Going Back To Film, Digital Is Inferior In Skin-Tones

[eddie g]

It is much easier to get accurate/natural skin tones with film than

with digital. I don't know why that is...but I know that it is so.

Don't get me wrong, I have been a passionate proponent of digital

for 9 years. But for nine years I have struggled to consistently

get satisfying skin tones.

 

<p>Key word there is consistently. Sometimes I get accurate skin

tones with digital but almost always with film.

 

<p>I suspect it has something to do with the fact that color spaces

didn't exist in the world of film back in good old days. Color

spaces limit the number of colors to a fixed set of colors depending

on your space. With analog/film you have a smother transition from

color to color and from tone to tone. If you have a tone that needs

to be just slightly between tone X and tone Y, you can get that

specific tone with film...whereas in digital, it's just that,

digital, and the computer is forced to pick either tone x or tone y

since the color space has nothing in between.

 

<p>I hate the thought of getting rid of my 20D, which I have grown

to love. But I must have accurate/natural skin tones.

 

<p>The following two questions are directed at those of you that

have used film extensively and have recently began using digital

more (within the last 3 years or so).

 

<p>What has your experience been with skin tones (film vs digital)?

How are you dealing with the digital skin-tones?

[bennyboy]

Are you talking about in your prints or what?

[eddie g]

My monitor as well as my prints. I calibrate my monitor weekly so it's not a color management issue.

[steve_rutledge]

I admit, I agreed while shooting a 10D & 20D. I seemed to have a problem with blowing out

skin tones and was never really happy with what I saw.

 

Rather than switching back to film I would consider renting a 5D or a 1Dmk2N.

This change seemed to eliminate film from my vocabulary.

[mendonphoto]

Ah, yes. Color spaces ruined photography. And film transcends color spaces. Only digital has to live with those silly constraints.

 

Just one question: who is going to do your prints for you? I assume you have a lab that doesn't use a Fuji Frontier.

[v.anisimov]

Well I agree and I do miss the Fuji NPH - shot at ISO 320 on my EOS 30 it produced pure and perfect prints. However I can't afford to go back to film, you have to be independently wealthy to do so these days.

[denisbergeron]

With 10d and 5d.

You have to work with color spaces and white balance !

 

And to my opinions, color spaces and white balance exists in the world of films. You have difference between different films, look at velvia, kodakcolor. I think, you never develop color films, where you have to check for color for every print ! Different paper will have different finish !

[bennyboy]

I'd like to see an example, I'm not sure I can identify poor skins tones if I saw them. I take it you are not scanning your film shots for post processing.

[dennisprice]

"...I suspect it has something to do with the fact that color spaces didn't exist in the world of film back in good old days..."

 

Eddie, while you have chosen an excellent topic for discussion (how to achieve consistently good skin-tone quality in digital photography), I think you are mistaken about when color space definitions were created, and how any given color space relates to tonal transitions.

 

The first CIE model (it think it was XYZ?) was defined in 1931, and was revised in 1976 into the more familiar L*a*b* model. That was waaay before digital photography became commercially viable.

 

http://photography.about.com/library/weekly/aa031703b.htm

 

I am certainly no expert, but AFAIK, color spaces have nothing to do with the smoothness or transition of colors or tones so long as they fall within the boundaries of the given space.

[charles_mason]

And if you scan that lovely film, you end up back in a color space...hmmm, cat biting its own tail?

[digitmstr]

>>My monitor as well as my prints.<<

 

Have you ever taken your files to someone else for printing? Did you print color film at home? Try using the same lab you used for film for printing your digital files.

 

>>I calibrate my monitor weekly<<

 

There is NO need for that. If you calibrated properly the first time. Now, it seems, you calibration is changing every week therefore your results will also change every week.

 

This is not film VS digital. This is a matter of choice:

 

 

1) With film, the VAST *majority* of people took it to a lab for developing and printing. The lab did the color correction and editing for the final print.

 

2) With digital, everyone wants to do it at home, understandably so (it's cheaper, it's possible and the tools are readily available).

 

3) Again, with digital, Every one expects to get the SAME results *at home* as they did taking their film to the lab.

 

Unless you really know about White Balance, color in general, color calibration and are willing to really learn it all well there is NO way to make number 3 happen. But, you can still take your work to a lab for proper printing and color adjustments.

 

Now, if the argument is that you switched to digital so that you could do the work at home then, it's a moot point because now you talking about taking your work back the lab. Unless, you have a full color darkroom at home in which case the time & money investment alone would be HUGE compared to what it takes to edit and print in digital.

 

I say, focus on identifying and correcting the real issue(s) before giving up on something (anything) that you may not have totally learned or exploited to its full potential.

 

Skin tone is a "personal taste" issue. Some (myself for example) like it warm, some cool, etc... But, with a good RAW converter and Photoshop you can get a skin tone *precisely* as YOU want it. You could then, save that preset for all you other shoots. Provided the lighting conditions and white balance are directly and proportionatelly the same. The same holds true for slides. Print film is corrected at time of print, something you now have to do yourself.

 

Whatever you end up doing good luck!

[lovcom_photo]

Giampi, a calibrated monitor must always be calibrated again and again, even if each time it is done right. LCD's and conventional tubes provide color that "wanders" over time. I've seen this with all my monitors, of all kinds. I calibrate about once every 3-5 weeks, and it is something we all must do to keep our color corrective process in post processing accurate.

[daniel_taylor]

"I calibrate my monitor weekly so it's not a color management issue."

 

This is equivalent to telling a cop: "I stopped drinking beers 5 minutes ago, so it's not a driving-under-the-influence issue."

 

If you need to calibrate your monitor weekly, you have a color management issue. Maybe you feel the need to calibrate because you're not doing it right so it always ends up off, or maybe you're being obsessive and by calibrating it every week you're introducing a problem some weeks. Either way, there's a problem.

 

"I suspect it has something to do with the fact that color spaces didn't exist in the world of film back in good old days. Color spaces limit the number of colors to a fixed set of colors depending on your space. With analog/film you have a smother transition from color to color and from tone to tone."

 

I'm always amazed when people say this because it's the polar opposite of all my experience to date. There's no comparing my 35mm film and digital work in terms of tonality and subtle color transitions/details: the DSLR always wins. Film does not have an infinite ability to render tones, and in 35mm grain interferes with accurate tonal transitions. I can discern texture in flower petals in my 10D flower shots, defined by the most subtle color variations, that are simply not present (i.e. single color/tone) on 35mm frames of similar flowers under similar conditions.

 

And that's using sRGB, not Adobe.

 

If you're sometimes getting accurate skin colors and sometimes not, it's not a color space issue. It's most likely a white balance issue, a variation in post processing, or the constant equipment recalibrations. Assuming you're just being obsessive and your equipment is actually calibrated, I would lean towards WB.

 

As a couple other people have noted, there's no lab to think for you. You have to manage this stuff yourself. Maybe you have a lab you love and trust and will just find film easier for you. That's fine. But understand it's not a "digital vs. film" issue, it's doing it yourself or leaving it up to someone else.

[bennyboy]

Hmm, I thought that sRGB was actually a smaller gamut than adobe hence you have tones that are closer together.

[chris_hutchins]

In reference to the colourspace/smooth tones issue, the wider the gamut, the less smooth the change in tones will be(in theory) as the same number of values are still used to represent the sum of all colours(TM!). different spaces have different levels of presicion in different parts of the colour space but afaik its not visible to the human eye in most cases. i believe that errors visible in prints are more likely to be out-of-gamut colours rather than an idadequate number of colours to give a smooth change of tone.

 

chris

[kelly_flanigan1]

Here at the print shop I find the many comments about "calibrate your monitor" alot always to be abit odd, like they somehow are always drifting around. The calibration of the RIP boxes , scanners, color printers seems to be the major issue, with "monitor calibration" really not such a thing that wanders around much. Maybe its just an anal thing, folks dwell on the thing that they see in front of them that has knobs or buttons and is easy to mess with. Maybe the same folks polish their riding lawn mowers to get better gas mileage. :) <BR><BR>The usually reason I have to calibrate a monitor is when the computer setup is a multiuse computer and somebody fiddles with the monitor. What is sad is that many of my monitors are just 14, 17, 19 and 21 inch middle of the road CRT's from the thrift store that cost me only 35 buck max for the giant ones. Even the paper stock one uses in inkjet and other printing has a different hue and brightness that requires calibrating out for critical jobs. The Lamination process alters the apparent saturation of a print, boosting it somewhat. Inkjet inks also fade, and with a bulk ink settup the ink can sometimes be a tad different in the clear tubing feeding the heads, than the bulk supply. There are also color blind clients, with weird lighting settups. In the copying of artwork, there are some artist materials that are out of gammut of a printers inksets.<BR><BR>Usually the folks that are my customers who are always talking about "monitor calibation" also have color problems. Msany times I think that they are just chasing their own tail, with blinders on of other color issues. Sometimes I feel they are varying the air pressure in the spare tyre, varying the polish on the radio antenna, and checking their gas mileage, ignoring the cars dragging brakes or 100's of pound of crap in the rear boot.<BR><BR><b>Eddie</b>You may on a lark just dabble with the thought of sending the same image to some local printers and see if their settup makes better looking skin tones. When digital cameras had not much resolution is when I last saw some real "skin tone" problems with printing digital images, or when folks use a radical jpeg compression.

[ymages]

Dan Lovell with what do you calibrate your screen ? i am interrested in THE solution

[PuppyDigs]

I agree somewhat as I find skin tones extremely easy with Portra 160 or NPH. It's like

falling

off a log. The dynamic range of these emulsions is amazing too. With all that said, I

wouldn't

trade my 5D for film as it's better in most other ways, not to mention having total control

of the image

from start to finish.

 

A decent EOS film body is cheap so you don't have to switch. You can buy an Elan 7E for

less

than $150 on ebay. An EOS 3 for $400. Why not shoot both film and digital and enjoy the

best of both worlds while you can? I do but with the EOS 5D am finding fewer and fewer

reasons to dust off my film bodies.

[gluteal cleft]

<p><i>I suspect it has something to do with the fact that color spaces didn't exist in the world of film back in good old days.</i></p>

 

<p>That's just silly. Of course they did. They just weren't a nice file with a .icc extension which would fit on a disk. You had the color space of Velvia, the color space of Portra, the color space of NPS, etc., etc.. Each film, with it's inherant color range and response, effectively had its own color space.

 

 

<p><i>Color spaces limit the number of colors to a fixed set of colors depending on your space. With analog/film you have a smother transition from color to color and from tone to tone.</i></p>

 

<p>Yes, the color space will limit the number of colors - but with the wide color spaces (ProPhoto as an example), there's almost nothing you can see with your eye that the color space can't represent. And with a 16-bit depth, the transitions are more subtle than your eye can see. In fact, 16-bit ProPhoto will represent more colors than you are ever likely to be able to display or print.</p>

 

<p>So, why the problem? Partly (mostly?) because people don't realize how to work in a digital system. They don't realize that it's not "point, shoot, drop off at the lab", like film. The largest mistake I see is with sharpening - the very nature of sharpening is that of destroying smooth gradations of tone and/or luminosity. A great deal depends upon how it is performed, but sharpening is a very quick way to make your bokeh suck, and your smooth tone transitions come out more abrubt.</p>

 

<p><i> If you have a tone that needs to be just slightly between tone X and tone Y, you can get that specific tone with film...whereas in digital, it's just that, digital, and the computer is forced to pick either tone x or tone y since the color space has nothing in between.</i></p>

 

<p>If you're dealing with an 8-bit color space, that can be true. But when you're dealing with a 16-bit color space, the difference between X and Y becomes much smaller, to the point where you really aren't going to be able to tell the difference with your eyes.</p>

 

 

 

<p><i>I hate the thought of getting rid of my 20D, which I have grown to love. But I must have accurate/natural skin tones.</i></p>

 

<p>Before you ditch everything, try one more thing. Calibrate your monitor, printer, <b>and camera</b>. Nobody expects 100% accurate color from an uncalibrated monitor or printer, but many seem to believe that an uncalibrated camera will magically produce such results.</p>

[ymages]

with which tool do you calibrate your screen for ProPhoto RGB ?

[les]

Now, could someone explain what it really is: "accurate skin tones".

 

Accurate relative to what ? Everyone sees colors differently. Skin tones vary depending on the lighting. When you take a pic at sunset - you will get warm, reddish cast on everything, including the skin. Everyone's brain introduces different corrections to the visual input too. Most people see colors differently with their left and right eye !

 

About the only common denominator is proper calibration of CRT/printer. If you are really hard core - you may use profiles for your particular camera.

 

What does all this have to do with color "accuracy" ?

Accurate skin tones are 'accurate" at the moment of capture, with lighting available. I doubt very much that anyone can even judge whether or not the colors on the screen (or in print) are "accurate". How do you make comparisons ? Your only record is your picture - which may conflict with your memory of the subject. If color management is used and the system calibrated properly - you get what is "accurate".

 

Now, I agree that it may be in conflict with one's recollection of the subject or with aesthetical criteria - but what does it have to do with color accuracy ? If you do not like what you get - there is PS to correct the issue until you are pleased with the final effect. But again - color is so subjective an issue that I wouldn't even mention it in one sentence with the word "accurate". You want accuracy - get a spectrometer, scan the subject at 1,000,000 points or more, process your picture, compare with the spectrometer data and (when all is said and done) put a stamp on the picture "99.99% color accurate as per Spectrometer data xxxxx" (it is a joke, do not get worked up by this).

 

But seriously, how one defines color "accuracy" ? Is there such a thing at all ? NPH might give us skin tones which are pleasing, but I doubt very much that they are accurate in a strict sense.

[digitmstr]

>>color that "wanders" over time.<<

 

Not weekly! Never, ever had that happen. Not with CRTs, not with LCDs, ever.

[chrisjb]

Hi, we do restuarant & niteclub pix, events wedding etc, nearly all skin tones, I prefer to keep skintones close to natural. I have a full coloir darkroom lab, so have always done our own, We had a fomula with film, chemistry and certain papers. Film processing gear is calaulated with a test strip and corrected Daily. The lab has been dorment for 2 years as the other pros we D&P `d for as well as ourselves have moved on to digital. Film labs rarely keep consistancy as they don`t get a big turnover these days, plus most I`ve found printed too blue and cold, a good reason to do it yourself, unless you have a good pro lab close and pay the extra.

 

Digital has been so much easier to keep skin tones consistant. Especially correcting blemishes and defects, I use 20d`s. PS, and mostly a Fuji Finepix 400d printer, its calculated and only fiddled with or recalculated if the final print alters, If you are doing it weekly it may be either unnecessary or something is wrong with your equipment. As Giampi says, everytime you change your monitor so everything else changes. How do we control it.? Keep it all simple.sRGB. and we shoot nearly all Jpeg with good exposure, none of this shoot raw fix it later. Its nice to play with wide gamuts but most monitors don`t cover the range and I know some of the best pro labs that don`t print a wide gamut on thier papers. Even when I use a friends Prontier use sRGB. And another friend prints with sRGB on his LED (pegasus)printer.using the full gamut of the paper.

 

I`d agree with Puppy, grab a cheep Eos 3 or 1v just for specific purpise. and also try different labs to see if they print to your taste. We had one lab setup here a while ago, it was set just for shooting NPH, nothing else was catered for, so they got all the wedding D&P. but closed down last year from lack of work. a lot of film printers have pre calculated program disk to cater for various emulsions.

We still like shooting film ocassionally but hate the wasted time consumed doing it. and do ocassionally use raw to gain that extra with 16bit depth with larger files.

Digital has been a positve step for us the last 7 years.

 

Good luck with your decision

[john_murphy1]

Eddie,</p>

I certainly had a lot of trouble making the transition from film into digital (about 6 months

ago). I had grown good at recognizing which color films would work well with a person's

particular skin color. I have never really been able to match the beautiful colors of

portraits made with Astia.</p>

Having said that, I rarely shoot film these days. The digital workflow is just so much more

convenient that I end up getting much better shots. Yes, color correcting images is

difficult, but I have found something that works for me. Besides, because I end up

scanning my images anyway to be given to the client on CD or via email, the beautiful

colors of film end up getting squeezed into the sRGB gamut anyway because that is the

standard for the web and for online print services. Rarely, if I print at home, I do use a

larger gamut, such as ProPhoto.</p>

My process is as follows: I shoot a gray card with every session for every different lighting

set-up (color balance changes when you add or subtract scrims). I convert my RAW

images using Capture One and I spend a lot of time on the white balancing. I almost

always have to subtract magenta (by adding green). I also usually increase the saturation

by 2 or 3 points. Then I convert to TIFF. Next I open up the image in Photoshop to fine

tune the color of the skin. Usually, this gives good results.</p>

I assume you know all about profiles and color management, so I won't insult you by

telling you that you should just calibrate your monitor and everything will be okay. But, I

would note that I recently bought an LCD monitor because everyone seems the think the

colors on LCD's are as good as CRT's now. That certainly is not what I am seeing. So I am

sticking with my CRT. If you don't have one, you can pick up a used Dell Trinitron or one

of those Mitsubishi Diamond things really cheaply these days.</p>

Whatever you do, don't dump your digital gear, because you will need it again someday.

Pick up an antiquated manual focus camera and shoot some film. You'll feel better. Get

on the Leica or Large Format or Medium Format forum and brag about how you don't need

to use digital. This will be very therapeutic. But don't throw away your digital gear,

because eventually someone is going to ask you to take their picture when you just don't

have the time and energy to struggle with traditional film. Then your digital stuff will

come in handy.

[stacy]

I didn't read any of your responses so sorry if I'm repeating someone. I never liked the skin tones I got out of the 20D either and I do think it's easier to get great skin with film, but I've found the 5D + dpp raw processer can get very good tones.

 

If you want to stay with digital get the 5D- it's about one million times better than the 20D (and I thought the 20D was pretty good until I tried this one). Otherwise- yes, switching back to film will fix your skin tone problem too.<div></div>