if somebody does not see the difference, it does not mean that there is no difference, it probably only means, that he has never seen a bautiful B&W printed image, or that time, cost or ease of use have higher priorities than the pictorial quality.

I have just looked through the latest book of Pentti Sammallahti - even in this case it is not hard to see what a great B&W quality looks like. I am confident, there is no digital sensor on this planet able to compete with this.
And even if some internet site claims the sensors have more DR, resolution or whatever, it is like when the transistors came out, and the producers were saying that because they have less harmonic distortion, the sound is better than with tubes. A pity, that the human ears did not agree.
After a few decades, nowadays some solid state amplifiers compete and even trump the valves, but it did not happen quickly.

As to the burnt highlights, it is not the only problem, the main problem is what happens in the highlights before they burn out. Here you see a burnt highlight, yet I find this much more pleasing than high key digital portraits:

Summicron 90, Acros in Rodinal 1:100


201211825 by mfogiel, on Flickr
 
Honestly I don't see much difference in digital vs film. Where I do see a difference is in approach to b&w. Very often it is all about black and white like having grey in a photo is a sin. While "old" b&w film is often about the range of grey that can be achieved.

Part of it can be that achieving b&w in digital is a process, even before you start thinking about contrast and ranges. Some are better achieving a pleasing image on the pc than others.

Personally I can't see in b&w. Tried and spoilt a lot of film and gave up. Maybe some digital photographers doing b&w have a similar problem but keep posting?
 
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