For all the graphs, curves, charts, blogs and techno evaluation on Dig v Film, I still think that film has a certain feel in a finished print that cannot be replicated on digital. Doesn't mean its better but its different, to me anyway.

I don't think its grain, its more to do with the tolerance of dynamic range. Anyone know Bob Carlos Clarke? Saw some of his original prints a while ago, they were stunning. I mean really breathtaking and there is no comparison between the online version of the same photo. Would love to have seen him working in digital now.

Cheers
Mike

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is so many of you are so confident that digital is in all ways superior then why are you so damned insecure about it when someone disagrees?

Ha ha, good point. I think a lot of that comes from the psychology of having an investment to protect. If you have a lot of time and money invested in digital equipment and technique, you're naturally inclined to defend that investment against all challenges...even your own, sometimes. Simple human nature.

What's admirable about Adrian's comments is that he has the best digital system on the market and still thinks film does certain things better...and it does. The inverse is also true but ya gotta admire the guy for spending that kind of green and admitting it has problems.

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Exposing digital requires more exposure than chrome film. 50% of the information is in the brightest stop of the capture. If you underexpose or even correctly expose you run the risk of banding in the 3/4 tones and midtones. Hence its best to Expose to the Right.

That only works if the contrast range of the scene is less than the sensor can capture. If you're already at the highlight clipping point, overexposing to get more range in the darker tones doesn't work very well. The only way around that is to layer different exposures...which only works with static subjects.

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I am not talking about grain, I am talking about that ultra smooth gradation you get with film. With digital I always find that transition into shadow areas is less smooth. Banding must be an issue with digital because software has a button to try and fix it. I can't ever remember getting moire with film either.

You can get moire with a film scanner too, but I digress. As I said before if you preferred the output of your drum scanned 6x7 vs. your incredibly expensive 39MP system that really says a lot to me, given your talent and experience. It's been said by other users of the same back that it beats their 4x5" film scans so your observations are even more surprising.

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This reminds me of the ridiculous LP vs. CD argument. Albums have terrible S/N ratio that people quantify as "warm", when in reality is just noise. My father was an acoustic research engineer at Bell Labs and I grew up learning about it.

Getting even more off topic but here's an anecdote you might enjoy:

I engineered and mixed Tracy Chapman's first record. We mixed it down to digital tape and had it digitally mastered by the best guy in the country for CD. He also mastered it for vinyl as this was when major releases were released in both formats.

Anyway, when the record shipped we bought the manufactured CD and a high quality European pressing of the LP. We rented the best CD player on the market at the time and the producer had an audiophile record player that was one of the best ever made. We set them up in the studio along with the digital reference tape we got back from the mastering engineer, which had his changes on it.

Guess which sounded most like that reference tape? The LP! In theory, the CD should have sounded exactly like the source but it didn't.

The arguments back then were very similar to what's being voiced in this thread. We were told that CD was audio perfection and that vynil was dead. Without getting too technical it turns out that there are many, many things that can screw up a digital source and audibly reduce the quality. It's also been found that the "bandwidth" of a CD isn't enough for optimum quality. What was deemed to be perfect was found to be not.

The recording industry eventually tried to rectify that by introducing DVD-A and SACD but both formats mostly failed, thanks to a marketplace which increasingly found highly compressed audio downloaded from the Internet was good enough by that point in time. Some hi res digital product is still being released but it's a fraction of the ugly sounding audio that Amazon and Apple sells over the Internet.

Ironically, there are some companies that are mastering records and pressing them on high quality vinyl for the audiophile crowd. It's a very small market but it's there!

I think both film and digital put out a quality product, although I am a 6x7/4x5 guy and hate the grain of 35mm. Each has its quirks and downfalls.

I would imagine digital will continue to improve while film will eventually fade (lasting a lot longer in my opinion than some here think).

Now to add fuel to the fire, while I am impressed with digital color I am not so impressed with digital bw compared to bw film. Sure, a color to bw conversion in digital is light years beyond film color to bw, but it still can't compete with film in this respect in my opinion.

My reasons? Bw film picks up a whole lot more information from the original scene, and that tonal range can be manipulated by filters, etc. before it even reaches the film, and then there is all the dev. manipulation afterwards.

Digital conversion always looks like just that, a digital conversion from color to bw. Now you can argue that digital filter manipulation matches or exceeds filtering film, but remember that the weak link is that with digital you are manipulating an image that has a tonal range greatly reduced from the original scene, while with bw film you manipulate the tonal range of the actual scene before you.

I realize that for many images and personal styles the bw conversion works great. I've seen beautiful work come from it; but I don't think it works for everything. It's certainly not as flexible as bw film (again, in my opinion).

Now I know there are a few who are just waiting to link to a pic and say,"can you tell if this was a digital conversion or bw film", which proves/disproves nothing. The more accurate judgement is whether it's GOOD bw or not.

i always heard that the best record players and vinyl sound better than the best cd and digital player. The brain doesn't like perfection - just take a look at a face image which has been made by mirror imageing one side - just ain't right.


I am saying that film does some things better and digital does others. My Mom and my daughter both love me in 2 different ways but neither is better than the other. Film is my trusty old Mom, who has always looked after me and asks for nothing. Digital is my 11 year old daughter who makes mistakes, needs a lot of attention and costs me dearly but is my future.
I love them both

Adrian

Adrian, I liked the work first seen on your site a few years back, but the latest is fantastic. Not only in its shades, with its more opened and detailed shadows, plus the richness of the color palette and the quality of color balance. Besides there must be some very valuable new aesthetic abilities resulting from the instant feedback, as the digital work I see everywhere is free from old rules in forms and compositions and goes so much further from what was done when having to play safe with film.

About B&W, I think once the engineers work on duplicating the toe and elbow effects of a film, things should get better for both highlights and shadows.

"RANT ALERT"

Seems to me, and I am generalizing that those that prefer digital are in great need to claim it is better when those that prefer film just prefer film.

I do prefer film, I shoot 100% digital 'cause is what my clients presently will only accept. Adrian has it cold, it is a matter of analog having greater "gradation" I call it more nuance and I happen to prefer this, I am not making any claims that this is better but I will claim that yes vinyl beats hands down CD'S. Get a real high end audio system, both a remastered CD of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, originally recorded in 4 analog tracks and a vinyl pressing and listen to both, each on whatever happens to be the top CD player and top turntable, close your eyes and on vinyl you'll place where Paul and John stand, and you'll swear those damned dogs are running all over you.

I cannot fathom how a 72 dpi image on a computer screen beats a medium/large format transparency on a light box, as this 72 dpi images have become the "standard" for judging image quality!

The second thing I detest about digital is storage, I see closet full's of drives in our future that will need to be transfered every decade or so as new stuff comes along making whatever was new just a few years ago obsolete.

I have this fearsome nightmare of discovering 20 years from now that all image files deteriorate in any storage medium regardless and that there's no coming back from that. 2 decades of all the world images gone forever...

Scary?

Now the first thing I detest about digital is how it is creating a generation of lazy idiots as the learning curve to get "a passable image" gets easier and easier, the bar keeps on getting lower and lower, no one wants to actually understand what they are doing.

Art director calls me last week to complain about the color balance of a simple product shot on white, now to start with, neither did the agency figured on having a proper mock up made, nor even asking the client for labels so we could paste them to the container nor having a few boxes of the product delivered to pick the best one to shoot, someone on an entry level position at the agency was sent to the supermarket to buy a couple of pieces.

Back to the color balance issue, I start by explaining to the art director, one that has been at it for 6-7 years already about monitor calibration, color spaces and give up as soon as I hear the little birds flying inside her empty brain, try to tell her about seeing via the picker in PS on the white background that the color balance was fine, more little birds, her genius of a solution was to make an image capture of her computer screen at the agency and email me that file aptly titled "this is how it looks over here" so I could see on the monitor at my studio that indeed the file's color balance was off as she was clearly seeing this at her end.

This is not a particularly moronic AD, this is the norm and I do blame all this digital "betterness" in great part for this.

What is an f stop asks the young hot digital photographer...?

Then how gimmicky everything has become. Digital Kung fu has taken over. All my career I had been a magazine, book freak, I still look at them but don't buy them anymore. I shoot fashion and lifestyles, the trend is now to shoot talents in the comfort of the studio so they can be "dropped in" on a location shot done by another shooter or even worst, downloaded form Getty or Corbis! The challenge has gone from creating great images into making seamless compositions of separate images or whatever PS filter is that weeks fav!

Nice rant bruchi . . . I enjoyed it. Here are some fun items from my last few weeks:

Asked for a four colour logo to be sent to me, so I could drop it into a photo layout I worked on recently. The four colour logo came to me as Red, Green, Blue and Black, though at least they sent it to me as an EPS.

Got a comment about how something looked good on their laptop monitor, but then the print was all fuzzy. They didn't understand why an image from their website would not print better. This came through a tutoring session I was doing. My comment was that there is no such thing as capture once output anywhere . . . there needs to be in-between steps prior to output, and every output is slightly different.

Got a request from a magazine for a high resolution image of mine. First I asked about how big a file they could get through e-mail, so they checked and found out their limit was 3 MB. So I suggested I could upload it to my website, send them the specific file location, and they could download the file; okay then. Got a call the middle of the next morning asking if I could give them the names of the band members in that image, which was no trouble. Then the girl on the phone made a comment about she needed to convert the file to JPEG so they could use it . . . I had sent them a TIFF . . . further discussion. So it appears that she was use to getting JPEGs from photographers, and had no idea what a TIFF was nor how to use it, and she thought they needed figure out how to convert it to a JPEG before they could drop it into their layout . . . really.

I have to wonder how good creative education, or even training for creative support and production people can be when these things happen. Seems to me that the colleges have much more to worry about than whether or not film should be in the curriculum. Of course, if someone else messes up the image files, it is still the photographers fault . . . go figure.

FWIW, the reason good vinyl often sounds better than CD's is something called even order harmonic distortion, similar to what tubes (valves for you Brits out there) add to analog audio. Vinyl also has a higher noise floor - there's mostly inaudible noise in the music that's virtually inaudible on CD's and non-existent with DVD-A and SACD. Which, btw, sound fantastic if the source material does.

On the production side, with more and more people mixing their music inside the computer (which adds no harmonic distortion), they spend a premium for vintage electronics, tube microphones, software plug-ins, and other things to add that warm distortion and noise that's missing from digital systems.

And believe it or not, many records are still being recorded onto noisy analog tape and mixed on noisy analog mixing consoles, if the budget permits it (and today's budgets rarely do). Why? Because some artists and producers just like the sound of it.

See where I'm going with this analogy? The recording industry has been having this exact same argument for 20+ years now so it's very familiar to me since I still record and mix music using a combination of analog and digital processes.

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...I think once the engineers work on duplicating the toe and elbow effects of a film, things should get better for both highlights and shadows.

Well, the jpeg output on most cameras adds those and other effects if you want them, and you can get pretty close in a raw conversion with the curve tool and other tools in the computer. And there are also plug-ins that simulate the "look" of certain films pretty well.

Personally I think that if anything is missing at this point it's more resolution and bigger chips that better deal with moire, blooming, tonal grads. Banding issues can be solved by 'simply' adding more bits to the sensor output. 14-16 is pretty good but 24-32 would be even better. So would digital printers that can handle that sort of range.

Besides, someone might surprise us with a whole new type of sensor (nevermind Foveon) that will solve all these problems in a way we can't foresee right now.

The cost of silicon is dropping which should help on the chip side, and downstream processing in software is improving all the time. Heck, take the Nikon D3 for example. It took a long time but they finally smoked the original Canon 1Ds in every respect at the same resolution and chip size at 2/3 the price. So, I think if you take all the improvements made in the last 5 years and extrapolate into the future, well the future looks pretty bright, at lest for those that can afford it and have clients willing to pay for that sort of quality...a real big if, IMHO.

If my recording industry analogies are correct I think it's unlikely. The better digital capture technologies we have now are sufficient for 98% of the buyers out there and they certainly like the economics of it, even if we don't.

If most music buyers are happy with what they hear coming from sub-CD quality audio being pushed from the crappy d/a converters and analog electronics in an iPod, are the image buyers of the future going to concern themselves with image quality issues that we see and care about but they don't? Probably not, I'm afraid.

KWSmith well said...

To bring the discussion back to the original question...

Most schools make curricular changes based largely on the recommendations of an Advisory Committee. If the Advisory Committee was made up of members of this forum there is no doubt that the debate would be spirited. But ultimately, the Advisors would need to reach a consensus. By consensus, I mean that everyone would not necessarily have to agree but the committee would have to come up with a decision that the Advisors could all live with.

Based on the discussion of this subject I do not know if the members here have reached a consensus, and if they have, what that consensus would be.

Film Only: yes or no?
Digital Only: yes or no?
Both Film and Digital: yes or no?

TC

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Originally posted by KWSmith:
[qb] If most music buyers are happy with what they hear coming from sub-CD quality audio being pushed from the crappy d/a converters and analog electronics in an iPod, are the image buyers of the future going to concern themselves with image quality issues that we see and care about but they don't? Probably not, I'm afraid. [/qb]

This is unfortunatelly what this "advancements" in tecnhology bring us, an homogenization that makes for more paying costumers for those that get the patents rolling and the lowering more and more of the bar.

When I started shooting, chimeras where just coming around, photographers built and designed their light shaping tools, I build many a softbox in my days, many times we would just tape one for a specific need, studio photographers did not own flash meters, they would just look at how many powerpacks where turned on and knew what the exposure was, that first polaroid confirmed this.

Hey, there was a time where doctors where required to know how to draw to graduate. There was a time when the discipline and hard work of mastering a craft earned some respect.

quote:

Originally posted by bruchi:
[qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by KWSmith:
[qb] If most music buyers are happy with what they hear coming from sub-CD quality audio being pushed from the crappy d/a converters and analog electronics in an iPod, are the image buyers of the future going to concern themselves with image quality issues that we see and care about but they don't? Probably not, I'm afraid. [/qb]

This is unfortunatelly what this "advancements" in tecnhology bring us, an homogenization that makes for more paying costumers for those that get the patents rolling and the lowering more and more of the bar.

When I started shooting, chimeras where just coming around, photographers built and designed their light shaping tools, I build many a softbox in my days, many times we would just tape one up for a specific need, seems Leibovitz still loves that Sears shower curtain draped in front of an umbrella combo she used back in the day of that American Express campaign. Studio photographers did not own flash meters, they would just look at how many powerpacks where turned on and how far the 8x10 was extended and knew what the exposure was, that first polaroid confirmed this.

Hey, there was a time where doctors where required to know how to draw to graduate. There was a time when the discipline and hard work of mastering a craft earned some respect.

Who needs great audio quality to listen to Britney anyway?

I just wanted to add a couple of items.

I was once shooting the NAB convention and came across a booth selling a "filter", sorry don't know what else to call it, whereby you run your video through to make it look more "film-like". In the first digital images I saw, they too had the "video" look to them. Now however, I see that current digital images have a more "film-like" look to them. Is this coincidence? Just wondering.

I also read recently that all digital files, no matter the sensor's resolution, are interpolated to create the color images we have today. Is this when it happens?

I love film and I love digital. With a couple of notable exceptions above, it seems most of us do. But I wonder why digital imagry has been trying to look like "film" or film printing. Again, just wondering.

Peace,
rb