Nikon D300 and the Zone System

[tm_photography]

<p>I recently watched a very insightful video:<br>

PHOTOSHOPCAFE PERFECT EXPOSURE FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY<br>

Wikipedia has a good article on the Zone System including diagrams.<br>

In the videos the series assumes that a digital camera has a latitude of 5 stops allowing one to place +1 in zone VI, +2 in zone VII, and zone VIII: white with no detail . Conversely it places -1 at zone IV, -2 at zone III, and absolute black at -3 or zone II. According to Thom Hogan in his "Complete Guide to the Nikon D300," the D300 has 8 usable stops. So here is my question. this should mean that Zones II and VIII are usable and zones I and IX are not usable. That's as far as I can determine onmy own.</p>

<p>Does the d300 really have a latitude of 8EV?<br>

What zones should be assigned to what EV, if there are 8 stops and not 5.<br>

5 works out nicely because the historgram shows basically 5 sections, but when you up it to 8 I'm not sure where do draw the line.<br>

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.<br>

Timothy</p><div></div>

[jlharris]

<p>Whether you're shooting JPEG or Raw is going to have an effect on how many stops of latitude you have.</p>

[leicaglow]

<p>Timothy, shooting both film and digital, I find your questions troubling to reconcile in my head. I guess first and foremost is that the true zone system isn't just about the camera and exposure, it's about the entire end to end process, with the darkroom being a key component. So when you talk about placing exposures in certain zones, it really doesn't mean anything from a complete process standpoint.</p>

<p>I believe this is why people shooting digital will use HDR and splice together images of different exposures. I've not found an accurate means of measuring EVs on a digital camera. I do know that I had a tough image recently where I tried my best to capture it on a D200 (knowing that the contrast range was at least 10 EVs, but ended up doing stand development from images taken from my Leica instead.</p>

<p>And really, you can't answer your question with just the pieces you've supplied. You have a couple of other variables that play into your dynamic range: your monitor or printing process being two of them.</p>

[tm_photography]

<p>I shoot in raw mode, but want to know the latitude pre raw manipulation.</p>

[dale_dimmick1]

<p>Wow, 8 stops? H-e-dbl hockey sticks no! What the writer doesn't address is how digital cameras must compress the tonality of the darker portions of the image to eliminate inherent noise in the signal. Film responds to a flat detail curve when exposed correctly and digital requires a logarythmic (sp) curve. This is why so much detail in shadows is lost in digital caprture. Detail exists, but after tonal compression and noise reduction you can't see it. <br>

Can you use the zone system? Sure, you just can't manipulate the image through chemical processing. That was the point of the zone ssytem, to move tonal values up and down to reveal the desired detail in specific tonal areas. </p>

[rarmstrong]

<p>Tim, I think that it is true that you can get 8 stops of usable dynamic range from the D300, and as Tom Hogan puts in in his guide..."sometimes you can push it to 8 1/2". I also believe that it is really tough to wrap your mind around a comparison between the zone system in black and white film with chemical developing and a 14-bit RAW image captured by a digital sensor. It's kind of like comparing apples and oranges in the sense of the physics of light and the chemistry of film. Every digital sensor has an inherent dynamic range that it is capable of capturing. If you take care not to blow out the upper end and not to seriously underexpose the lower end, then you should have that 8 stops of range to work with in RAW in your post processing program, just as a good exposure in black and white film should allow you the full zone range in the darkroom. It's interesting to think through, but I don't think that film can be easily compared to digital sensors, since their process of dealing with light is so basically different.</p>

[rodeo_joe1]

<p>Dale, have you ever seen a linearised film curve? It makes a digital gamma curve look as flat as an ice-rink. The familiar H&D film curves only look vaguely straight because they're a log/log representation of density (log opacity) against log exposure, and film is actually much less linear than the gamma curve applied to digital images. Indeed, we wouldn't be able to print a truly linear capture, because a paper print is only capable of around a 200:1 brightness range, and a computer screen isn't much better either, at around 300:1.</p>

<p>Anyway. A digital camera with only a five stop dynamic range would be pretty poor. That's a brightness ratio of 2^5, or only 32:1 which would look a pathetic grey on grey. I've measured a useable range of 8 stops with my own DSLR. So, an inciteful video? I don't think so if they can get the basic technicalities so wrong!</p>

<p>B&W film has a useable "linear" range of around 7 stops with standard processing. The Zone system describes 9 zones, but the first and last are "just perceptible shadow detail" and "barely perceptible highlight detail" - in other words falling in the extremely non-linear parts of the film curve. Zones 0 and X are fairly irrelevent, since they describe pure black and white with no detail.</p>

<p>Is it possible to transcribe the zone system to digital? I'd say yes, since the underlying principle of Ansel Adam's system was pre-visualisation of the photograph. All the technical stuff was merely a means to an end. Having instant replay of the finished image kind of makes all that faffing about with precise exposure measurement redundant, since if it doesn't look the way you wanted it to, you just change the exposure and reshoot. Or use PhotoShop to get the tonal range you intended.</p>

[rarmstrong]

<p>Tim, this quote was from Ansel Adams in 1981....<br>

“I believe the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.”<br>

What I take away from this and the various discussions of the zone system is that it just represents a functional way to think about the dynamic tonal range of a scene, which should be able to be applied to any image acquisition system. But, that each system(like the CMOS sensor in the D300) has it's own dynamic range, based upon it's design and ability to capture a range(8 to 8 1/2 stops) of tones. So, whether it's 1935 or 2009, we work with the same scenes, see them with the same eyes, but record them with different equipment. I think that Ansel Adams would find what we do now exciting, just as we admire what he left us.</p>

[kuryan_thomas]

<p>One thing you should consider is that you make best use of your camera's dynamic range if you "expose to the right", that is, you always use the highest exposure value that does not result in clipping in any of the channels. You can still use the Zone System, but the difference is that you use it in the raw processing stage, not in the camera.</p>

<p>See <a href="http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml">this article</a>.</p>

<p>Some raw processors are designed specifically to support Zone System during processing. One such is <a href="http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/index.html">LightZone</a>. I don't use it myself, but many people who use Zone swear by it.</p>

[jay_moynihan]

<p>Hmmmm.<br>

I would agree with the poster above, about the "Zone System" actually referring to all stages, from exposure through film and print processing.<br />That said i still on occasion used a truncated part of it with my D200 when shooting landscapes.<br />I still have a Pentax "digital" handheld meter. I also still have the old Zone VI zone scale pasted between the dials. If the photo i intend is to be B&W, i set the camera to manual, and i will position the values on "zones" (EV's or F-stops) using the meter. Works well for me.<br />And to anticipate those who say a handheld meter is useless for digital, all i can say is, sssssh! Speak quietly, I do not want my DSLR to hear you :)</p>

 

[leicaglow]

<p>There are some good points in this thread, especially about the zone system being about visualization. But just because I know that camera x has the capability of capturing y EVs, does it mean I have the ability to compress or expand the tonal range to make it capture what the visualization was in the first place? I'm not sure I see how to do that without stitching together pixels.</p>

<p>Richard says: "If you take care not to blow out the upper end and not to seriously underexpose the lower end, then you should have that 8 stops of range to work with in RAW in your post processing program." But what happens after that? How can you get any more range out of a digital image, even in RAW?</p>