Film Friday | Film vs Digital | Part 1 – Color | Northern Virginia Film Photographer
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(Image by Kristen Lynne Photography, Contax 645, Fuji Pro 400h)
Ahhh, pretty! Ok, now let’s get down and nerdy!
Color! One of the first things I learned in art class in grade school were the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. Almost everyone remembers learning the color wheel, yes?
POP QUIZ! If someone asked you what are the three primary colors of light, what would you say? When I first heard this question I thought it was some sort of joke, or trick question. How many of you thought, “duh! red, blue, and yellow!” Wrong!
One of the first things I learned in my first college photography class were the three colors of light: red, green, and blue. Say what?! This is a joke, right? Nope, it’s the truth! See… look at that fancy diagram that proves it! ;) And if you’re a photographer you are likely familiar with the color gamut that we all commonly work with, sRGB. Lightbulb!
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(This diagram can be found on ScienceLearn.org, click here to see the full article)
And guess what? If you combined all three colors together you get white! WHITE?! My mind is blown! ;) This was a totally new concept to me but a very basic one in the world of photography. And to be perfectly honest I don’t know the exact physics and ridiculous equations and calculations behind this madness. It’s like trying to explain gravity. It’s just there! And now we’re moving on…
So digital sensors and film both record these three primary colors of light. But what is different is HOW they record the light.
The medium that a photographer uses when shooting film is, well, film! Film consists of several teeny tiny layers of materials that are sensitive to certain wavelengths of light (ok, technically it is sensitive to photons; a discrete bundle (or quantum) of electromagnetic (or light) energy. Yeah… that sounded like a line straight out of the mouth of Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory). So we are just going to go with wavelengths of light. Deal? To really simplify it let’s think of film as having three layers: one blue sensitive layer, one red sensitive layer, and one green sensitive layer. Much like a chocolate layer cake, one layer laid on top of the next. (Who wants chocolate cake now?) So when the photons, (ahem), light hits the film it penetrates through the layers, recording the resulting color onto the film.
1 pixel = 3 colors
Think of it as an artist being able to blend and mix different colors of paint together with his brush to get a new color.
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(This diagram is found on atmega32-avr.com, click here to see the full article)
The process of recording color is completely different when a photographer shoots digitally. Instead of layers of colors on film, it is more like a mosaic of colors on a digital sensor: (you guessed it) red, green, and blue. But each pixel can only be assigned to record one, single color.
1 pixel = 1 color
Go back to our artist’s painting analogy and now the artist can only use three colors and because he can’t use his brush to mix/blend the colors, he must arrange tiny dots of unmixed pain into a dot matrix to create the optical illusion that he has blended the paints to get a new color. You might be thinking… Dude, these $2500, professional, DSLR cameras have sensors that consist of pixels that are only capable of recording ONE, preassigned, color?! Well yep, you’d be right! Ipso facto!
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(This diagram can be found on outbackphoto.com, click here to see the full article)
You can see the advantage that film has here. HOWEVER! Technology is always getting better and better, and they are now starting to make digital sensors that have layers of pixels instead of pixels in one flat mosaic pattern. So theoretically, this new sensor will record the light and colors much like film does. To be perfectly honest I haven’t had a lot of time to research this exciting new technology. But since I bleed red (or more like my bank account bleeds red) and I’m invested in the (amazingly wonderful) Canon premium glass, I won’t be jumping ship and getting that new Sigma Foveon x3 sensor… I’ll be sticking with Canon until they adopt this new technology. It’s only a matter of time… Maybe the 5D MkIV? Hopefully?! Pretty please?!
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(This diagram can be found on Foveon’s website and on dpreview.com)
One of the potential nasty side-effects of having a “mosaic” digital sensor is moiré. It’s a lot of fun to say, but it can be the bane of a professional photographer’s existence. Any digital photographer that has a client show up for a photo shoot wearing a tiny checker patterned shirt has had the “oh crap” sentiment, and will be dreading post production. See the rainbow pattern showing up on his sport coat? This is the equivalent of peeling a digital photographer’s fingernails backwards. Ok, maybe not THAT bad. But it is a pain in the butt to edit out, especially if it happens for an entire photo shoot. Thankfully this isn’t an issue for film photographers due to the random and more natural way the film records the colors! Whew!
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(This photo can be found on photographylife.com, click here to see the full article)
So to sum it up, maybe a year or so ago the score might look something like:
FILM – 1 DIGITAL – 0
In the not-so-distant-future, it might start to look more like:
FILM – 1 DIGITAL – 1
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Some photographers argue that film captures more realistic colors and truer skin tones. Some argue that digital captures more realistic colors and truer skin tones. Have you ever seen a “larger than life” digital photograph where the color is intensely bold? It looks really cool, but maybe not so realistic? Well, arguments can be made both ways about this. You can get into the most heated color gamut debate in the world about it. About the visible spectrum of color and how digital can capture quite a good bit of it, etc. etc. I’m not 100% sold that one is better than the other for whatever reasons. BUT, what I do know is that I prefer the way colors look on film.
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(Image by Kristen Lynne Photography, Contax 645, Fuji Pro 400h)
See, film and digital are like having two totally different boxes of crayons to choose from. In fact, even within the two different realms of digital and film, there are even MORE boxes of crayons to choose from. For example I get totally different representation of a red dress when I shoot it on Fuji and Portra film stocks. And I can even take it a step further, and I can shoot Fuji Pro 400h, overexpose it a bit, and create this wonderful pastel color palate. So in all honesty it depends on what YOU prefer. You are the artist, or you are the one hiring the artist… Which box of crayons is beckoning you? For me, I’ll take that dreamy, soft, romantic, pastel color palate, please.
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Here are a list of great resources where I borrowed the images from:
http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/Light-and-Sight/Science-Ideas-and-Concepts/Colours-of-light
http://www.foveon.com/article.php?a=67
http://www.outbackphoto.com/dp_essentials/dp_essentials_03/essay.html
http://atmega32-avr.com/how-photographic-film-works/
http://www.ishootshows.com/2012/04/09/understanding-moire-patterns-in-digital-photography/
http://photographylife.com/what-is-moire
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And just to get the “awwww” factor, who doesn’t want to see a picture of a totally adorable pup on film? ;)
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(Image by Kristen Lynne Photography, Contax 645, Fuji Pro 400h)
Dave Arthur - Good topic to stir up some nice or not so nice debates! It’s the ‘apples vs oranges’ comparison.
Let’s start with resolution or a more technically correct term ‘Spatial Resolution’. How do they compare? It depends! [And I’m sure Kristen’s reaction to my answer, since it’s coming from me ‘the analogist’, is like swatting at a wasp nest using your bare hands.] We CAN definitely measure the size of the photosites on a digital image sensor and the silver halide particles (grain) in film. These are the devices that record the light (oops, I meant photons). Let’s use the ever popular 35mm image size for reference. The size of film grain in an equivalent to digital resolution varies from approximately 3 megapixels to 16 megapixels. Why such a large range? Silver halide grain size directly affects its ability to capture photons. The larger the grain size, the less photons needed to create record the image. In reference to the ISO numbers, ISO 100 film has small silver halide grains and is used for bright light conditions (lots of photons) compared to ISO 3200 film with the larger grain and used in low lighting conditions. Comparing the digital pixel vs silver halide grain resolution for a 35mm camera, industry experts have surmised that a digital sensor with at least 16 megapixels surpasses the resolution of film. See the graph below comparing film ISO (grain size) vs the number of megapixels on a digital image chip.
(Graphs from http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/film.vs.digital.1/index.html)
Today, Canon’s highest DSLR resolution camera, EOS 5D Mark III, has 22.3 effective megapixels and the Nikon D-800/800E/810 series DSLR’s have 36.3 effective megapixels. These clearly exceed the resolution of any film products.
However, Kristen uses a Medium Format film camera and the size of that film area is approximately 4 times larger than 35mm film. So the digital megapixel equivalent has to be much higher as shown in the next graph. Medium format digital cameras currently range in size from 40-60 megapixels. They too either equal or exceed the resolution of medium format film.
(Graphs from http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/film.vs.digital.1/index.html)
But pixels or grain size is only a small part of a long list of variables that determine the quality of an image.
As pointed out in your blog, Moiré is a result of the Bayer ‘mosaic’ pattern. Like the new Foveon sensor technology, there are other solutions out there to reduce or eliminate Moiré. Anti-alias filters mounted to the front of the image sensor are designed to reduce or eliminate Moiré effects. And if the filters don’t eliminate it, post processing software usually takes care of it. But like you said, it does add extra time to post processing. Another solution comes in the form of a different RGB pattern. Fujifilm has recently developed a new digital RGB sensor pattern called ‘X-Trans Sensor’. This new pattern lays out the red, green and blue photo sensors in a way that simulates the randomness of film and thus prevents Moiré. With the Moiré problem resolved, Fujifilm removed the anti-alias filter on the front of the camera’s image sensor. A by-product of removing the filter is an increase the image sharpness.
Bayer pattern Fuji’s X-Trans pattern
Film grain pattern (typical)
(Pictures from http://fujifilm-x.com/x-pro1/en/story/chapter1/page_02.html)
The color space (gamut) is yet another variable. To keep this topic to a minimum, I will elaborate on one of your comments. You mentioned “film captures more realistic colors and truer skin tones”. Film properties have limits to how many variations of color they can capture. Let’s see what the color gamut of typical film looks like when plotted on a CIE xy graph with the Rec 709 Color Space (graph below). The unshaded area with the curved top in the graph is the limit of the human eye’s color gamut, aka, Rec 709 Color Space. The triangle is the limit of Adobe RGB color gamut. We see that film can reproduce colors out to the edges of the Adobe RGB gamut.
(Graph from http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?BetaRGB.html)
The gamut of RAW files is limited only by the color spaces assigned to them in software editing programs, i.e. Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. These programs can use a very wide color gamut called ProPhoto. In the graph below, you can see ProPhoto gamut is much larger than Adobe RGB and even has values that exceed what the human eye can see.
(Graph from http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/prophoto-rgb.shtml)
Therefore, film isn’t capturing any more colors than digital since digital RAW files can be assigned a much larger color gamut. The secret to why film may be rendering the final printed image with “more realistic colors and truer skin tones” likely lies in how film is processed and even the powerful scanners that digitize that film. As for digital images, the answer probably lies in the programing of the software that processes the image whether it be JPEG or RAW. Like you said in your blog, “…what I do know is that I prefer the way colors look on film.” I totally agree, it’s your art palate, use what you like best.
FILM FRIDAY | FILM VS DIGITAL | PART 3 – Aesthetic | NORTHERN VIRGINIA FILM WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER » Fine Art Virginia Wedding Photography by Kristen Lynne Photography - […] Part 1 of this series I discussed the color palates that I can achieve with film. My favorite film stock is Fuji Pro 400H because I can overexpose it a couple stops and get this […]
FILM FRIDAY | FILM VS DIGITAL | PART 5 – Summary | NORTHERN VIRGINIA FILM WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER » Fine Art Virginia Wedding Photography by Kristen Lynne Photography - […] During Part 1 of this series I talked about the difference in colors between film and digital photos. In the end I came to the conclusion that I much prefer the color palate that I can achieve with film. My favorite film stock is Fuji Pro 400H and I love the beautiful pastel palate that I can achieve when overexposing this stock. I summed it up by saying that every digital camera and every film stock is like having different boxes of crayons to choose from. My favorite boxes of crayons just happen to be film! Film = 1 point. However, similar results can be achieved with digital photos, but this requires time in post processing. So due to the fact that I can get results similar to film, but also taking into consideration the time that must be spent in post processing to get these results, I will give digital a 0.5 point. […]