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Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Dynamic Range Is Not Exposure Range! Part II

By Ctein

Part I is here

The windmill I am currently tilting at is trying to get people to stop misusing the term "dynamic range" when they are talking about the exposure range of their camera. Last week I explained how real exposure ranges can be somewhat less than the dynamic range of the sensor. This week I'll explain how the exposure range can be significantly greater than the dynamic range.

Fig. 1. These four squares illustrate how a sensor responds to low levels of light. In an imaginary world photons rain down uniformly, so any exposure level less than one photon per pixel comes out pure black, because you can't have fractional amounts of a photon. This also means you can't record any intermediate gray levels between zero and one photons or between one and two photons per pixel.

Most Internet musings on the subject of sensor behavior and image characteristics don't have anything to do with the way the real, physical world works. Most notably, almost all the discussions of exposure range, number of gray levels recorded, and so on, imagine a uniform, noiseless world that is far removed from reality. In their mythical universe, figure 1 shows what happens when you expose a sensor to very low light levels, starting with perfect blackness (zero photons per pixel) on the left, up to one photon per pixel on the right. Axiomatically, you can't subdivide photons, so everything remains pitch black until you reach a level of one photon per pixel, and then suddenly you see a signal. Similarly, although not illustrated here, the next jump in response occurs when you reach a level of two photons per pixel; 1.5 photons per pixel just doesn't mean anything.

Right?

That's a rhetorical question. You know I'm going to tell you it's wrong. And here's why.

Counting statistics. In the real world, when the exposure works out to an overall flux of one photon per pixel, we don't actually get one photon per pixel. Light doesn't come in a uniform rain of photons. One photon is only the average. What actually happens is the likelihood of any one pixel seeing some number of photons follows something called a Poisson distribution. (Wikipedia will tell you more than you probably want to know about this). In reality, equal numbers of pixels receive either one or zero photons, totalling about 75% of all pixels. About 1/5 of the pixels will see two photons. About a sixteenth will see three, and lesser fractions four or more photons.

Fig. 2. In the real world, photons arrive randomly, obeying Poisson statistics. This figure illustrates what a 10x10 array of pixels might see when exposed to different levels of light—0, 0.25, 0.5 and 1 photon/pixel, average.

I've illustrated this in figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 shows 10x10 cells of pixels, highly magnified, so you can see the way Poisson distributions look. For figure 3 I tiled bunches of these together so you'd see something at 100% scale, like in a real photograph, instead of much-magnified. (These illustrations will be easier to see if you click on them to open the larger versions.) The tiling's why you see fine repeating patterns in figure 3. In real life those wouldn't be there, but I wasn't about to hand draw 100,000 pixels!

Fig. 3. The same light distributions as in figure 2, but now you're looking at 160 x 160 pixel zones, to better simulate the visual appearance of a real photograph. Ignore any repetitive fine textures; that's caused by me tiling the zones in figure 2 to fill the large areas.

Overall, seen from a distance, the 0-photon and one-photon-per-pixel zones in figures 1 and 3 look very similar. No surprise, there. Figure 3 looks grainy, because there is a mix of pixels with different numbers of photons. This is one of those places where having more pixels unequivocally wins out over having fewer; the grain gets finer.

The import of this statistical noise is that you can distinguish several levels of gray between integral-photon illuminances (see last week's column). In particular it means you can record light levels below the single-photon-average threshold of the detector. Suppose you set the exposure so that there is an average of only 1/2 photon per pixel. You don't get solid black, as the armchair "experts" imagine. A plurality of pixels do indeed see no photons, but a minority see one photon, and a small fraction see two. The resulting photograph will be grainy, but on average it will appear to be a darker tone than the one-photon picture and it will be usably lighter than solid black.

Even a 1/4 photon-per-pixel exposure produces a visibly-lighter-than-black tone, although it's getting marginal. Our original "10 stop dynamic range" sensor clearly has a real, useful exposure range greater than 11 stops, as you can see my illustrations.

Even mixing in the intrinsic system noise that I discussed last time doesn't necessarily wipe this out, as figure 4 illustrates. It gets harder to see the distinct zones, but they're still visible. Again, the more pixels you have to work with, the clearer the distinctions between tones.

Fig. 4. Toss in a moderate amount of system noise and you've got an approximation of real photography. The tones are grainy but distinct from pure black, even at the 0.25 photons per pixel level.

So, now you know that dynamic range may happen to match exposure range. Or, it's going to be better. Or worse. And sometimes the difference will be very significant.

As I said last week, my gripe derives from the fact that we had a useful and accurate term that was widely understood, and a bunch of semi-informed neologists decided to replace it with a more techie-sounding but incorrect and inaccurate term.

There's a very simple fix to this. Just stop saying "dynamic range." You're never actually talking about that; what you are talking about and interested in is "exposure range." Just start saying that, OK? I try to always do this, and so far no one has ever written to me saying, "I don't understand what you mean by exposure range." Trust me, no one will misunderstand you.

Next time I'm going to explain to you how Raw data isn't really all that "raw."

Ctein

Columnist Ctein illumines the darkness every Wednesday on TOP.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Wednesday, 19 September 2012 at 02:33 PM in Ctein, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (17)

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Dynamic Range Is Not Exposure Range! Part I

By Ctein

OK, here I go tilting at windmills again. It's just that this one bugs me. Well, they all bug me. Well, but this time I'm really justified being bugged.

Yeah, but I always think that.

Never mind. I've got the donkey, I've got the lance, and I'm riding with both. For truth, justice, and Dulcinea!

Ninety-nine percent (conservatively) of the folks talking and writing about digital photography are misusing the term "dynamic range." They should be talking about exposure range. The two are not the same thing; they can differ by several stops. Both are entirely acceptable terms; in fact, exposure range was well established in traditional photography before some people with a little (as in "a dangerous thing") technical knowledge decided it would be cooler to call it dynamic range. They were wrong. Dynamic range is a preexisting term in electronics and it means something different. Replacing an accurate, understood, established, and entirely adequate term with an incorrect and inaccurate one does not strike me as a service to the craft.

So, let the lecture begin. There may be a quiz tomorrow.

Dynamic range is the range of signal that a sensor can record. As a thought experiment, let's imagine an ideal, noiseless monochrome sensor that converts each incoming photon to a photoelectron, and where each pixel can hold 1000 photoelectrons. Then its dynamic range is 1000:1 because the smallest signal it can record is one electron and the largest is 1000. That's 2 to the 10th power or 10 stops (or 60 power dB, if you're into that kind of thing). You'll find that information in the technical spec sheet from the sensor manufacturer.

That does not mean the exposure range, the range of brightnesses that can be captured in a single exposure, is 10 stops. It's likely to be considerably different, for a whole number of reasons. Real-world noise intrinsic to the sensor+camera system may reduce the exposure range below the sensor dynamic range. Photon counting statistics, which we'll get to next column, increases the exposure range to more than the dynamic range. We'll get to that next week (so hold your questions, please).

So, intrinsic noise. What are we talking about? Real sensors and cameras don't have zero noise, although they get surprisingly close under the right conditions. Some of the noise is constant but some depends on how many photons the sensor collects, some depends on temperature, and some on how long the exposure is. It's complicated

What impact does this noise have? One effect is that it means you can record smaller differences in brightness than an "ideal" analysis says you should, e.g., intermediate levels between one-photon-per-pixel and two-photon illuminances. I covered that at length in the column "Noise is Your Friend."

Seemingly paradoxically, noise also reduces the number of grey levels you can meaningfully distinguish. This paper by Emil Martinec of the University of Chicago analyzes that most beautifully. The text may not be for the mathematically faint-of-heart, but the illustrations are understandable.

(An aside: If you're thinking all this further trashes the arguments of the "expose-to-the-right" crowd, as if I hadn't done that sufficiently already, you'd be right.)

Noise also has another effect that interests us more at the moment—it reduces the contrast in the shadows, and that can affect usable exposure range. In our ideal, frictionless world, black is black and each photon is detected by the sensor proportionately to the signal. The top row of this illustration illustrates that:

Illustration © Ctein 2012

Adding a small amount of system noise to the record, though, disproportionately affects the smallest signal levels, that is, the darkest tones. In rows two and three of the illustration above, I've added small but increasing amounts of noise to the signal. The eight-photon-per-pixel zone doesn't change very much but the lesser-exposed zones get progressively lighter, with the greatest difference being visible at the black end of the scale. While the noise hasn't made any difference, directly, in the exposure range of the camera at the dark end of the scale it has drastically lowered the contrast.

Add enough noise and you get something like the fourth row, where you've lost any meaningful distinction between pure black and a one photon per pixel exposure. In principle the difference is measurable, and the more pixels you have (the finer the grain) the easier it will be to make out that difference. But practically speaking, there isn't much to work with.

(Side note: deciding what constitutes the darkest usable tonal difference is one of the vexing parts of measuring exposure ranges. It's not like at the white end of the scale, where there is a clear boundary when you saturate the sensor. At the dark end of the scale, the researcher has to make a judgment call right at the beginning about what tonal difference is considered meaningful.)

At low ISOs, with short exposures and moderate temperatures, system noise doesn't have a very big impact on exposure range. Go to long exposures and high ISOs and it's easy to see the effects. When you open up such Raw photographs in Adobe Camera Raw, it may even tell you that there is no black clipping at all even though you can look at the photograph and see there is no subject detail in the shadows whatsoever. The overall noise level is high enough that you don't have any true black pixels, even those pixels that received no light exposure whatsoever.

No simple answer
In the real world, it gets much more complicated than that. Sensors aren't 100% efficient, and on-sensor noise can actually improve photon capture efficiency under certain circumstances. Color muddles this substantially, which is why I limited these thought experiments to a monochrome sensor. Moreover, sensors don't have to be purely linear in their behavior, where the stored charge is directly proportional to the amount of light. Currently, I think (I could be wrong) that all ordinary cameras do have roughly linear sensors, but there are a number of specialized cameras that don't, and NASA and other astronomical researchers have designed specialized sensors with considerably more than a 20-stop range for their work (and they're not achieving that by storing several million photoelectrons per pixel).

So, what's the simple answer? Well that's the problem! There isn't one. The electronic characteristics of the sensor and the camera can have significant effects on the actual exposure range realized in the world, and the kind and magnitude of those effects depends on the circumstances of the exposures. There are many, many engineering rules of thumb that get used for estimating the relationship between dynamic range and exposure range, but there's no universal rule like, "multiply the dynamic range by 0.95 to get the exposure range."

Things get even more interesting when we include the way light works in the real world instead of in some people's imaginations. The real exposure range of the sensor turns out to be significantly greater than its dynamic range. That will be the topic of next week's column.

Part II is here

Ctein

Don Ctein de la Daly City mounts his faithful donkey and goes at the windmills on Wednesdays at TOP.

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Posted on Wednesday, 12 September 2012 at 03:45 PM in Ctein, Photo-tech | Permalink | Comments (46)

Wednesday, 05 September 2012

iPad Followup

By Ctein

Since my review of the new iPad, I've revised some opinions and found a very useful free app to recommend.

Let's be clear; in no way am I going to tell you why you should have an iPad. If you think you need one, fine. If you can't see any use for the device, fine. I'm not out to persuade you differently. You can read my previous articles to find out why I value the iPad, but as for whether or not you should get one you're on your own. Now, on to the updates.

After thoroughly trashing the usability of the camera in the new iPad, I found myself using it on rare occasion. Consequently, I will raise its ergonomics rating from –273 to a more modest –100.

One of the least exotic of the dishes at Travail (halibut, sunchoke, roasted tomato and pearl onion). No tweaks, no adjustments, just cropped. Even with a splash of direct sunlight, awfully good exposure and color.

In April, my friend Beth Friedman and I were having our second dinner at the fabulous and surprisingly inexpensive molecular gastronomy restaurant, Travail, near Minneapolis. (If you don't know what molecular gastronomy is, Google it. I will not even try to explain.) We take notes when we order the tasters' dinner, because there's no way we will remember the wonderful and imaginative dishes we've been eating. I typed into Notability on the iPad and, in a flash of inspiration, decided to see if I could use the built-in camera to photograph some of the tapas-sized courses. It worked astoundingly well, even with highly uneven and very mixed lighting and white china. Two of the photographs are reproduced here, with nothing done to them save some cropping.

Absent direct sunlight, the results were even better. Despite the mixed light sources, the color balance and exposure were excellent. Again, no tweaks.

The built-in dictation feature has worked even better than I expected. I wrote and edited my entire column about printing for Ronny sitting in the car one evening while on a trip, using the iPad's dictation. If this ever becomes user customizable, it will be my favoritest program, ever.

On the minus side, the runtime/recharge time issues have been more of an aggravation than I thought they'd be. In the bright light circumstances where I'm likely to use my iPad, I rarely get to turn down the brightness much. Since that's the main determiner of run time, I rarely get anywhere near 10 hours usage; it's more like seven or eight, at best. When I'm using Google maps in an automobile, 20% of the battery life can get sucked away in an hour. I bought one of those little $10 cigarette lighter USB chargers so I could keep the iPad plugged in while driving.

Because the new battery pack has such long charge times and the iPad has such high power consumption, plugging it in for short periods of time doesn't get you much. The calculus is pretty straightforward: with the old iPad, one hour of plug-in time would buy you about three hours of run time. With the new iPad, it may only buy you a little more than one hour of runtime.

The bottom line is that you're going to run out of power more frequently and more inconveniently, and it's going to be harder to do anything about it.

I'm still pleased that I got the new iPad, but if longer runtimes and more convenient recharging is important to what you do, and you don't really need the new and improved features, you'd be better served by a new or secondhand iPad2.

An app that helps
Lastly, I found a nifty new app for printing. It started when Walgreens advertised the Canon iP2702 printer for $19.95. It seemed like as good an opportunity as any to replace our ancient DeskJet 970. Paula asked me, "If we get this, will I be able to use it to print from my iPad?"

After some research, the answer came up no. After some further research, though, I stumbled across Airprint Activator, a program for the Mac that lets you access any printer that's hooked up to your Mac as an Airprint printer. Currently it is free and fully enabled, although a donation would be much appreciated.

It works like a charm. I can print to not just the Canon but the Epson 3880 as well; heck, I could print to the 9800 if I had a reason to do so.

I sent the author $10. It was worth it.

Sadly, I don't own any iPad apps that are particularly smart about printing; they lack controls for paper size, type or print quality. That's not an Airprint problem; Airprint is just a way of getting data to the printer. The application still has to tell the printer what to do. Consequently, I have no control over formatting at this time and all I can get out is plain paper quality. But I can print with no hassle and no fuss.

Maybe I should be shopping around for a few smarter apps.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by -et-: "With your background, I suspect that I am about to mention something that you have already considered. However, we all have moments when we overlook the obvious, so I'll go ahead anyway.

"All of the 'standard' cigarette lighter adapter (CLA) chargers have a built-in limit of 0.5 amps current flow to a USB connection. The iPad needs (and can accept) a current flow of 2.1 amps to keep up with the power drain while operating. If the iPad is not operating, it will just charge more quickly with a 2.1 amp CLA than with a 0.5 amp CLA.

"There are CLAs that can provide this amperage, but you have to look for them carefully. (There are some CLAs with two USB outlets that deceptively claim to provide the amperage, but when you read closely you find that they provide this as a total amperage—but split between the two outlets. So read the fine print.)

"Additional misleading factors are that most of the USB outlets on computers are also limited to 0.5 amps charging current, and that all USB cables are not equal. The 'standard' cables will not tell the charger that it should provide more than 0.5 amps—even if it is capable of doing so.

"I do not have an iPad, but I do have a Nexus 7 that needs and can accept more than 0.5 amps. I looked at CLA options for some time. and ended up purchasing a TomTom Hi Speed Multi-Charger from Amazon for $20. It has been very satisfactory for me, but YMMV."

Posted on Wednesday, 05 September 2012 at 09:58 AM in Computers, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (22)

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

What Do I Do With The Matrices?

Dye transfer matrices are the full-size sheet-film printing plates that are soaked in dyes and squeegeed against receiving paper to make dye transfer prints. Here's a set of matrices and the work print that goes with them.
They're unique; are they useless?

By Ctein

This is another one of those columns where I ask all of you for advice, because I have no answer to this question whatsoever. Here's the situation:

When I close down my darkroom sometime within the next year, I'm going to have some 300+ sets of dye transfer matrices and reference prints with my notes (see above) that will be of absolutely no use to me. What should I do with them?

Please don't suggest that I throw them out. That's simply not the way I'm wired. They only take up about five cu. ft. of space, and if I can't figure out anything useful to do with them, they'll just go in the back of the closet and stay there until I die, and then my heirs will deal with them...probably by throwing them out.

But I'm not going to be the one to toss them. They are a unique, albeit entirely intermediate, work product. The problem is that their uniqueness and intermediateness (is that even a word?) [yes —Ed.] makes them good for nothing else. It's not like Ansel Adams's collection of negatives that he passed on with the proviso that students be able to print from them as a learning experience. (Does anybody know if the beneficiaries of his generosity actually followed through on that?)

You can't strike prints from these unless you're doing dye transfer printing, and it's pretty damn certain that the handful of dye transfer printers who still exist will not have any interest in printing unsigned knockoffs of Ctein photographs, even with my blessing. It's not like my work is that much in demand. It also turns out to be surprisingly difficult for two dye transfer printers to produce similar prints, even when they work from the same sets of matrices.

You could scan the matrices on a flatbed scanner, assemble them into full-color images and print those. And, again, why? Who would care? Especially since high quality scans already exist of most of the negatives that those matrices were made from, and those scans are much better suited for making good prints.

I can imagine there would be institutions here and there that would like to have one set of matrices and a reference print as part of their photographic collections, to represent the craft. Are there 300–400 such institutions? I doubt it. Certainly, I am not so notable nor famous that I would think that any institution would want to acquire the entire set.

This isn't about making money. I'm not concerned about selling these; I'm more likely to make money selling clippings of my hair. I just can't imagine where they would even find a home.

What I am definitely not interested in doing is putting in a lot of effort on this. I'm not going to send out umpteen dozen cold inquiries in the vague hopes that I might get a nibble from someone who says that they're interested. If somebody is interested, they can reach out to me. If you know somebody who might be interested in this stuff for whatever reason, imaginable or un-, pass this column on to them and have them e-mail me ([email protected]). I will definitely respond to inquiries of interest. I'm just not putting myself out to solicit them.

Now, let's hear the brainstorms!

Ctein

Ctein ponders from within the Matrix on Wednesdays, not always in virtual 1999.

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Featured Comment by Hudson: "Would they work as replacement glass for a greenhouse?"

Mike replies: Wonderful comment, subtle. But who was that? My brain isn't coming up with it...and now it'll drive me crazy if you don't tell me.... :-)

Ah, got it from James Rhem's comment. Of course....

Featured Comment by Tom: "I remember seeing framed cels from Walt Disney animated films for sale. It seems you could do something similar: the matrices and proof mounted in a frame might be of interest to photo collectors."

Featured Comment by Ed Kirkpatrick: "Donate them to the Library of Congress in Washington. That kills all your birds with one stone. They will be kept safe, available to any who might wish to look at them and possibly available for use in the future after you are gone. Oh and it saves your heirs the pain of tossing out all your work."

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "I have to think that George Eastman House might be interested in your matrices and work prints, given the vast size and eclectic nature of their collection. That and Kodak's long involvement in the dye-transfer process. Given their current financial straits, they might even want to (inexpensively) mount an exhibition based on their extensive holdings of beautiful dye transfer prints."

Featured Comment by David Paterson: "Isn't this essentially the same problem which every photographer eventually has to face—getting older, wondering what to do with a lifetime's collection of material which has served its purpose and which the future will have no interest in? I am 67 and not getting noticeably younger, with a remaining collection of some 60,000 transparencies and negs in every size from 35mm to 10x8", plus a plan-chest full of prints. I can't see any way out of this except maybe drinking some good beer around a large bonfire some fine afternoon quite soon."

Featured Comment by ault: "Why not offer them to owner(s) of the print(s)? If they value the prints enough to have bought them, they may appreciate and care for the intermediate states...."

Posted on Wednesday, 29 August 2012 at 05:09 AM in Ctein, Film and Darkroom | Permalink | Comments (66)

Friday, 24 August 2012

Zooms vs. Primes, Part II

An Idiosyncratic, Unfair and Unscientific Comparison

By Ctein

Here's the question I'm exploring:

If I'm out photographing in a situation where I could use either a zoom or a prime, at the same settings (focal length and aperture) which lens in my kit is going to give me the best image quality?

I don't care about relative size, weight, convenience, maximum aperture, or cost. If that doesn't interest you, skip the rest of this article and come back next week.

Here are the lenses I own:

12mm ƒ/2 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital
14–42mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital (first generation) (NLA) [Here's the current version in black and silver —Ed.]
20mm ƒ/1.7 Panasonic Lumix
45mm ƒ/1.8 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital
45–200mm ƒ/4–5.6 Panasonic Lumix G Vario
85mm ƒ/1.4 Rokinon

I did those comparisons last week.

Jeff Goggin loaned me three wide-angle zooms:

7–14mm ƒ/4 Olympus Zuiko Digital
14–35mm ƒ/2 Olympus Zuiko Digital SWD
14–50mm ƒ/2.8–3.5 Lumix Leica D Vario Elmarit (NLA)

How do Jeff's lenses compare to my own set of lenses? That's where I go now.

The 7–14mm ƒ/4 Olympus zoom beats my 12mm Olympus prime at all apertures; it's sharper over the entire field and noticeably less smeary in the corners. The 14–35mm Olympus SWD zoom (at 14mm) is also distinctly superior. On the other hand, the 12mm Olympus beats out the 14–50 Lumix (at 14 mm); they're very similar on axis but the zoom is really lousy in the corners, soft and flarey with massive lateral chromatic aberration. My 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom once again shows pretty well, being as good or better than all the lenses except the 14–35mm Olympus SWD.

At 20mm, the story is similar; the 14–35mm Olympus SWD zoom is best by far over the entire field at all apertures. As I reported last time, my 20mm Panasonic and 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom run neck-and-neck, but they both lag behind that 14–35mm wonder.

"Twenty millimeter" lenses compared at ƒ/4. These are 150%-scale sections from the centers of the frames: heavy-duty pixel-peeping. The 14–35mm ƒ/2 Olympus Zuiko Digital SWD is clearly best, and the 14–50mm ƒ/2.8–3.5 Lumix Leica D Vario Elmarit worst. The first generation 14–42mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital and 20mm ƒ/1.7 Panasonic Lumix are very similar and fall between the two other zooms.

At the edges of the frames, the rankings don't change, but the differences are more pronounced. In these photos, the 20mm Lumix looks better than the 14–42 Olympus, but in most comparison sets the Olympus comes out a bit better. At this level of pixel-peeping, there can be substantial frame-to-frame variation, so a tester needs to look at several comparison sets
before passing judgement.

And, still taking up the rear is the 14–50mm Lumix zoom—weak in the center and really lousy at the corners.

Finally we get to the 45's. Not unexpectedly, my 45mm Olympus prime took top honors in most photographs at most apertures, center and corner. Surprisingly, though, the Lumix 14–50mm zoom finally came through and performed nearly as well as that prime. Both of my zooms took up the rear, although the 45–200mm Panasonic wasn't much worse.

Takeaways
What did I learn from all of this? Well, my 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom is a much better lens than I thought. At short and medium focal points, there's no reason to take it off my camera for another lens, although it loses it at the long end of its range. I definitely shouldn't use my 12mm Olympus instead of the kit zoom unless I need the extra coverage.

'This trashes-

most of the rules of thumb-

I'd use for picking a lens'-

My 45mm Olympus prime remains the big winner, but if I've got my 45–200mm Panasonic zoom on the camera I'm not really going to lose very much leaving it there (aside from the serious light falloff at ƒ/4 that I mentioned last column). And that 85mm Rokinon turned out to be a real surprise, a superior lens at moderate apertures.

As for Jeff's zooms? The clear winner is the 14–35mm ƒ/2 Olympus Zuiko Digital SWD, which appears to match or beat just about any other lens over its focal range. If I only wanted to be carrying one fast lens that would cover everything from moderate wide-angle to short tele, that would be it. Assuming that I didn't mind that it was huge (damn thing weighs nearly a kilo) and hugely pricey (north of two grand—eep).

Overall, this trashes most of the rules of thumb I'd use for picking a lens. Cheap lenses can be very good, kit zooms can be better than pricey primes, fast zooms can be great, and there's no way to predict without testing over what part of its focal length range a zoom will be especially good or bad.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein peers deeply into various mysteries weekly on TOP, usually on Wednesday. ('Steamed Editor was behind this week.)

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Posted on Friday, 24 August 2012 at 02:39 PM in Ctein, Lenses | Permalink | Comments (60)

Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Zooms vs. Primes, Part I

An Idiosyncratic, Unfair and Unscientific Comparison

By Ctein

Having rounded out my Olympus Pen lens kit, I've an excess of choices. I have four primes and two zooms and, as close as often matters, the zooms overlap all the fixed focal length lenses. The zooms themselves overlap at their extremes.

So here's my question: if I'm out photographing in a situation where I could use either a zoom or a prime at the same settings (focal length and aperture) which lens is going to give me the best photograph, technically speaking? E.g., if I have the 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom on the camera and I see a composition which asks for about a 20mm focal length, will I gain anything by switching to the Panasonic 20mm lens?

I don't care about relative size, weight, convenience, maximum aperture, or cost. I just want to know how my lenses perform and which ones I should choose. If that doesn't interest you, skip the rest of this article and come back in two weeks.

Here are the lenses I own:

12mm ƒ/2 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital
14–42mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital (first generation) (NLA)
20mm ƒ/1.7 Panasonic Lumix
45mm ƒ/1.8 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital
45–200mm ƒ/4–5.6 Panasonic Lumix G Vario
85mm ƒ/1.4 Rokinon

Simple enough; I'll compare the 12mm to the 14–42mm (lots of the times I don't need the extra coverage of the 12mm), the 14–42 to the 20mm, the 14–42 to the 45mm and the 45–200mm, and the 45–200mm to the 45mm and 85mm.

Then Jeff Goggin, who owns more equipment than is good for me, knowing that I was not totally thrilled with that 12mm, thought maybe I'd be curious to see how it stood up against his wide-angle zooms.

Oh sure, why not. So he sent me:

7–14mm ƒ/4 Olympus Zuiko Digital
14–35mm ƒ/2 Olympus Zuiko Digital SWD
14–50mm ƒ/2.8–3.5 Lumix Leica D Vario Elmarit (NLA)

You can see the assemblage of glass in the accompanying illustration. Suddenly the number of potential comparisons triples, and what was going to be one column is two. Sheesh. Nobody's fault but my own; I could've said no. Well, time to dive in....

Jeff's three zooms are in the back row, left. All the other lenses are mine.

How did the 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom compare to the 12mm Olympus lens? At ƒ/4 they were essentially identical in image quality, the zoom being just a touch less contrasty overall. At ƒ/5.6, the zoom was actually better, being sharper on axis. At ƒ/8 the two lenses looked identical.

How did the 20mm Panasonic fare? At ƒ/4, the 20mm had better image quality in the center of the field but the 14–42 zoom was better at the corners. The prime lens was just a touch more contrasty. At ƒ/5.6, though, the two lenses produced almost identical image quality; if one had reason to stop down to ƒ/8, the zoom was actually better.

Understand that there is much nitpicking going on here. In practical reality, what this tells me is that there's no reason to swap out the zoom for the prime (or vice versa) at these focal lengths.

It was quite a different matter at the long end of the 14–42mm's range. The 14–42mm is mushy and smeary in the corners; even stopping it all away down to ƒ/11, where you'd expect diffraction to completely dominate, doesn't clear that up entirely. That superb 45mm Olympus lens wipes the floor with the zoom. It's better in the center of the field, much better in the corners. More importantly, it has much better microcontrast. Overall contrast isn't a big deal in these days of Photoshop; it doesn't really much matter if one lens is a little more contrasty than another. Microcontrast is another matter entirely; if the lens is muddying up tonal distinctions in fine detail, that's hard to recover.

Comparing the two zooms at their extremes, the 45–200mm Panasonic is a lot better in the corners at the 45mm setting than the 14–42mm Olympus is at 42mm, although the Panasonic has pretty serious light falloff in the corners wide open. Not what you'd usually expect in a telephoto. Still, if it's a choice between those two lenses for overall quality, the Olympus loses. But more importantly, that 45mm Olympus prime lens beats them both, although it's only slightly better than the Panasonic zoom at ƒ/8. (That zoom is really quite good; I've made a number of 17x22" portfolio prints with it over its whole range of focal lengths.)

That only leaves me to compare the 85mm Rokinon with the 45–200mm Panasonic. Lenses optimized for ultrafast apertures are frequently not as good as their brethren at more modest apertures. Well, at ƒ/4 the Rokinon is really good, corner to corner. It's noticeably better than the Panasonic zoom, being crisper and sharper over the entire field. By ƒ/8, the two lenses are equally good—the zoom might even be a smidge better, but I'm hairsplitting. Generally, though, I should switch from the Panasonic to the Rokinon if I don't need the autofocus and aperture.

So, there are the answers for my personal lens set. Some predictable results—did anyone really think the 45mm Olympus wouldn't blow everything else away? Some you wouldn't predict at all if you weren't familiar with the lenses. You'd certainly not guess that Olympus's first-generation 14–42mm kit lens would be as good as the much lauded 20mm Panasonic. Or, conversely, that a very inexpensive ultra-fast telephoto would beat out a much better-than-decent zoom.

Next time I'll toss Jeff's wide-angle zooms into the mix and see what rises to the top. Likely we'll find some surprises there, too.

Ctein

Ctein is anomalously idiosyncratic, unfair and unscientific on Wednesdays here on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Craig: "My big annoyance with dedicated Micro 4/3 lenses in general is that most of them (even the shorter primes) have excessive barrel distortion that has to be fixed up in software. The difference is obvious if you compare a in-camera JPEG to an uncorrected RAW file (using third-party raw processing software that won't automatically apply a lens profile to straighten the image out). Part of the problem is that correcting distortion requires pixel remapping, which by its nature always reduces sharpness in the regions farthest from the center (where the distortion is worst). Unless I missed something, Ctein doesn't tell us in this article whether he is assessing the lenses' performance based on JPEGs, corrected RAW files, or uncorrected RAW files, which makes it difficult to tell whether he's really judging the lenses as such or the image-processing software."

Featured Comment by Manuel: "You have every reason to be unscientific, Ctein. Using a lens can be a very subjective experience. We often get misled by technical specifications and overlook a lens because of e.g. its narrow maximum aperture, but lenses are hard to judge from specs only.

"Let me advocate a lens that everybody else dismisses: the humble Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm ƒ/2.8 Pancake lens. This is the lens that was bundled with my E-P1 (it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime deals) and was my only lens for two months, save for a rather frustrating two-day experience with the original 14–42mm zoom, which I never got to grips with. (That was when I realized I was a prime man.) Sure, the Pancake has horrendous chromatic aberration and fisheye-like levels of barrel distortion—even if it's unnoticeable with JPEGs due to in-camera correction—but, when I look critically at the 30x40 cm prints of photos made with the 17mm and the E-P1, those issues become completely irrelevant. The levels of detail are simply amazing for such a modest lens and, while I wouldn't exactly call it 'sharp,' it is nonetheless extremely accurate.

"Short of having a top quality wide-angle lens, the Pancake is my loyal companion when I do street photography. Very seldom it lets me down. Even now that I have some nice OM lenses in my backpack (don't even get me started with praising them), I keep turning to the Pancake because of its nimbleness and levels of detail. So here it is: there's nothing like actually using a lens to evaluate it. In my view, printings are the ultimate image quality test—and the 17mm passes it with flying colours. We should never overlook a lens just because it has a bad reputation, and neither should we rush in to buy one just because everybody is raving about it."

Posted on Wednesday, 15 August 2012 at 12:41 PM in Ctein, Lenses | Permalink | Comments (39)

Wednesday, 08 August 2012

Lord High Executioner

By Ctein

In early July, my friend DDB (David Dyer-Bennet) and I went off to Willow River State Park in Wisconsin to do some more of the infamous stochastic photography that some readers have found so controversial (example below) and to just photograph nature and waterfalls in general.

More "frozen" water. I love this stuff.

A successful and most pleasant outing, as usual, although the day was unpleasantly warm. Consequently, there were many folks playing in the water, a custom I still find a little disquieting, since the rapids and falls on West Coast rivers are typically much more rugged and dangerous. It just seems wrong to be splashing about in white water that way. Indeed, a small number of west-coast visitors die from not realizing how vigorously many of the rivers west of the Great Divide run.

Nonetheless, it does appear to be a Midwest "thing" and when we arrived at Willow River Falls, we discovered it was lousy with bathers and sunbathers.

I use that word by choice.

I don't like people in my nature. I am at my most misanthropic when I am out in the countryside, and I am especially so when I am photographing. Strange people are variously distracting, annoying, and an outright intrusion in my photograph endeavors.

I tried working around it, treating all the brightly and scantily-clad hominids as if they were some slightly mobile variety of wildflower, working them into the compositions. For all I know, I even got good results. Here's an example:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I found it.

But honestly, this kind of work is not to my taste. Whether or not other people think it's a nice photograph doesn't really matter. I don't like it. I'm interested in the waterfall, not the human intrusions into it. Too bad I left my magic wand (or, in a pinch, the mass disintegrator ray) at home.

But wait! I've got this nice shiny new copy of Photoshop CS6 that I've been breaking in, with its new and improved content-aware tools. I wonder how hard it would be to render all those pesky hominids into, well, nonpersons?

Whaddaya know! It was much easier than I thought it would be. It took me less than 45 minutes of work mostly with the Spot Healing Brush (and just a bit of cloning) to get to this:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I wish I had found it.

For those who would like to pixel-peep and see just what a good job the new tools do, I've posted full resolution versions of the before and after pictures on my website.

Instant pristine wilderness. What's not to love?!

Okay, if you're a documentarian, this is unacceptable. And I am, of a sorts. My stated aesthetic and artistic reputation is that I try to make prints that look like the way I see things (when I can see them, anyway). At the least, that what people are seeing in the prints has a reality in front of the camera. My audience trusts that my photographs aren't the result of special effects. A photograph like this last one, below, of the forest fire smoke, is accepted to be real by folks who know me. They do not think I used a tobacco filter on the camera or gradient filter in Photoshop to get that effect. My reputation lies in rendering it beautifully, not in inventing it.

Smoke creates a lovely kind of golden Renaissance light. What makes this photo work for me (and my audience) is that it's a real thing. If it were the creation of filters (hardware or software), it would be much less interesting and appealing.

Consequently, the Willow River Falls photograph is never going to end up on my public website or as part of my portfolio. It would poison that reputation. But that doesn't mean I can't amuse myself.

Even from the documentary point of view, though, it might be acceptable. If one were interested in portraying what the waterfall looked like, with no particular space-time context, I'd see nothing wrong in using the depopulated photograph. It accurately portrays the falls themselves. Just not their relationship to those pesky people.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein depopulates reality on TOP mostly on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by John Holland: "So, Ctein's hero turns out to be Marvin the Martian, the fellow who wanted to disintegrate the Earth because it obstructed his view of Venus. I clicked on each picture above to open them in separate windows, then alt-tabbed between them. Mesmerizing. People...waterfall. People...waterfall. Watching them disappear was more fun than I would have expected, because for one thing, I'm not a misanthrope—at least, I don't think I am. Second, I actually like to have a human or two (but no more) in outdoor pictures to give a sense of scale, especially if the vista is immense. (But no red shirts!) However, this particular herd of hominids was too dense; your instinct to reach for the Illudium P-36 Space Modulator is entirely understandable."

Featured Comment by Jim: "There's still one small fragment of humanity surviving near the top of the waterfall, towards the right, just next to the large boulder. And there's me thinking I don't pixel-peep. Sheeesh."

Featured Comment by Andre: "With regards to Ctein's fire picture, I recently ran across some really stunning photos of tornadoes and other severe storms from a news site link—stunning, that was, until I found a post by one of the photographers showing the original capture and the amount of manipulation that had been done to get the final result. The finished photo made it look like the photographer had captured some spectacular natural light that illuminated the lower part of the storm while the clouds above were ominously dark. The base Raw file showed the exact opposite —the higher clouds were lit up while the lower reaches were dark. At that point I completely lost interest in the photograph.

"Certainly not everyone feels that photographs need to maintain some amount of documentary accuracy—at least one contributor to the Luminous Landscape site has stated that if all his photo does is capture reality then he doesn't see much point in it. But for me, I've found that I expect a fair amount of realism in a photograph. I'll happily accept dramatized-beyond-reality poses/lighting/colors in other media (paintings, drawings, etc.) but have no tolerance for them in photography. Not sure why my mind draws that hard line, but it does.

"I much prefer photographers with Ctein's philosophy—where what you see is pretty darned close to what they experienced."

Featured Comment by Clayton Jones: "I have no hesitation in using the Spot Healing Brush/Clone Tool to remove unwanted objects. I assume as much freedom to do whatever I want as I would if painting a canvas from scratch. Why should painters be the only ones allowed to create compositions the way they want? I don't invent things that don't exist, but I will modify if needed. Just yesterday I removed a small foreground tree that was ruining an otherwise nice composition. I have removed power lines and beer cans, and once I moved a bird in flight to a better location which made the composition more balanced. It's art, not documentation. I like the falls picture, by the way (without the people). Very nice."

Featured Comment by Rodger Kingston: "For me the people in the original photograph are what keep it from being just another boring nature calendar photo. Usually I find that nature itself trumps photographic representations of it. (I'm an equal opportunity nature photography bigot: more often than not I have the same feeling about Ansel Adams' images, including most of the current Adams exhibition of photographs of water at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.)"

Posted on Wednesday, 08 August 2012 at 02:36 PM in Ctein, Digital Techniques | Permalink | Comments (61)

Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Memories Are Made of These

By Ctein

Last column, I talked about my experiments pushing the limits of available light photography down to the level of starlight. Emboldened by the impressive results, I decided to try some candid photography. When Rachel was at the scope, I'd open the shutter for as long as she seemed to be standing (more or less) still and see what I got. After several tries, I got this...

...a 14-second exposure at ƒ/2, ISO 6400. OK, not perfectly sharp. But still, starlight!? Wow.

I e-mailed the photograph to several friends with the remark to the effect of how amazing it all was and Oren Grad commented back, "Subtract the color, and I agree." (Oren added a smiley.)

I had already tried that, resulting in this:

You know something? Artistically, I agreed with Oren. It'd never be a great photo, wasn't supposed to be, but it had a mood about it in B&W. If someone else had shown it to me, I'd likely make the same recommendation—subtract the color and it's a better photograph.

But, as a memory photo, a snapshot, that I made, it was a serious fail in B&W. It looked phony and artificial and disconnected from reality. Same as if it were a Lomo photo or run through one of those silly artsy-fartsy camera filters. It became a derivative (in the IP sense) work that was distanced from the original photograph and experience.

I don't remember stuff in B&W. Even in a situation like this, where I can only barely see what I'm photographing (starlight, remember) it's still in color in my brain. There are perceptual cues, like the yellow-green fireflies flickering in the brush, the occasional car headlight barely visible miles away through the trees, the very dim red glows of the LED flashlight and the astronomy app on the iPad. The stars themselves have colors. These all remind my brain that it's a color world, even though I can't see any in the starlit landscape. Black-and-white photography does not reproduce the experience of viewing the world at night.

So, in color, funky as it is, this photograph is a simulacrum of reality for me, which is what I want from a memory photo. In B&W, it becomes an aesthetic artifact, with considerably more redeeming social merit but much less of a personal connection.

Interesting.

Even more interesting: when I was a youn'un and color was beyond my reach and budget, I didn't feel that way. Snapshots made in B&W with the family camera or my Polaroid felt entirely real. And those older photos do still work as memory photos. Differing expectations and experiences have changed what's an acceptably faithful reference to reality in my brain.

I wonder if this is in any way related to the newish custom that has arisen of recording short video clips instead of making a still photograph? Not because the folks doing this have any urge to be videographers or want to watch hour upon hour of "home movies" but because a moving picture (with sound, yet) is a closer simulacrum than a silent, still one, just as a color photo is closer to life than a B&W.

It ain't about the art. Most photography isn't about the art. It's about the memories.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by John Krumm: "Interesting observations about color and memories. So I wonder what your take is on Hipstamatic iPhone filters and the like? Myself, I shoot probably 90 percent family memory shots, though I spend a fair amount of time making them look decent in Lightroom. But I try to be a little careful when deleting the bad ones too. I know I'm grateful for every old family photo I have now, looking for interesting detail in even the worst photos, so perhaps (maybe in 20 or 30 years) I will enjoy going over my digital family-shot rejects just to see what I missed, and miss."

Featured Comment by Steve Jacob: "What a fascinating post.

"Colour vision is such a marvelous, incredible and seemingly arbitrary gift (such a tiny spectrum of wavelengths) yet it conveys immense meaning and significance in its own right. The semiotics of colour and its effect on mood and preconception is immense, and changeable (cultural).

"The colour of a photograph is the most sure way to date a picture—fashion in the '60s, shop fronts, branded signs, buses, cabs, fishing boats, rows of cottages. It's so evocative I can almost smell lavender in a photo of Provence but it's the colour that triggers the memory.

"I spent much of my youth in Malta. Buses there were colour coded by destination. As a result the central bus station in Valletta was a riot of colour. Mdina, Rabat, Sliema. Looking back through old photos of it brings all the names back to me in a way a monochrome print simply cannot.

"Black and white can work, but in my view desaturating a colour digital photograph is not a default way to be more 'artistic' any more than one of those cheesy Instagram retro effects. It only works when it's appropriate, which frankly is not nearly as often as it's used."

Posted on Wednesday, 25 July 2012 at 01:04 PM in Ctein | Permalink | Comments (32)

Wednesday, 18 July 2012

Photons? Who Needs Photons?!

By Ctein

Last week I wrote about my dislike for the Fuji X-Pro1, but that's not to say it's an objectively-bad camera. My personal take on the image quality is that it gets a solid B or B+. I grade on an absolute scale, not relative to other cameras in the same size/price range, so this is fair praise. In particular, its low light performance seems pretty good.

The Fuji is probably not better than other cameras of the current generation, but that's a big improvement over my four-year old Olympus. What this really speaks to is the overall state of digital photography today. To put it technically, Fuji's low light abilities are effin' unbelievable.

Here's the setup:

One of the best things I did on my Minneapolis vacation was I got to spend three days with my friend Rachel at her folk's cabin on the North Shore (of Lake Superior) so we could get in some stargazing.

"Stargazing" is a euphemism.

For astronomy.

We're both avid amateur astronomers, and whenever I visit Minneapolis the two of us try to get in some observing time together. She's got lots easier access to dark(er) skies than I do, so I see lots of stuff with her that I don't get to see at home, even though I've got a 10" scope and she has a six.

Up on the North Shore, it gets really dark. To the south of the cabin is the vast, wet, and unpopulated expanse of Lake Superior. The only sources of light pollution are Duluth, which is a good 100 miles to the west, and, eastward, the teeming metropolis of Grand Marais (pop: 1,300). We lucked into two nights of mostly clear skies (and mostly moon-free, it should go without saying). Two out of three is not bad.

Aside from looking at a whole bunch of old favorites, I got to see several objects I'd never been able to observe before, because of too-bright skies, including the great spiral galaxy, M101, and a very nearby dwarf galaxy that was an NGC object, my first ever NGC galaxy [NGC = John Dreyer's New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, a well-known catalogue of deep sky objects —Ed.]. The sky was so dark, in fact, that the two of us observed that the North America nebula was just barely a naked eye object! A surprise discovery for both of us.

Simple astrophotography
I like playing around with astrophotography. The simple kind, where you just set the camera up on a tripod, open the shutter for a while, and see what gets recorded. I'd done some of that with my Olympus Pen and was always amazed at what a few seconds of exposure could capture. The Fuji blew way beyond that previous amazement.

Fig. 1. North America Nebula. 5 sec. @ ƒ/1.4, ISO 1600, 35mm lens (50mm equiv.). This is a 50%-scale crop from the full frame.

The aforementioned North America nebula took a mere 5 second exposure at ISO 1600 (figure 1). This is a 50%-scale crop from the full frame that clearly shows the nebula's reddish color as well as the signature "Gulf of Mexico." By astrophoto standards, nothing to write home about. But, for a normal camera with a normal lens, just plopped on a tripod, it's impressive.

Fig. 2. M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, along with its satellites, M32 and M110. 5 sec @ ƒ/1.4, ISO 4000, 35mm lens (50mm equiv.). This is a 100%-size crop from the full frame.

For true mind-blowing performance, though, check out this photo of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) along with its two satellites (figure 2). Now we're cranked up to ISO 4000, and this 100% crop faintly shows the dust lanes in the spiral arms. True, they're right down at the level of system noise, but they persist from frame to frame, so I know they're real and not artifact.

Photographing Andromeda isn't hard; it's bright and big. Getting detail in it with an ordinary camera is another matter. Wish I'd had a third clear night so I could've tried this with a longer lens.

I'm not quite done.

The trip had an added bonus for me: there were fireflies up there. Fireflies! I was in heaven. Those are one of my few fond childhood memories and I hadn't seen any in decades (they don't exist where I live). After I jumped up and down and burbled and cried a little bit, I went for the camera (figure 3). Sorry for the unlevel horizon line—I couldn't see what I was pointing at! The only source of illumination in this photograph is starlight and airglow. (Rachel and I don't know if the faint pink and green bands in the color are a very dim auroral display or due to very thin high clouds. They were below human visibility. They're not camera artifacts.). This isn't dusk, it's 1:00 in the morning. Stars in the sky, fireflies in the trees. What could be better?

Fig. 3. Fireflies by starlight! Can you believe it? 30 sec @ ƒ/2, ISO 6400, 18mm lens (28mm equiv.).

I never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd ever be making photographs by starlight with a normal camera. And, remember, the Fuji is far from the best low-light camera on the market today.

Lots of fireflies—same photo as Fig. 3, but here's a 100% crop instead of the full frame.

As I said—putting it technically—it's effin' unbelievable.

And, let's not forget, we're still a couple of stops away from theoretical limits of performance (see "Photography at the Speed of Light" and "Something Old Something New"). Things will only get more unbelievable.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column rises above the level of system noise on Wednesdays.

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Posted on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 at 02:02 PM in Cameras, new, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (29)

Tuesday, 17 July 2012

We Cry Wolf: And This Time, There Is a Wolf

Lobster Carapace, Cabo Pulmo, Baja Mexico, 1991

The short take: As you've read here, Ctein is closing his darkroom within the next year. Before he does, through the end of this year, he's taking one last round of orders for his dye transfer prints.

After the end of this year, you'll be limited to whatever he has an inventory. When he closes the darkroom, a lot of his photographs will go out of print. So if there's a particular photograph of his that you've been eyeing, this may be your last opportunity to get it.

There's something else. When he does close his darkroom down, sometime between the end of this year and the middle of next, he's going to be raising the prices on his remaining dye transfer prints substantially—a minimum of 40% and, in the case of the very last dye print of any particular photograph, as much as 300%.

Can this really be the end?
We've cried wolf about this before. When Ctein had his first dye transfer sale here on TOP, I made noises about how it might be your last opportunity to own a real dye transfer print. That turned out to be wrong: a number of former dye printers approached Ctein during and after the sale, offering their unused materials to him, and, far from running out of paper, as he expected, he actually ended the sale with more paper in stock than he'd started with. He's now had a second dye transfer sale, and still has some materials left.

This time there really is a wolf...we just don't know exactly how close the furry feller actually is. Ctein will run out of paper within the year and he's not looking for more (as he's written, he's even looking forward to that darkroom closing).

Necropolis Overlooking Glasgow, 1995

Why a dye? Carl Weese's idea, from about 1996, was that B&W photography was already perfect, but that digital would represent the true coming-of-age of color photography. And thus it has come to pass. But of all the pre-digital color photographic methods, at least, dye was the aristocrat, a rare and damnably difficult-to-master process of almost unparalleled beauty.

In the 1990s, you could fit all the master dye transfer printmakers in the world into one living room. (I actually published that picture, in a magazine—sorry I can't show it to you.) Now, you could fit them all in a modestly-sized bedroom. Well, assuming they were good enough friends.

Ctein's prices may be bargains for dye transfer prints, but these aren't purchases everybody can enter into lightly, and he knows he isn't giving people a lot of time to make up their minds. To make your life a little easier economically, he's accepting layaways on orders, so people can pay for their prints gradually over a year or so instead of having to come up with a large chunk of money all at once.

Sometimes, there really is a wolf
So anyway, that's the announcement: Ctein is coming to the end of an era, and offering layaways on dye prints from his portfolio. There are info pages with layaway and pricing details.

And here's a page where you can see all the pictures that are available.

Keep in mind you're not really seeing the prints in the JPEGs, unless you know how to "translate" from one to the other in your mind. I know I have a reputation for hating cat and flower pictures, but this one for instance is just gorgeous as a dye, let me tell ya.

Mike

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Posted on Tuesday, 17 July 2012 at 04:58 PM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | Permalink | Comments (17)

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

I Am NOT Saying the Fuji X-Pro1 Sucks...

By Ctein

Those of you who are regular readers of my columns know that I've been kinda sorta of shopping around for a new camera. My Olympus Pen E-P1 still works just fine and produces files of quite satisfactory quality. But after four years, camera technology has progressed enough that there are some attractive alternatives in roughly the same size range (for me), at various price points: the Olympus OM-D, the Sony NEX-7 and the Fuji X-Pro1. I haven't made up my mind that I will get a new camera, but I might.

Jeff Goggin was kind enough to lend me his Fujifilm X-Pro1. It pushes beyond the normal top end of my price range, but I'd heard good enough things about it that I felt I needed to give it consideration. I'm going to get three columns out of my experiences with it...none of which will be a review of the camera, for reasons that are quickly going to become apparent as you read this.

Let me make one thing very clear at the beginning. To borrow a friend's catch-phrase, this is all about me. It's not about you, it's not about the camera, it's about me. This week, egocentrism reigns. Just so you know.

Cut to the punchline. I hate this camera. I hate it so much that if someone offered one to me for free, I am not sure I would take it; there's a good chance it would sit on my shelf almost never getting used.

The eye level viewfinder is a letdown. I'm left-eyed, which means whenever I use that viewfinder I put a great big greasy nose print in the middle of the LCD screen. LCD screens are my preferred way to work. Having to whip out a microfiber cloth every time I use the eye level viewfinder is a severe discouragement to wanting to ever use it. The only eye level viewfinders I had used before were centered in the body of the camera, where my proboscis fit better, so I didn't realize what a problem this would be.

Then there's the lack or near lack of several important user interface features. Possibly I missed something reading the manual. If I'm wrong about this, someone correct me.

I get a choice of two screen layouts: a default one which is cluttered with all sorts of crap I don't want obstructing my view, and a customizable one which has much, much less crap, but isn't entirely free of it (can't figure out how to disable the "silent mode" and "slow shutter" warnings). I would prefer to be able to bring up a screen that has no garbage on it under any circumstance.

I also want to be able to bring up a live histogram so I can check exposures. There isn't a way, except to embed it permanently in the customizable screen, and it's buried so many levels of menu deep that it's not something I'd want to be turning on and off frequently. Forget that. Well, at least I can check the exposure after I make the photograph by looking at the histogram when reviewing my already-made photograph on the back LCD. Okay...I don't see any way to get histograms of photographs I've already made. That is not good.

What's my fallback? Turn on the shadow/highlight out-of-range warnings. Wait a minute—there aren't any, in live or review mode. So far as exposure goes I'm photographing blind. As Timprov put it, mildly sarcastically, "Gee, you might as well shoot film."

There's no way to zoom in by more than a factor of two when reviewing RAW photographs. That won't tell me if my focus is correct, if there's subject movement, or how noisy the photograph might be. It's barely enough to judge facial expressions.

Really, this is sounding more and more like using film, and I don't mean that in a good way.

If I capture RAW plus JPEG, I can zoom all the way in. It's kind of dumb, and I just waste time later throwing away the JPEGs (I have no use for them), but it works.

So, let's summarize: an eye level viewfinder that doesn't really work for me; no way to check the quality of the exposure; no way to zoom in on the results except to capture files I don't really need.

Now you understand why I hate this camera.

The lesson? I would have had no idea that this camera was so unsuitable for me if I hadn't had a chance to use one. Based on reviews, I could very well have bought it blind. On paper it sounds pretty fine. In my hands it's awful. (Remember what I said earlier: this is all about me. It's not about you, it's not about the camera, it's about me. Also remember: when you buy a camera, it should be all about you.)

Well, it's nice to be able to scratch the most expensive camera off my list, but it's going to make me leery of buying anything without testing it first. Good that I learned this lesson the easy way rather than the hard way:

Try before you buy.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays. For more, see the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar..

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Featured Comment by John Robison: "'Try before you buy.' Getting next to impossible for an increasing number of enthusiast photographers. We cannot even lay hands on most new equipment at a camera store. I live in South Puget Sound, Washington State. I might as well be on the moon."

Featured Comment by Roger: "I have an X-Pro1 and enjoy using it. However, it is without a doubt one of the best examples of why cameras manufacturers should open source their firmware. Or publish a set of APIs that permit others to adjust the camera's operation. Great image quality, build quality, and ergonomics (a shutter speed dial! Aperture rings!). All dragged down by really bad software engineering. Mine is in aperture priority mode and currently has a Konica Hexanon 40mm ƒ/1.8 lens mounted on it. Love it, warts and all."

Featured Comment by John Krumm: "Hmm, wonder if I could market nose covers to the left-eyed crowd...there's always a micro-niche for the savvy entrepreneur. I could make it out of micro-fiber cloth so the LCD actually becomes cleaner as you use the camera. Better check the patent office."

Mike adds: I could see Ctein wearing an eye patch (he already has the parrots!), but not a nose patch. Shades of Tycho Brahe.

Featured Comment by Bill Pierce: "As another left-eyed X-Pro user, I agree with much of what Ctein has to say about the camera. However, as an elderly rangefinder photographer with a love for bright-line viewfinders but little desire to spend the money for a brace of digital Leicas, the X-Pros (which do a good job with both their lenses and the longer lenses which might normally go on a DSLR) suit me well.

"Only one disagreement with what Ctein says. I, too, normally trash camera JPEGs. But the X-Pro JPEGs are very good. They are the only ones I save, whether as instant back up against the loss of the image; a quick, transmittable proof or, in rare occasions, the source of the final print when subtle but important color differences from what my processing programs can easily and quickly produce from the Raw files are important.

"The major problem I currently see with the camera is the processing programs available. The unique sensor pattern that replaces the conventional Bayer pattern has created problems for both Lightroom and the furnished program. But that's the subject of another thread. Ctein has the knowledge to comment on this intelligently—and that's the real reason I regret his moving on to other cameras.

"I think Ctein is a groundglass, LCD kind of photographer and I'm a wire-sports-finder, bright-line-finder kind of photographer. Each of us will have to live with less than perfect camera, and it will be interesting to see what he chooses."

Posted on Wednesday, 11 July 2012 at 03:52 PM in Cameras, new, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (111)

Friday, 06 July 2012

Epson Printers Investigated (Product Variability Part II)

By Ctein

My last column, published on June 20th, explained that there's lots of unit-to-unit variability in photographic gear. Recently I had reason to investigate variability in Epson 3880 printers.

Before I get into this, let me emphasize that these are great printers and Epson is a great company. I've been entirely satisfied with the quality of their goods, and their customer support and warranty on their professional printers is almost inhumanly superb. I will continue to buy Epson printers in the future, along with an extended warranty.

Further, my decades of experience as a reviewer do not give me any reason to think that my results are unique to Epson. I expect I would find similar variability if I looked at any maker's printers. In short, this is not Epson bashing, nor an excuse for such. Diving in...

Last fall my Epson 3880 printer developed a head clog. The heaviest of heavy-duty cleaning cycles did not clear it, so I called Epson support: "No problem, you'll have the replacement printer tomorrow."

The next day I did, along with the prepaid pickup label to return the old printer. Out with the old, in with the new. A quick test showed the tone and color balance were nearly identical to the old printer. I didn't even need to make new profiles. Hurray!

When I looked more closely at the new prints, they looked "grainier." The old printer produced invisibly-fine droplet patterns; I could just see the individual ink droplets in the new prints. Not so "hurray."

After doing my own version of "is it plugged in," I called back Epson support. Got this great technician who knew even more about Mac systems than I did. She suggested a couple of more plugs to check, so to speak. We fiddled around for half an hour, then she shipped me another printer. It wasn't a lot better.

I put the matter on hold for a few months. At the end the last year, I called support again; the fellow I got this time clearly didn't know much about Macs, but he spent a good 90 minutes with me on the phone as we tried to figure things out, even waiting while I made scans of sections of prints and e-mailed to him. He was pretty convinced I was seeing normal product variation, but I wasn't. So, Epson sent me a third printer.

It was a little better than the second, but nowhere near as good as my original printer. Still, I agreed that there was hardly much point in sending me further printers without having some good reason for thinking they would be better.

Me, I'm thinking thusly: I bought this really great printer in late 2010. I got three replacement printers in late 2011 and they all looked worse. Something had slipped in quality control at Epson. A slight timing jitter in the placement of the ink droplets would explain the degraded pattern I was seeing. There are ways that manufacturing can go awry that will cause that.

I put my suspicions forward to Epson. They accepted a packet of sample prints from me, which were shown to the production managers. They still thought it was normal sample variation.

I persevered. I have a private contact inside Epson, someone positioned to make things happen if there really was a problem and someone who knows me personally and professionally, so he knows exactly how careful I am about testing and making these kinds of claims. He investigated my reports and my data. His conclusion was that I had lucked into a "cherry" unit the first time. A random roll of the dice.

I still thought (well, hoped) that Epson might be wrong. I decide to test their conclusion. If I looked at prints from a whole bunch of 3880 printers manufactured at different times and found a systematic variation in "graininess" with time, that would prove that something had changed in the manufacturing process. I knew how to collect that data—crowdsource it to you, my faithful readership.

So now you know what my request four months back for people to make Epson 3880 prints was all about. People came through. I collected 40 respondents, with printer purchase dates scattered over more than a two-year period that nicely bracketed my units. Yes, I know that purchase date is not the same as manufacture date, but it correlates roughly. I had people provide me with their printers' serial numbers in case I needed more accurate dates down the line.

I provided a test file, told folks exactly how I wanted it printed out, and had them send me their prints. I ranked the prints by graininess from first/best to last/worst. I plotted those rankings against the purchase dates, confident a pattern would emerge. I didn't know if I'd see a gradual degradation in quality with time, or a relatively sharp transition when something changed in the manufacturing line, but I expected there'd be something.

Fig. 1

Figures 1 and 2: scatter plots of print quality (by ranking number) vs. date of printer purchase. It's the same data in both figures, the axes are swapped between the two of them because sometimes correlation patterns stand out better one way then the other. In this case, there is no pattern; it's about as random as you can get.

Fig. 2

Well, a pattern sure jumped out at me. The print quality was totally uncorrelated with time. This is about as close to a random scatter plot as I'd ever expect to see from real-world data. Epson was right. I was wrong.

Dammit.

In both plots I've labeled my current printer and my original printer. Yup, the original printer was considerably better than average while the current one is worse. Ah well.

Mind you, my new one is still a very good printer. Nobody who's ever gotten prints from it has said a negative word about the print quality (including the 750 of you who recently took advantage of the $19.95 print offer). The printer gets high marks. It's just that my old printer got an A+. He whined.

Fig. 3

Figures 3 and 4: high-resolution scans of prints from the best and worst printers in the lot. This is about a 40X magnification; you'd have to stand back 60 feet from your display for the ink droplets to appear as they would in a real print viewed closely.

Fig. 4

Still, the difference in quality from best to worst is considerable. Figures 3 and 4 show very high-resolution scans of prints from the best- and worst-ranked printers. The difference you're seeing there is greater than the difference between printing at 1440 dpi high-speed and 2880 dpi low-speed. In fact, it's comparable to the difference you'll see between entire generations of printers. In other words, the very best of these 3880 printers is right up there with the 4900 printer quality. The very worst is down at the printer quality of the previous generation of printer.

So, what can you do about this? Nothing. What can I do about this? Nothing. But, ain't it interesting!

Getting back to the point of Part I, it's a good lesson in why you should take reviews that peer too minutely into equipment quality with a certain very small grain of salt.

Or perhaps a rather large chunk of halite.

It's one of those random variation things, you know.

Ctein

Custom Printer Ctein's regular weekly column usually appears on Wednesday but was delayed this week because of Editor Presence Variability (EPV).

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Featured Comment by Sareesh S: "This is an excellent article in the best traditions of information-sharing on the web. Thank you for taking the effort and sharing!"

Mike adds: That's what I thought too. Taking Part I and Part II together, this is among Ctein's best articles for TOP. First an informed and judicious discussion of the general principles, then a specific example with original site-sourced research, clearly presented and well illustrated. Kudos to columnist Ctein from the Humbl. Ed.

Featured Comment by Paul Maxim: "I've scanned through all of the other comments and didn't notice anyone bringing this up, but if I missed it, I apologize.

"As a statistician, it occurs to me that something is missing here. While I don't doubt your testing (subjective or not), there's nothing in your published data that shows the 'within printer' level of variability. That is, if you take some of the individual printers and repeat the test multiple times (with independent setups, of course), how much within printer variability do you see? And if you then compare that level of variability with the 'between printer' variability that you've measured, is there a detectable (significant) difference? In other words, is the 'between printer' variability detectably larger than the 'within printer' variability?

"The result of that test will determine what conclusions, if any, that you can draw from the tests.

"I suspect that Epson already knows the answer to that question. And that's why they've said that you're looking at 'normal' printer to printer variability. At least I hope that they know. Otherwise, there truly is a hole in their quality system."

Ctein replies: Ah, good point! For a given printer, printing on a given paper, there's very little variation in quality from print to print or session to session. I can't say for sure there's none, but it's so small that it's smaller than any of the other sources of data "noise" I'm dealing with.

Posted on Friday, 06 July 2012 at 12:40 PM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | Permalink | Comments (60)

Wednesday, 20 June 2012

Product Variability, Part I

By Ctein

No two pieces of the same photographic equipment behave the same way. Lenses, camera bodies, memory cards, computers, printers, they all vary from unit to unit.

Some of the ways they vary are unimportant to us. Generally we don't care if the clock speed of our computer or the read/write speed of our flash RAM card is some percent higher or lower than someone else's. Sometimes it can be very important; as Lloyd Chambers has written about at length, focus accuracy in cameras is problematical at best and can vary considerably from unit to unit. Sometimes it only matters to a subset of users; most of us don't care that different units of the same camera model will have slightly different low-light noise characteristics, but if you're an available-darkness photographer who's always living on the Stygian ragged edge, that's another matter.

The problem is, any review you read is about one particular unit. You, and the reviewer, hope it's a typical unit. With time and experience, reviewers develop instincts for when something is horribly wrong; normally, though, it's impossible for us to tell if a unit is merely better or worse than average. Obviously one can't learn anything about product variability from testing one unit, which is all there is usually the time or money to do. Unfortunately, the peculiar statistics of small numbers mean that you have to test many units or you will frequently be wrong.

Let me give you a numerical example. Suppose a company introduces a new piece of photographic equipment that is so poorly made that 20% of them perform horribly. I'd certainly not want to be recommending that to my readers. How many units would I have to test to discover that? If I tested 10, there would still be a 10% chance of me not getting a single lousy unit. If I reviewed two dozen products a year and I tested 10 of everything I reviewed, two or three times a year I'd be assuring my readers that some product was well made when it wasn't.

This would not endear me to my readers or my editors, with good reason.

Not that it's feasible for reviewers to test even ten units. We just can't collect enough information on product variability to provide reliable advice. We don't even try; if we did, readers would be thoroughly ticked at having to wait an extra six months for their reviews.

There are rare exceptions. Back in the early 1980s, when I was writing for Darkroom Photography magazine, the editor Ken Werner and I were very interested in knowing what the absolute best enlarging lenses were. (The results of this investigation are in my free downloadable book, Post Exposure.) There were lots of old shutterbugs' tales out there, but precious little hard information. The magazine paid me a then-considerable sum to test every single one of the top-tier enlarging lenses made, up to and including the fabled apo El-Nikkor (the only true apochromatic enlarging lens*). I think there were 60 or 70 lenses involved in all formats from 35mm through 4x5.

I wasn't too far into my testing before I got to the Schneider Componon 50mm ƒ/2.8, a lens that was widely regarded as excellent. Well, my sample wasn't. It was so badly decentered that there was smearing of the image on-axis! At the edges of the field, around the circumference, resolution varied by considerably more than a factor of two.

Ken contacted the people at Schneider, who were appropriately appalled. A second sample of that lens behaved normally. That got me looking at quality control. I tested all the lenses for decentering. In many cases, I had the manufacturer sent a second sample; there was a lot of random sample variation. When all was said and done, I'd looked at well over 100 lenses, and maybe five were "perfectly" centered. The rest all showed a visible degree of deviation from the ideal. Nearly a third were sufficiently decentered that I wouldn't consider them acceptable.

That's when I started firmly recommending that people should never buy a lens without return privileges, and that they test it thoroughly as soon as they got it. And we're talking about enlarging lenses here, the mechanically simplest of optics. If so many of them are bad, imagine what can happen with regular camera lenses.

That's in the past. Now we come to the present. We all know that computer printers and displays vary in their color rendition from unit to unit. That's why color management and custom profiles are an essential part of any serious worker's toolkit. It's a kind of product variability that we accept as common, and that we can fix with the proper software. What, though, about the variations that we can't fix? Specifically, do two different units of the same model printer produce equally "fine-grained" prints (i.e., with uniform ink droplet patterns)? If not, are the differences between units large enough to matter?

Recently I had the reason and the opportunity to investigate that question in Epson 3880 printers, and got some surprising results. Tune in in two weeks for the full story (as TOP will be closed for maintenance next week).

Ctein

[*I believe the Carl Zeiss S-Orthoplanar was also a true apochromat, although it was never readily available. —Ed.]

Ctein's weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays, with only occasional sample variation.

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Featured Comment by John Wilson: "Roger Cicala of Lens Rentals has done some interesting investigations on variability in camera equipment. He has the great advantage of having access to reasonable numbers of the same item (because he stocks them for rental) and has access to good measuring equipment. His first blog post on it is here. If you don't already read his blog I'd warmly recommend it."

Featured Comment by Allan Ostling: "Your Darkroom Photography test was a classic in its day. I pored over that article, then bought the Computar 65mm, one of the enlarging lenses to which you gave the top rating. I lost all respect for Schneider lenses, and this was reinforced when I got a de-centered Schneider zoom on a Samsung film P&S in 1996. I had a stack of those magazines from Issue #1. In 1990 I donated them to the library at the Center for Creative Photography, on the U of A campus in Tucson."

Featured Comment by James B: "There's also another variable for most modern equipment: local climatic conditions. Not extreme, but average climate from winter to summer. The manufacturers of consumer equipment all have a little paragraph tucked away somewhere in the user instructions advising of temperature limits (and it is normally pretty broad) of something like –20 to +50 Celsius (sorry my American friends, I only understand decimal). I've tested for military-grade use various thermal imaging units. These things are literally hand assembled and all are individually tested at the factory before being passed for service.

"Most are useless in a Norwegian winter or a Arabian summer. OK, those are the two extremes we test against. Most are still exhibiting significant variations in a European winter or summer. Some can exhibit variations on an April day in the U.K. in between pre-dawn and early afternoon, with a temperature difference of only about 15 degrees Celsius. Tiny variations in plastics quality and metal/plastic surfaces can twist the optics by that tiny amount as temperature changes. The principle applies just as much to commercial camera lenses as it does to military thermal imagers.

"Don't start me on humidity—that's an even worse variable.

"And worst of all is shock. You can mount an optic and calibrate it perfectly, but a big jolt and it's knocked off-axis. You can try to get it back in calibration, but what's actually the issue is that one of the 10 or so internal lenses has changed alignment, so it's a back to the factory job.

"I only have consumer lenses, less my completely beloved Nikkor 105mm ƒ/2 Defocus Control which I assume sits somewhere between consumer and pro. There's just too many variables for me to think of wasting my money on a pro lens, when I know that despite everything, so much depends on factors beyond my control."

Posted on Wednesday, 20 June 2012 at 11:00 AM in Ctein, Photo equipment | Permalink | Comments (24)

Wednesday, 13 June 2012

The Inconstant Eye

By Ctein

Paula and I went off to see the annular solar eclipse three weeks ago. By the time the moon was covering barely 25% of the sun, she, I, and the friends we were hanging out with all noticed that the landscape had gotten distinctly darker. That's at less than a half stop down from full sunlight.

Our eyes are usually very insensitive to gradual changes in illuminance; they have what's called "brightness constancy." We have very adaptable visual systems that allow us to see over a brightness range of greater than a billion to one. Apparently, though, we have a reference point wired into our brains for how bright normal sunlight should be. I hadn't noticed that before. Interesting! Also, it led me directly to this week's little lesson.

Visual constancy isn't perfect. Our ability to distinguish different tones diminishes under very bright or very dim light. There's a sweet spot around several hundred footcandles—the equivalent of a heavily overcast day or very bright indoor lighting—where we have a maximum ability to distinguish tones. In brighter light than that, we lose the ability to separate tones near white. In the other direction, we lose the ability to separate tones in the shadows.

The total number of tonal steps we can see a surprisingly small, about 650 for the average eye over that entire billion-to-one brightness range. Under optimal viewing conditions, in a typical photographic print, we can distinguish about 250 tones. If the light is significantly brighter or dimmer than that, we not only lose tonal discrimination but we lose it disproportionately at one end of the brightness scale or the other. That's why it's so easy to see "into the shadows" in a print when it's in direct sunlight and so hard under dim indoor light. More broadly, it's why we try to make our prints under conditions vaguely like the way we expect an audience to be viewing them. If our viewing lights are significantly brighter or dimmer than our audience's, they will perceive the prints as being too dark or too light (compared to what we intended them to see).

Third contact in the annular eclipse, as seen in H-alpha light, photographed through my Coronado PST. A few prominences are licking around the edge of the sun, even past the disk of the moon at the bottom of the photograph.

Our vision also has what's called "color constancy." You can vary the color temperature of the illumination over a considerable range, and colors appear approximately the same. We take all of this for granted; it only comes to our attention because our cameras and films aren't this adaptable. If they were, we'd hardly ever have to make an adjustment for exposure or color balance.

"Approximate," though, does not mean "exact." I'm not talking about metamerism, the apparent color shifts that some dyes undergo when viewed under different kinds of illumination. That's a different problem. I'm talking about the color interpretation by our eyes. A nice silver gelatin black-and-white print, which has a pretty flat spectral reflectance and exhibits very little metamerism, still tends to look cool-toned under skylight (10,000 kelvins) and warm-toned under a 60W incandescent bulb (2,600 kelvins). It's not a big shift in apparent hue, but fussy photographers and printers are well aware of it. Of course, this affects color prints as well, metamerism or no. It's doubly important to view your color prints under illumination similar to what your audience will be using, if you have any say or knowledge in the matter.

There's another deviation from color constancy: below 4000 kelvins or so the total range of colors we can see, our visual gamut, starts to shrink. Even with illumination of sufficient brightness, we start to lose parts of the spectrum, especially towards the cool end. By the time you get down to normal incandescent lighting, our visual gamut is substantially diminished. This is why even a slight improvement in color temperature, as when going from 100W incandescent bulbs (2800 kelvins) to quartz-halogen bulbs (3200–3400 kelvins) makes the colors look so much more vivid in a photograph, even if the brightness level of the light isn't any greater.

There's yet another deviation from color constancy. It takes our eyes time to adapt to changes in the illumination's color temperature. It used to be thought that this happened fairly quickly, in a matter of minutes. Half an hour at the most. More careful experiments and research showed that along the yellow-blue axis, in particular, it can take several hours for the eye to fully adapt! During that time, our perception of the overall color balance of the photograph is slightly but perceptably shifting.

This is just the way our eyes work. There's nothing you can do about it except to be aware of it and pay attention to it, so that it doesn't compromise you too badly.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears with approximate constancy on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Yves Papillon: "My left eye is dominant. I recently compared looking trough the viewfinder of a rangefinder camera with my left and then right eye. I noticed a clear difference in image tint. One eye showed a cooler image and the other a noticeable yellow one. My two eyes are inconstant."

Posted on Wednesday, 13 June 2012 at 02:43 AM in Ctein | Permalink | Comments (31)

Thursday, 07 June 2012

'Done Done Done Done Done Done Done!'

Ctein has shipped the last of the $19.95 prints! By now everyone should have received either their print or an e-mail telling them that the print is on the way. If you have not gotten either print or e-mail (check your spam folder too) from Ctein, please e-mail him immediately ([email protected]).

The prints are shipping via first-class mail; normally this only takes a few days, but three tubes took as long as 15 days to arrive, so be patient. If you haven't gotten your print by the 23rd, let Ctein know—but not before then, please.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Bruce Bodine: "I received my print Tuesday afternoon in the mail and all I can say is...WOW! This is the first time I have seen a print by a master of the art and it is just stunning.

"Ctein deserves all the accolades he receives and it justifies the saying that the proof is in the print. I will be sharing this with some of my photography friends at work so they can also appreciate the art of the master. Thanks to both you and Ctein for giving so many of us the exposure to the best of our craft be it amateur or professional. And thanks for this follow-up post on TOP so we can all publicly give Ctein the credit he truly deserves and thank you for making it possible on TOP."

Posted on Thursday, 07 June 2012 at 11:49 AM in Ctein, Print Offers | Permalink | Comments (12)

Wednesday, 06 June 2012

Printing for Ronny

Lord Mountbatten by Bern Schwartz. All photographs by Bernard Lee Schwartz, courtesy of and copyright by the National Portrait Gallery of Great Britain

By Ctein

Ken Tanaka's comment to my column of two weeks ago reminded me that I've never written about my experiences printing Bernard Lee Schwartz's portrait photographs. The Bernard Lee Schwartz Foundation, guided by his widow Ronny Schwartz, has been my largest and oldest printing client; we have a relationship that now goes back 30 years. Sadly, I never met Bern; the relationship started four years after his death.

Bern's work is notable in a couple of respects. Not because he's the greatest portrait photographer who ever lived, although he's head and shoulders above most of us.

What's notable is that he exhibited that level of proficiency in a mere four years of dedicated work: portrait photography was his second career. The Schwartz family owns Sherman-Clay (the piano company). Bern died an untimely death, cutting his photographic career short. It's unusual to establish a major body of work in such a short time.

(Bern is not the only photographer to make his mark after "retirement." Bob Cameron, the author of Above San Francisco and a whole series of follow-up books, did all of that work after retiring from the marketing and import business. It's nice to know you can establish your place in the photographic world starting at the point that many people would consider hanging up their working shoes.)

The second thing that makes Bern's work notable was his access; through a combination of friendships, networking, and word-of-mouth, he had the opportunity to photograph an extraordinary array of famous people, from important artists and authors to heads of state. A massive portfolio of decent-to-brilliant portraits of A-list people is nothing to be sneezed at.

Ronny crossed my path in 1982. She'd been unhappy with the quality of the chromogenic prints of Bern's work and was looking for something better. She'd had a dye transfer done of this famous portrait of Lord Mountbatten (if it looks familiar, perhaps it's because it was used on a British stamp) but wasn't satisfied with the results. She contacted Frank McLaughlin, the dye transfer guru at Eastman Kodak, who told her, "There's this guy in California you should try out; if he can't make a print that'll make you happy, there probably isn't anybody who can."

She did. I printed that Mountbatten photograph for her, as a test of my abilities. She was happy. She said she had another two or three dozen negatives she'd like to have printed. Well, that was just the first year or so. She kept selecting more portraits that she wanted done up properly as dye transfers. I ended up printing dyes for her for a good decade or longer. When all was said and done, I'm sure I did more than 150, maybe even 200.

Ronny proved great to work with. She was just as professional as I am, and she appreciated artistic effort as much as I do. Furthermore, she had at least as good an eye for a good print. Sometimes better. She pushed me, and she never accepted a print that she didn't think couldn't be improved upon. I've never worked with another client as fussy as she. I love it.

Printing for Ronny altered my life in other ways. It not only got me out of debt, but when my landlord decided to sell my residence and I had to find new living quarters, Ronny advanced me enough money on future work to allow me to buy a house.

After nearly a decade the flow of new negatives petered out. It wasn't that Ronny had become dissatisfied with my efforts or that there weren't many more portraits deserving of fine printing. I think she simply got burned out. She was the force that turned rolls of exposures into a solid body of work. She'd sort through hundreds of individual frames of film to find the one that she thought best embodied a subject (she knew the subjects as well as Bern did and was usually there for the photography). She figured out the crop that was the most effective composition and sometimes even made recommendations on how it should be printed. She became the primary artistic force after Bern's death (I have a personal suspicion she was a major one before that; I consider this work to be jointly hers and Bern's, no matter who pushed the shutter button). She may very well have put in more time over that decade editing and selecting the photographs as I spent printing them.

My relationship with the BLS Foundation continued at a low key level for another dozen years. I'd hear from them a couple of times a year, maybe. Then they developed a series of new initiatives to distribute his work. As president of the Foundation, their son Michael had the primary duties. (Ronny is alive and well and active; she's just got other things to do with her life. She is still the final arbiter of whether a print looks right or not when Michael and I are uncertain.) At first it was several dozen more dye transfer prints. Then, starting five or six years back, we began to move into digital.

It began with the portrait of Ann Jenner shown below, the negative for which was in such poor shape that I couldn't pull a decent print in the darkroom. I suggested we try a digital print, combining my skills both as a restoration expert and a fine digital printer.

This is the best dye transfer that I could make from the negative.

This is my digital print from the same negative.

The results were wonderful. We started doing more and more work as digital prints, and that finally took over from dye transfer entirely. All of us involved are firmly of the opinion that Bern would have just loved this new technology; we feel like we're getting results that are so much closer to what he must've been after when he pressed the shutter.

Since then, major projects I've been involved with for the Foundation have been scanning and archiving hundreds of the best negatives, preparing all the images for their website, making prints and preparing digital files for the large body of work that Foundation has donated the British National Portrait Gallery and the Hoover Institute and, most recently, printing for two exhibits in Israel sponsored by The Jerusalem Foundation.

So, the relationship continues. One client shaped my career as a custom dye and digital printer, through the remarkable support of Ronny and Michael. Lemme tell ya, every artisan should be so lucky as to have clients like that.

Ctein

NOTE: The BLS Foundation does not sell prints. Prints of works that are now owned by the National Portrait Gallery of Great Britain can be ordered through their website.

Ctein's column appears on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "What a personal coincidence you should mention Sherman-Clay! While visiting San Francisco in April I snapped this huge neon sign, certainly somewhat of a relic, while strolling to dinner one evening.

"What a terrific story, Ctein. Of course Bern Schwartz's story is remarkable. Not only did he have talent as a photo portraitist (I understand he had some rather exceptional instruction) but he was able to gain access to so many celebrities. How'd he do that?

"But the story of your 30-year relationship with Schwartz's work and family is equally remarkable. Time and again I encounter stories in the arts world where one person—a teacher, a collector, a gallery owner, a museum curator—made a profound difference in the trajectory of an artist's life. I know there is a guiding moral to this story for young artists and craftspeople...but I'm not sure what it is.

"Thanks very much for sharing this personal story with us, Ctein."

Featured Comment by Paddy C.: "For me, Ctein, one of you most interesting recent articles. Thanks for sharing. And that restoration job on the Jenner portrait looks amazing."

Posted on Wednesday, 06 June 2012 at 01:37 PM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | Permalink | Comments (28)

Wednesday, 23 May 2012

O.T.: Five Books that Will Drive You to Think

By Ctein

Introduction: Mike's recommendation of some philosophy books a few weeks back caught me by amused surprise. This seems to be yet another case of great minds lying in the same gutter, because while he was writing that column I was laying out this one.

I don't read anywhere as much as I'd like. I still buy a few more books each year than I find time to read. There are close to 600 unread books on my shelves, 400 of which fall into the "I really must read this" category. Consequently, I almost never go back and reread a book.

Mostly I read for entertainment, occasionally for factual education. On very, very rare occasions, a book comes along that actually makes me think. They are few and far between, and I'm recommending five to you. It happens that three were written by friends of mine. I won't tell you which ones. Don't ask. It doesn't really matter. I have hundreds of books written by friends on my shelves; I'm not recommending most of them.

If you read all of these, at least one of them will make you think very, very hard about stuff you thought you already knew. Probably, all of them will.

It's almost impossible for a thought-provoking book to be anything but controversial. We don't want to engage those controversies here. Were I to recommend a book on economics, that would not be a call to debate capitalism vs. communism. Not that Mike would allow it, but let's make his life easier and keep the conversation meta, okay? So, without further ado:

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, by Bruce Schneier

Bruce is such a well-known security/computer security expert that XKCD makes jokes about him in its rollovers. The book's subtitle, "Thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world," sums it up. It's a straightforward and common-sense discussion of real world matters, things that affect us every day. More important, it's a tutorial on how to think about security. That's its major value.

For example, there is threat vs. risk, concepts that people conflate. Threat is what might happen to you, risk is how likely it is to happen. Your security usually involves reducing risk to manageable levels, not necessarily eliminating threats. That's on page 20 of nearly 300. It just gets better and better.

God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion, by Bro. Guy Consolmagno, S.J.

Brother Guy is an MIT-trained astronomer who got the calling in midlife, became a Jesuit brother, and now works for the Vatican (his specialty is meteors and and other subplanetary bodies). He's a consummate techie who is also profoundly religious. This isn't as fringey as you might imagine; a substantial percentage of scientists and engineers are religious. He got curious about how other techies deal with their religious beliefs, so he studied them.

The first third of the book presents historical background on science and religion. He shows how good/bad theology has lead to good/bad science and vice versa. Did you know that Kepler came up with his famous laws of planetary motion because he believed that the Godhead physically resided in the Sun and so the Sun must be at the center of the motion of all stellar bodies? Great science but lousy theology. He also elegantly explains why trying to use science to validate theology is a terrible strategy.

The second third is a field study; Guy talked to about two dozen techies, questioning them on exactly how and why they were involved with religion and wrote up their case histories for our benefit. Fascinating stuff, and the truly original part of this book.

The last third homes in on Guy's relationship, as a techie, to Christianity and the Church. Roman Catholicism has less-than-zero appeal to me (yes, I am religious; no, it's none of your business) but when I was done reading this section I had a genuine appreciation and empathy for how it does work for Guy.

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

I'm not sure how to convince most of you to read this book: a collection of essays of radical feminist political theory by a trans woman. Very much my cup of tea, not most of yours. So, why do I imagine most of you would get anything out of this book? Because this book presents a brilliantly integrated and extensive model of gender and sexuality. It was recommended to me by a respected friend, Marlene Hoeber, and to steal some of her words, this is the unified field theory of sex and gender. Marlene wrote, "Serano is a scientist in her primary career and it shows in this work. Her suggested structure fits the available evidence without stretching or omitting data. It is a workable operational model that is not worried about unknown causes."

As such, it doesn't demand redefining who you are, as too much hortatory political theory does. Think of it like this: Newtonian physics works perfectly well for a lot of everyday things. But when you're stuck with puzzles and seeming paradoxes (the constancy of the speed of light, the ultraviolet catastrophe, etc.) then you bring in quantum mechanics and general relativity. An understanding of those gives you a comprehensive and practical insight into the world.

Similarly, Juliana replaces the simplistic one- and two-dimensional models of human gender with something that's much more complete and actually makes sense in light of the way humans act, instead of prescribing how they should act.

I thought I had a really good understanding of gender before I read this book. Boy, did it ever prove me wrong.

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, by Olivia Judson

Now we turn to the lighter side of gender, namely sex! Humorous and entertaining, yet fact-filled, this book is cast in the form of an advice column to the lovelorn, viz.:

Dear Dr. Tatiana, we're sea hares. We've been having a fabulous orgy—being both male and female we all get to play both roles at once. [...] It's such a great system, so much better than being male or female, that we're mystified why everyone hasn't followed our lead. Why aren't all living things hermaphrodites?—(signed) Group Sexists in Santa Catalina

It's fun, it's funny, it's damned educational. Judson is an evolutionary biologist, a breed that has justifiably gotten a bit of a bad reputation. Too many of them took their marching orders from the Social Darwinists, picking and choosing their data and their logic to justify the status quo. The results were as reliably laughably idiotic as they were intellectually dishonest. (My favorite example from the seventies was a claim, made in all seriousness, that women had large breasts because that body type had been selected for by men. A theory that manages to ignore the huge variation in standards of beauty across space and time, as well as the undeniable fact that there is a more-than-sufficient subset of the male population who are simply horndogs and will, as the song lyrics say, "love the one they're with.")

Olivia is not of that ilk. She manages to explode, discredit and disprove so many prevalent myths about sex and sexuality across the animal kingdom, using established scientific information. It's a real hoot.

The Fortunate Fall, by Raphael Carter

This one is science fiction, unfortunately out-of-print, but readily available used from Amazon. [UPDATE 6:00 p.m.: The clean and reasonably priced ones seem to be gone now, apparently due to attention from TOP (there were plenty this morning when I checked). Sorry about that. Perhaps check abebooks.com or your local library system? —Ed.]

It's vaguely on-topic (and I do mean vaguely); the protagonist is a living camera, a journalist of the future when everyone and everything is wired. And like all good journalists in novels, she stumbles upon a conspiracy and cover-up and starts to pursue the truth behind it. I don't want to tell you any more. It would spoil the fun.

For one thing, I couldn't figure out what this book was up to until I was well over 100 pages into it. I can usually divine an author's broad intentions within a chapter or so. Not the plot details of course, but the broad thematic skeleton the author will flesh out with story. In this case, I just couldn't figure out Raphael's skeleton. The book was in no way obscure; it was so rich with possibilities and directions in which it could go that I really didn't know which way she was going.

That's high praise. This books deserves it; it is one of the very best first novels I've ever read.

Let me tell you something else about this book. When I got to the end, I said to myself, "Huh." And I turned back to page one and started reading it all over again, for the pleasure of truly appreciating and understanding all the details in the book in their larger context.

I have never, ever done that with any other book, fiction or nonfiction. As I said at the beginning, I rarely read anything more than once, ever, let alone twice in a row.

The book is that good.

Ctein

Ctein's columns, one out of four of which are off-topic, appear on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Posted on Wednesday, 23 May 2012 at 03:26 PM in Books, Ctein, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (30)

Thursday, 17 May 2012

What Does It Take to Be a Good Printer?

By Ctein

One of the interesting (because it was unexpected) results of the educational print offer of a few weeks back was that people thought I invoked extraordinary measures to come up with a good print of that photograph. Not even close. I worked with a level of care and attention to detail and meticulousness that most people wouldn't muster, but that's a different thing. In that respect, I am unusual, and that's why I get paid for what I do.

But the measures themselves had nothing extraordinary about them. They're just the kind of things that any more-than-routine printer should be doing.

Good printing is not accomplished merely by getting curves and color balance and saturation correct. That's basic, like figuring out the right exposure and paper grade (or filter pack) in the darkroom.

One step above that is local tone correction—dodging and burning in. It's always amazed me (not in a good way) how many printers don't do that, in the darkroom or out. The majority of photographs I've printed over the past 40 years, and that's many thousands, have been improved by some amount of local correction. Frequently, it's very slight and very subtle. But it's not the norm for a print to be better with none at all.

If you don't have that under your control, you're not even a competent printer. If you are, you're competent. You can be trusted to turn out a good journeyman print.

Note: In each of the following pairs of photographs, the "before" version is what I get from my default settings for Adobe Camera Raw prior to making any adjustments to the photograph. The "after" version is what I use to make my finished prints; it isn't optimized for viewing at small resolution on a screen, but you'll get the idea. To put it another way, the "before version" is what the camera saw, and the "after" version is what I saw when I made the photograph—and what I wanted in a print.

Before (above) and after (below): The most important change to this photograph was a lot of dodging and burning in. Human beings are really good at ignoring large-scale variations in brightness that cameras see all too clearly.

What is it take to move beyond that level? Just as in the darkroom, it requires some real understanding of the limitations and quirks of the media (both film/sensor and print) you're working with. That leads me to three tools that are part of my standard printmaking toolkit. Some variation on these ought to be part of yours.

1. Local contrast enhancement. Simply, you can do it with a mild dose of unsharp masking or you can do it in a much more sophisticated way with plug-ins like Photo Wiz's ContrastMaster. What you can't get away with is not doing it. Digital prints tend to come out flat, with poor separation of fine and subtle tonal differences. I don't know why, but I've observed it to be broadly true. The delicate nuances that are there in the original file, whether it comes from a digital camera or a film scan, don't get rendered well in the print. You need to make that tonal separation stronger in the file or the print will look duller than it should.

Before (above) and after (below): The near-setting sun produced a grazing light that brought out wonderful textures in the building and provided great contrast in tone and color between the building in the sky. I made adjustments that emphasized sharpness and fine tonal detail.

2. Deconvolution sharpening. Simply, there's Smart Sharpen in Photoshop, with a radius of a few tenths of the pixel and the percentage set to taste. Complexly, any of several plug-ins, like Topaz Lab's InFocus. If you're trying to produce a digital photograph with the best and most nicely-rendered fine detail, and you're using a Bayer array camera, this is pretty much a must. (Can't speak to non-Bayer array cameras; never printed from them.) There is a genuine improvement in sharpness and fine detail buried in those Raw files that deconvolution sharpening can dig out.

3. Noise reduction. It's the counterbalance to the previous two tools. Both local enhancement and sharpening increase noise at the same time they improve fine detail, gradation, and texture. Noise reduction, on the other hand, tends to suppress precisely those image attributes. Many digital files (and film scans) are improved by just a whisper of noise reduction, no matter how great the camera is. A lot more digital files need it when local enhancement or sharpening are coming into play.

Before (above) and after (below): To turn this photograph from what the camera saw into what I saw, I needed a certain amount of dodging and burning in but far more important was bringing up the large-scale tonal variations so that they would separate and print well.

Combining all three of these in different measures gives you broad control over the characteristics image. You can get reduced noise with no visible sacrifice of fine detail and texture. Or, you can get substantially improved sharpness and detail with no significant increase in noise. Or, you can split the difference and get a photograph that has lower noise and better sharpness at the same time.

Before (above) and after (below): This photograph got "the works"; everything in my basic toolkit was important to making this photograph work as a print: Proper dodging and burning in, local contrast enhancement to bring out the gorgeous ripples in the water I had seen, proper sharpening to bring out the details in the seals and make them stand out against the water, and noise reduction to get rid of the increased noise from the previous operations.

None of this is heroic; none of it is exceptional. It's the norm for good digital printing.

No mincing of words: this is what it takes to be better than run-of-the-mill.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column, which usually appears on Wednesdays, is a day late this week through no fault of his own.

[Note that the illustrations are only approximations. Real corrections would have to take size into account, as well as the big jump between screen and paper, and the TypePad blogging software has an effect on how illustrations look that is impossible to compensate for precisely. Finally, your monitor and its calibration might change what you're seeing relative to what Ctein—or anyone else—is seeing. —MJ]

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Featured Comment by Richard Tugwell: "I bought one of Charlie Cramer's prints from TOP a while back—quite beautiful. I see he has an interesting and in-depth article on tonal adjustments using Lightroom 4 over at The Luminous-Landscape."

Featured Comment by Ned: "In my opinion this is an area where books, videos and other training techniques just don't cut it. I don't even know what a good print looks like, which is why I purchased Ctien's Micro 4/3 print. I don't like to print because I know it will be a piece of crap."

Mike replies: Sounds like you might be a candidte to become a client of a custom printer. Don't forget that there are numerous photographers, now and in history—including some of the greats—who let other people print their pictures for them. It's how Ctein makes his living. Perhaps his best-known client was the late rock-and-roll photographer Jim Marshall, but he prints for many other clients as well, some of whom are quite famous. Years ago I made my living as a custom printer too—and many of my clients at the time never made their own prints.

Remember this picture?

It was taken by Peter Turnley at Voja Mitrovic's retirement party, and shows Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka good-naturedly begging Voja not to retire.

Featured Comment by Ed: "Mornin', Ctein, great read as ever. To me printing is about effort and the ability to reject (no matter the cost). In a German documentary I saw Gursky at work at Grieger (one of the best digital print shops on the face of this planet). He was making a test print...2 meters 60 cm by .5 meter. Just to check local contrast, after he rejected a full print of 'Hamm Bergwerg Ost.' If your print does not provide what you want, tear it up—it is a painful, wasteful, yet very important part of the process of learning to print. And looking at examples like the ones you provided, well, that may make people wonder about their skills (and their preferences), but, hey, you don't get 40 years of experience overnight."

Posted on Thursday, 17 May 2012 at 11:43 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | Permalink | Comments (58)

Wednesday, 09 May 2012

Art is a Popularity Contest, Not a Democracy

By Ctein

I'd planned on writing a technical column this week, but my brain is still too fried from handling the print sale to organize such lofty thoughts. Instead, I'm going to visit a topic I've been writing notes about for some time (which will eventually become several columns, although maybe not right now). That is the perpetually confounding question of the relationship between artist and audience. It's a topic I have visited in the past; it's not close to being exhausted.

Let me start out by pointing out something that is both obvious and often overlooked about the way the world of art works. There is no photograph out there that is loved by the majority of the photographic audience. Not a single one. Genres and tastes are too fragmented for that.

I imagine that's sort of self-evident if you think about it: B&W vs. color, landscape vs. urban, people vs. things, formalist vs. casual composition, staged vs. candid. The list goes on. I don't mean that people are antagonistic towards the subgenres they don't fall in love with, but that they just don't care. It's entirely possible there isn't a photograph that is even liked by the majority of the audience, but I'm not sure I want to stick my neck out that far. It surely is true for the vast majority of good photographs.

Were any of you left cold by the photograph I put up for sale, to such a degree that you couldn't imagine why we even offered it? Well, guess what? You're not the center of the universe. Neither am I. Nobody is. You can say with utter assuredness that it doesn't appeal to you, but that's about the limit.

But before you start to get bristly, here's the really important thing: you are the norm! Most people agree with you. About any photograph. Most certainly about mine.

Some numbers: TOP currently has over 30,000 physical readers [on a good day —Ed.]. By the time the sale ended we'd sold close to 800 prints of a photograph that a few people can't figure out why anyone would buy. That's a fabulous number of prints to sell of any photograph.

But the more important thing, the big picture, is that it's also only about one in 40 readers. So, if you didn't see $20 worth of merit in that photo, 39 out of 40 people agree with you. You are the 97.5%!

Thank heavens for that. Imagine what would happen if the majority of people actually loved that photograph. We'd have had more than 15,000 people clamoring for a thousand prints, the sale would have shut down in three hours, and nearly half of Mike's readership would now be really pissed at me. So, you know, I'm kind of happy with only a 2.5% share.

This is the reality of the world of art and the business of being an artist: Art is a popularity contest, but it's not a democracy. It doesn't require a majority vote for you to be successful—just enough people have to like what you do to pay the bills.

If you can do that, then it doesn't matter what everyone else thinks. So don't sweat it.

And be kind, or at least polite, to the ones who don't like you, because, you know, they far outnumber your fans. And you never know, some of them might change their minds.

So, do you like this photograph?

Well then, how about this one?

Maybe this one?

Aw, c'mon, it's a cat! Who doesn't love cat photos? Really!

Ctein

Weekly columnist Ctein pleases a changing minority of TOP's audience every Wednesday.

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Featured Comment by Simon Robinson: "Well said Ctein. I am one of the majority—in fact I haven't liked any of your photographs that have been offered in TOP's print sales. It's not that they aren't good photographs, it's just that they are so far away from the type of photographs that I like (and make).

"The world would be a terrible (and depressing) place if I loved every photograph by every photographer—where would that leave my photography?

"Truth be told—I like seeing photographs that I don't like. It makes me question why I don't like them, which in turn makes me question why I like the pictures I do like!

"But hey, tastes change—when I was younger I never liked country music. Now I love it. So maybe, in the distant future, my taste in photographs will shift and I will be kicking myself that I passed on an original Ctein for $20!! Keep up the good work. While (at the moment) you are not pleasing me, you are pleasing some people—and that pleases me!"

Posted on Wednesday, 09 May 2012 at 03:07 PM in Ctein, Photographic aesthetics | Permalink | Comments (51)

Friday, 27 April 2012

How I Made the $19.95 Print

By Ctein

[Note: The example print sale ends Sunday night. —MJ]

I came upon the scene right after visiting Pier 24 in San Francisco. Happily for me, I was carrying my trusty Olympus Pen E-P1 with my favorite lens, the 45mm ƒ/1.8 (reviewed here). ISO 100, open up two thirds of a stop to compensate for the bright sky, ƒ/5.6, and Ctein's your uncle.

Once I got a good look at this photograph on my large monitor I knew it was something special. Lovely exquisite detail everywhere, delicate tracery in the clouds and tones on the bridge tower, and an amazing degree of sharpness. My, do I love that lens.

In order to eke the very last bit of quality out of that data, I super-sampled the image in Adobe Camera Raw, pulling it into Photoshop as a 16-bit, 28-MP (6144x4608 pixel) file in ProPhoto RGB color space. Why the upsampling? Because I have a (possibly superstitious) belief that ACR, having access to all the Raw camera data, will do the better job of extracting every last bit of detail from the file, and I know from experience that more pixels get me better results when I run deconvolution routines to maximize sharpness.

Wonder what you can get out of the 12-megapixel camera when everything is pushed to the max? Check out the rivets in this 100% scale detail (the full image file is 6100x4600 pixels).

Once I had the image in Photoshop, I ran the ContrastMaster plug-in from Photo Wiz to kick up the gradation and tonal separation in the subtle, fine detail just a bit. It did a great job of restoring the delicate tracery in the clouds and the subtle variations of light on the bridge tower that I had seen in the original scene. It also kicked up the noise (just more subtle, fine detail so far as the algorithm is concerned).

And here's the moon and some support cables, again at 100% scale.

Next I ran Topaz Labs' InFocus with a one pixel de-blur radius using the blur function calculated for this particular photograph. Deconvolution algorithms like this produce a genuine increase in resolution and sharpness. I use them routinely on all my digital photographs...just a touch. They'll also sharpen up and enhance any noise or grain in the photograph. Between the two plug-ins, I had more noise in the sky than I really wanted to be seeing. Normally I have no complaints about the noise levels in this camera at low to moderate ISOs, but here I was really pushing hard.

I needed some careful noise reduction. I didn't want to lose any of the fine detail and subtle gradation in the bridge, and noise reduction algorithms always clobber a bit of that. Time to make a mask so that I could apply noise reduction, using Topaz Lab's DeNoise, to the sky alone. Making that mask required lots of fine tuning and a certain amount of pixel painting where the bridge cables were almost the same tone as the sky. There are limits to what even the best masking software can do. I had a couple of hours of fiddly work getting the mask just so. Such is life.

This is the mask I created so I could selectively apply noise reduction to the sky and not the bridge.

From that point on, it was pretty straightforward work. A few masked curves adjustment layers for dodging and burning to get local brightnesses just as I wanted them, another curves adjustment to get the overall tonal placement just so. Surprisingly, no color correction; the camera had nailed it perfectly. That almost never happens.

I printed the finished photograph out on my Epson 3880 printer as a 17x22-inch (15x20" image area) print. The printer settings were 16-bit output (I've never seen this make any difference in a print, but I figure it can't hurt), 2880 dpi with high speed off, and finest detail on.

Twenty minutes later I was looking at a very decent first print. A bit of curves tweaking to get the print tones just so, a little more dodging and burning, a bit of pixel painting to catch a bit of cruftiness that it slipped past my masking, and there it was. A superb print of a photograph that still makes me very happy every time I look at it.

That's it for this time, folks. I'll be taking next week off, while I deal with all the orders. See you again in two weeks. Meanwhile, keep those cards and letters coming in.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Sven W: "Hmmmm...is this exercise a measure of a Micro 4/3 camera or Ctein's excellent post-processing skills?

"Quote #1: '...I think exemplifies the very best that a Micro 4/3, 12-megapixel camera can do. It's not a hero experiment; I can go out any day and make photographs of this technical quality. I just can't see any possible way to make a much better one.'

"Quote #2: 'I had a couple of hours of fiddly work getting the mask just so. Such is life.'

"The two quotes imply Ctein spends 2+ hours post-processing a typical image. I suspect that's way more than what most people do for their 'any day' images. Truth be told, I don't have enough post processing skills to spend two hours on one image. ;-)

"I'm not making a pot-shot here...just getting my head around Ctein's level of dedication! I spend around 20 minutes fixing up my images in post and have been thinking about upgrading my camera to reduce time spent in post. Maybe I need to re-think this!

"As an aside, what level of camera would produce the (equivalent) bridge photo as a JPEG? A D7000 or a D800, for example?

"Anyway, thanks for the print offer and the write-up. You've given me some ideas to explore."

Ctein replies: As I said in response to a similar question on Wednesday, "...while I did my usual superb custom printing job (he said immodestly) this is no trickery. The processing I did to turn this into a fine print is pretty straightforward; it is about what is inherent in the medium. It's just ordinary Ctein custom printing magic, not how clever I can be at manipulating pixels. I'm not trying to win some argument by hook or by crook, here. So far as I'm concerned, I won that argument years ago. I'm only giving people an opportunity to see for themselves instead of having to take my word for it."

In other words, this is about what the camera is capable of, not what I am capable of.

As I mentioned in a the Comments, I do typically spend hours custom-printing one of my photographs, but the time for any particular photograph runs from less than an hour up to several days. That puts me a cut above most other people, but if you're trying to show what a camera is capable of, you really need a superb print. Otherwise it's like trying to show off your audio system by hooking it up to $10 speakers.

An interesting question you and others have raised: would a camera with more pixels or a larger sensor reduce the amount of work I do printing? The answer turns out to be no. I've printed everything from six-megapixel quarter-scale sensor to 40 megapixel medium-format sensor photographs. The amount of time it takes to print a photograph to my satisfaction depends entirely on the photograph, not the format.

For example, the fastest-printed photo I alluded to previously is this one. Printed in half an hour from start to finish. From the Olympus. It just happened to be one of those 'perfect negatives' that comes along once in a blue moon and takes very little work, and you just nail it on the second print. (11x14-inch prints, in this case. My printer can't print fast enough to turn out two 17x22" prints in half an hour.)

Contrariwise, this crop from a medium format sensor took quite a few hours of work.

Can't really explain to you the whys and hows in more detail without writing several book-chapters worth of verbiage.

Featured Comment by Alan Fairley: "It sounds like you essentially applied two rounds of sharpening once you had the photo in Photoshop. Did you also apply capture sharpening in ACR? If so, how strongly? As a 4/3 and Micro 4/3 user, I am very intrigued by your workflow. Thanks!

Ctein replies: I routinely apply a modest amount of sharpening and noise reduction within Photoshop to my digital photographs. The results are so dramatically better that it is the norm for me, for any Bayer array photograph I deal with, everything from six megapixel quarter-scale sensor to 40 megapixel medium-format sensor photographs, with or without an anti-aliasing filter.

Usually I leave the Raw conversion sharpening in ACR at the default setting unless I'm dealing with a photograph with pinpoint specular highlights. Then it puts ugly rings around them. Absent that, it's on.

Once I have the photographs in Photoshop, I typically use Smart Sharpen at a radius around a quarter pixel and a percentage in the 50% range, for photographs ACR-converted at normal resolution. Tune to taste. Smart Sharpen is a deconvolution routine; it actually does improve fine detail, not merely enhance edges. I'm quite astonished at how much more detail there is in those Bayer array photos.

I also usually apply a low level of noise reduction using a third-party plug-in (there is no one best plug-in; some work better with some photographs, others with others. No rhyme nor reason to it).

Between the Smart Sharpening and noise reduction, I can produce a photograph with less noise than the original but the same sharpness and detail, the same noise as the original but better sharpness and fine detail, or something in between. Depends on how much of each tweak I use. Usually there is one combination of the two which works very well over an entire photograph.

Sometimes it works a bit better to apply sharpening before noise reduction, sometimes the other way around.

I also happen to own Topaz Labs InFocus which is a deconvolution plug-in. It's more sophisticated than Smart Sharpen but not as good at small radii, because it increments the blur circle in one-pixel steps.

In this particular photograph, since I was supersampling it, I needed to de-blur with a radius more like one-two pixels for maximum quality. I did a bunch of pixel peeping and decided I liked the plug-in better than Smart Sharpen, just by a bit.

By itself, this amount of sharpening doesn't produce killer noise. Yes, there is noise gain, but it's tolerable. What made it a killer was having applied ContrastMaster. It's a plug-in that improves local tonal separation and detail, but it's really hard to tame and it really latches onto noise.

As for the very good question of why I didn't do the masking before I did the sharpening? Well, because I didn't think of it. Normally, I don't need a mask, as I implied above. In this case I was far into the process before I figured out that there just wasn't going to be a set of compromise settings that would work for the clouds, the sky, and the bridge, all at the same time. That's when I built the mask. Had I known when I started I was going to have to go that route, it would've made a lot more sense to do it at the beginning. Given that it took me a couple of hours to create that mask, you can understand why my head didn't want to go that way. (Lazy smile.)

Posted on Friday, 27 April 2012 at 11:45 AM in Ctein, Digital Techniques, Print Offers, Printers and Printing | Permalink | Comments (33)

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