Color accuracy digital vs Film

<p>Oh yeah, I'm going there.</p>

<p>First of all, I have NEVER said that digital is "better" than film - ever. What I have been posting is the <em>market forces</em> and the <em>economic</em> (as in economist) egg head type of explanations of what's happening to the film market. A few of you seem to take it like I'm saying film is dead and it's because it's inferior to digital. Nope I just make observations - and get annoyed at myself when I'm incapable of making my point.</p>

<p>Here it goes:<br>

I've taken shots of purple morning glories with film and digital. Digital fails. Those flowers show up as blue instead of purple - I've never shot a Sigma camera (fov..whatever) so keep that in mind.<br>

Anyway this is what <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&sa=X&biw=1161&bih=725&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=4Z4lKkd1UN_SHM:&imgrefurl=http://www.celestialtearoom.com/flowers.html&docid=0mlrRXPoXRiW3M&imgurl=http://celestialtearoom.com/images/PurpleMorningGlories.jpg&w=616&h=462&ei=PkvVTu3eF8ehtwfLrbiPAg&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=362&sig=104797094776002994165&page=1&tbnh=155&tbnw=188&start=0&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&tx=132&ty=82">the flower should look like</a></p>

<p>Here's what my <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&sa=X&biw=1161&bih=725&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=M5wKKom64L1RsM:&imgrefurl=http://asclepias.wordpress.com/category/seasons/summer/&docid=hH9diQ3PE8fG_M&imgurl=http://asclepias.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/purple_morning_glory_1.jpg&w=600&h=450&ei=PkvVTu3eF8ehtwfLrbiPAg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=108&vpy=417&dur=611&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=166&ty=109&sig=104797094776002994165&page=2&tbnh=158&tbnw=195&start=15&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:15">digital cameras see - Kodak and Canon S95</a> - see that? It's blue NOT the purple that it should be.<br>

I hope the images that I'm trying to use as an illustration pop out, by the way ....</p>

<p>Those are websites that Google gave to me when I searched on "purple morning glories" and picked out what I observed when I shot film and digital. Did the posters of those shots alter them? I don't know, but it's the best example of what I have observed.</p>

<p>You see, digital cameras and anything digital photographic has been optimized for skin tones - as well as film for that matter, but with the history of film, it has a better color accuracy than digital -<strong><em> at this time</em></strong> in Nov 2011.</p>

<p>Film is better at dynamic range* and color accuracy.</p>

<p>*I once had a Plustek 7200 and I shoot BW with a red and polarizing filters at the same time. When I scanned the images, it choked on the highlights - in my analog darkroom, I had to dodge and burn to make the image right on the paper. You can't do that with digital because <strong>the equipment doesn't capture the information</strong> I got blown highlights all over the place. Compensating lead to more blown highlights.<br>

Sometimes, a mixed workflow isn't good - no, I didn't save any of it.</p>

<p><strong><em>Am I saying one is better than the other? Nope.</em></strong></p>

<p>Until the photographer can capture <em>exactly</em> what <em>he's</em> seeing, then it's an imperfect medium.<br>

You want to capture <em>exactly </em>what you see? Take up painting.</p>

<p>Well I shoot Film mostly and from time to time Digital. I find Film or Digital post processing and tweaking is needed. Color correction right out of a digital camera to me is just like a scanned negative. It needs help.</p>

<p>Here's an another example: Beta vs VHS.</p>

<p>The techies thought Beta was much better but the market chose VHS.</p>

<p>That's what's happening now - people are choosing digital over film because of their needs, wants, desires, whatever ..</p>

<p>Same with MP3 downloads vs audio cd.</p>

<p>IOW, the race to the bottom for the fastest and cheapest. :(</p>

 

<p><em>You see, digital cameras and anything digital photographic has been optimized for skin tones - as well as film for that matter, but with the history of film, it has a better color accuracy than digital -<strong> at this time</strong> in Nov 2011.</em></p>

<p>This is not true, even if the morning glory example stands. (Have you tried RAW processing to get the purple you see? Shooting a white card for white balance on the scene?) Only the portrait films are fairly accurate, and then only under white light very close to the correct color balance. I'm not saying color films are terrible here, but from the viewpoint of <em>accuracy</em> they cannot match digital. You can get a correct Macbeth color chart with digital under a much wider range of lighting conditions, including lights that cause color film to just get weird.</p>

<p>Then again, the unique color inaccuracy of some popular films is what gives them their look that some people like to get out of the can, or through film emulation plugins.</p>

<p><em>Film is better at dynamic range* and color accuracy.</em></p>

<p>Most films do not offer greater DR range than modern sensors. Some do. B&W film as a class does not necessarily, though incredible DR can be found with some emulsions (especially when hand processing for greater DR).</p>

<p>Well good and bad there Bob. I spent 5 hours the other day cleaning up a 33 and 1/3rd and a few 78s converting them to digital. :)</p>

<p>Mr. Taylor:<br>

No sir. I haven't tried raw. You see, I grew up shoot'in film - slides for that matter: I compose, get my exposure, and shoot. And what I get is what I get. And when shoot shoot digital, it's mostly JPG - sometimes RAW when I want to be a goof'n.<br>

The discipline I developed in shoot'n slides makes digital so much easier. Unfortunately. I seems to think that shoot'n digital is like shoot'n slides. It ain't. It's like shoot'n B&W and add'n color afterwards - the colors that they give ya, is just a suggest'n. Postshop rules!</p>

<p>Just trying to make fun and light here guys - no offense to no one!</p>

 

<p>LOL Well I never take offense.. I though seem to make others take offense. :)</p>

<p>I'd like to also add in regards to some film brands and I won't mention Fuji but some brands are so heavy on the red - I mean really guys - that everything looks like cartoon characters.</p>

<p>I was driving home from work one day (Yes, I do have a job) and I looked at the sky. I thought, "How retro the sky looks!" Yep "retro" sky. Why is that?</p>

<p>Every sky I see in the media has over saturated colors. The sky looked retro because it looked like a Kodachrome (may she rest in peace.) sky - The natural sky looked retro - does anyone else find that weird?</p>

<p>For crying out loud - I'm not saying that film has perfect colors- I'm saying it's more accurate in my opinion. Let's get someone to post scans of film accuracy .... who's that guy here who's always posting film's dynamic range shots? Do one for color accuracy!</p>

<p>Man ... maybe for an easier time, I'll go to the Temple Mount and talk about the strengths and weaknesses about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It'll be easier than talking about film's and digital's strengths and weaknesses up here at Photo.net....</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Maybe it is because our brain and real life are so different that we when we process film we lean to the edge of what we want or think it looks like not how it is....</p>

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<p>Maybe it is because our brain and real life are so different that we when we process film we lean to the edge of what we want or think it looks like not how it is....</p>

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<p>That's probably what's happening. We all look trough our own #[personal] filter and look at the World.<br>

What would be the number for a "rose" colored filter? It's not #2.</p>

 

<p>LOL I think it used to be called Velvia #1. I shoot slide film in 120 and I have to say at times I will tweak it in color to make it give me a Kodachrome moment. The thing is Kodachrome was a neutral film when used properly projected on a screen. It became overblown when we started scanning it....</p>

<p> Artist will be Artist and every person has some feeling of it in them...</p>

<p>I went back and found that I had missed some slides, various films, when I did my massive digitalization some years ago, so I am currently in the process of doing some more scanning.</p>

<p>This means that I am looking at a lot of slide (and some CN) film. Mostly Kodachrome, still my favorite if it were around, but everything that I ever tried out including such standards as Agfa and Fuji, to things like Perutz, Ansco, and whatever in the world 3M and Dynachrome were.</p>

<p>I am forcefully reminded of several things, that were once common knowledge:<br>

No film or digital image process ever made records "true colors" in terms of what the human eye sees. As a scientist often concerned with things like recording soil colors accurately, this was always a matter of concern. Some films were better than others for some parts of the spectrum, but nothing was ever 100% accurate for all the spectrum. The same is true of digital, although I actually see more accurate colors there than were possible using chemicals and dyes. If purples are problems (and they are) for some technologies, then you can take your pick of what other color issues arise in the red or other parts of the spectrum with different films....</p>

<p>Digital may be relatively archival, if there were only some way to keep the little zeroes and ones from getting garbled. On the other hand, dyes and pigments are inherently unstable, as the difference between my Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides that were processed by Kodak show when compared to the third-party developing my ex-wife got before I returned home shows all too clearly. Third-party stuff was just not done as carefully as Kodak did it.</p>

<p>I could go on at even greater length, but the point is that imaging technology will always run up against some limitations, regardless of the medium. The eye itself is a very flawed piece of design, jury-rigged as it is out of leftover pieces of light sensitive nerve tissue.</p>

<p>Could be why I shoot B&W for my life.... :)</p>

<p>This morning glory is a well known problem subject. It has very high reflectance in the infrared, so film or digital with excess infrared sensitivity will get the color dead wrong. It's known as "anomalous reflection." See <a href="http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/support/techPubs/e73/e73.pdf">Kodak Publication E-73</a>.<br>

Kodak Ektachrome Professional 100 (EPN) was especially formulated to have no excess sensitivity to infrared light in the red-sensitive layer. This made it a lot more expensive. It also made it a favorite of catalog photographers, because many fabrics are "bright" in IR. It stayed in the product line for at least a decade after the otherwise much better T-grain E-series Ektachromes were released.<br>

Kodak also recommends their Portra films for the same application. I'm sure they don't waste a single cent of product cost on avoiding this problem on their consumer C-41 films, where there's enormous competitive price pressure from Fuji.<br>

The same problem happens with digital cameras, many have excess IR sensitivity. Filtering properly is expensive, and has some technical challenges. The digital camera that got the most bad press over this was the Leica M8, but many many other digital cameras are equally hyper-sensitive to IR.</p>

<p>John they have a IR filter built in.... That is most Digital cameras....</p>

<p>Interesting choice of examples. The heavenly blue morning glory is a commonly cited example of a blue subject that was often reproduced as violet in many film products. I've never seen a reverse example like this. </p>

<p>In any event, JDM is correct that no film or digital sensor ever "saw" colors the same way the human eye sees colors (with one exception described below). There are several common color sensing deficiencies. Silver halide crystals are naturally sensitive to ultraviolet and shorter wavelengths. Outdoor scenes often had very blue shadows in part because the film recorded all that UV energy as if it were blue light. Nearly all modern color film has a UV filter to trim this sensitivity (and to reduce the sensitivity to static discharge). On the other end of the spectrum, the peak red sensitivity of the eye is about 590 nm while classic films had a peak red sensitivity around 650 nm. This "long red" sensitivity was done intentionally to reduce the overlap between the red and green sensitivities. It made most red brighter, but it recorded too much red in some long red reflectors (heavenly blue morning glories and azo green fabric dyes). Many professional products like Portra moved to short red sensitivity to fix this. These films needed a boost in the red-on-green and green-on-red interlayer interimage effects (more DIR couplers). While films like Portra have significantly more accurate colors, amateur astronomers were upset by the loss of long red sensitivity to record all of the nebulosity around the Orion constellation. (FWIW, Portra 800 has long red sensitivity.)</p>

<p>Digital has a different set of problems. It is easy to get red and green sensitivity in a digital sensor and harder to extend the sensitivity into the blue region. There is a wide variety of sensitivity patterns among digital sensors. I have yet to see one that looks like film sensitivity. Most film vs. digital differences come down to a matter of preference. </p>

<p>Here's that exception I mentioned. A very thick coating of a Lippmann emulsion (very slow, very fine grain <br />B&W emulsion) coated on a glass plate would produce interference patterns in the emulsion. Once the plate was developed, if one viewed the plate directly on the axis where the lens had been, these interference patterns reproduced the original colors. There used to be an example on display at the Geoge Eastman House. When viewed off axis, a B&W negative image was visible. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lippmann_plate">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lippmann_plate</a></p>

<p>You know this reminds me of a question I asked years ago on why there is IR film but not UV film.... It was a question my daughter asked me....</p>

<p>@Doug The excessive red in Fuji CN film can be cranked back digitally but the regular prints from drug store processing almost always pop the red. <br>

Larry, most glass transmission cuts of sharply at the uv portion of the spectrum. http://pvcdrom.pveducation.org/CELLOPER/spectral.htm</p>

 

<p>I know this... I am just remembering that and how many times we have spoke of same details....</p>

<p>Doug,</p>

<p>In your example of what the flower should look like, you posted a picture from a digital camera.</p>

 

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<li>Image details: <a href="http://images.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=185515&hl=en"><img src="http://www.google.com/help/hc/images/MapMaker_156969_question_mark_en.png" alt="Help" width="16" height="16" /></a></li>

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<th>Type:</th>

<td>JPG</td>

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<th>Date:</th>

<td>Aug 13, 2006</td>

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<th>Camera:</th>

<td>Panasonic DMC-FZ20</td>

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<p><em>No sir. I haven't tried raw. You see, I grew up shoot'in film - slides for that matter: I compose, get my exposure, and shoot. And what I get is what I get. </em></p>

<p>The only slide film I used that was remotely close to being accurate was Astia (now gone), and again only under the correct color temperature light.</p>

<p><em>And when shoot shoot digital, it's mostly JPG - sometimes RAW when I want to be a goof'n.</em></p>

<p>Shoot a film you think is accurate side by side with digital, identical lighting and subject. Try a few different lighting / subject combos. Try AWB on the digital as well as custom WB. 9/10 AWB will be more accurate, and 10/10 for custom.</p>

<p>Film had some things going for it, but perfect color accuracy under a wide range of lighting conditions was not one of them.</p>

 

<p><em>In your example of what the flower should look like, you posted a picture from a digital camera.</em></p>

<p>LOL! Always check the evidence :-)</p>

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<p>it has a better color accuracy than digital -<strong><em> at this time</em></strong> in Nov 2011.</p>

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<p>Have you found any actual testing results that support this conclusion? The problem you are seeing with your flower picture is a limited color gamut. Different films and different digital cameras have different responses to color both in accuracy and in the ability to reproduce certain colors.</p>

<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut</p>

<p>Some digital cameras such as the Leica M9 have extremely wide color gamuts. Certain film also have the ability to see a wider range of colors.</p>

<p>That is why we use to take several several different films out to test. It gives you an idea of the film's capabilities.</p>

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<p>but with the history of film, it has a better color accuracy than digital -<strong><em> at this time</em></strong> in Nov 2011.</p>

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<p>No. It has better accuracy with one "outlier" color, blue morning glories. When you run a few thousand colors from the botanical spectral database, digital exceeded the color accuracy of film by about a factor of three, <em><strong>way way back</strong></em> in 2003.</p>

<p>Stop and think logically for a moment. Do you really believe that color filters designed to be made so cheaply that you could use them once and throw away thousands of square feet of them a year were of higher accuracy than filters delivered in 0.5-2 square inches per camera?</p>