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Boris_Epix

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« on: April 13, 2008, 02:02:46 am »

What I'm having a hard time understanding is why color is so terrible with DSLR's and MFDB's. And why manufacturers don't offer more options when it comes to color reproductions (styles or color profiles). I find myself doing selective color manipulations, paint with light, painting in shadowskin-tones, etc that I rarely ever do with film.

With film my stuff looks rather natural. With DSLR's and MFDB's my work suddenly looks all digital flat or freaks out. I have a hard time to find a balance in the colors that is pleasing to me while still looking natural. So I tend to go to far. Sure some customers like that and even book me for that look. But I prefer the rich skintones film provides.

I guess it's hard to talk about colors and feels so some examples if you care:

Unretouched film pic (I like the skintones on this one)
[attachment=6103:attachment]

Finished pic
[attachment=6104:attachment]

Isn't that kinda amazing? I didn't even need to tune the skintones.

Another film shot. Paint with light and some liquify but no colorchanges
[attachment=6105:attachment]

And now the unretouched digital file
[attachment=6106:attachment]

And the finished file:
[attachment=6107:attachment]


It's painful to see movies with great colors and skintones and then you shoot with a 50k$ MFDB/camera combo or Canon 1Ds level cam and you first need to tweak the RAW settings, then continue to massage the file in photoshop to make it look like my wifes Fuji P&S delivers from the start.

How can it be that the RED One digital video camera outputs a file with pleasing skintones like this and the MFDB needs lots of work to get there?
http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg


And the crazy thing is that the base RED ONE costs only 17k$ for the base camera which is quite a bit cheaper than the stil picture MFDB's à la PhaseOne P45+ (which is just a back without the camera).  And it shoots 30 frames per second at 12 Megapixels not just 1 shot about every 2 seconds like the p45.

Anyway... back to still photography: Have you ever compared the current covers of fashion mags to the covers a couple years ago? Virtually all look more or less the same today. Very flat and unnatural. Pale skin looks particularly terrible. The same pale person shot on Astia, Provia or whatever film you like looks much richer and healthier. I guess aside from the brightness level of the skin it has a big deal to do with a pleasing color shift in the different tonalities of the skin that is present in film images.

It should be easy for PhaseOne/Leaf/Sinar/Hassy to get some engineers/developers/color dudes to work on PLEASING straight out of camera color profiles, right?

Cheers
Boris
« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 09:48:45 am by Boris_Epix »
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James R Russell

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #1 on: April 13, 2008, 02:55:05 am »

Quote
What I'm having a hard time understanding is why color is so terrible with DSLR's and MFDB's. And why manufacturers don't offer more options when it comes to color reproductions (styles or color profiles). I find myself doing selective color manipulations, paint with light, painting in shadowskin-tones, etc that I rarely ever do with film.

With film my stuff looks rather natural. With DSLR's and MFDB's my work suddenly looks all digital flat or freaks out. I have a hard time to find a balance in the colors that is pleasing to me while still looking natural. So I tend to go to far. Sure some customers like that and even book me for that look. But I prefer the rich skintones film provides.

I guess it's hard to talk about colors and feels so some examples if you care:

Unretouched film pic (I like the skintones on this one)
[attachment=6085:attachment]

Finished pic
[attachment=6086:attachment]

Isn't that kinda amazing? I didn't even need to tune the skintones.

Another film shot. Paint with light and some liquify but no colorchanges
[attachment=6088:attachment]
And now the unretouched digital file
[attachment=6089:attachment]

And the finished file:
[attachment=6090:attachment]

It's painful to see movies with great colors and skintones and then you shoot with a 50k$ MFDB/camera combo or Canon 1Ds level cam and you first need to tweak the RAW settings, then continue to massage the file in photoshop to make it look like my wifes Fuji P&S delivers from the start.

How can it be that the RED One digital video camera outputs a file with pleasing skintones like this and the MFDB needs lots of work to get there?
http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg
And the crazy thing is that the base RED ONE costs only 17k$ for the base camera which is quite a bit cheaper than the stil picture MFDB's à la PhaseOne P45+ (which is just a back without the camera).  And it shoots 30 frames per second at 12 Megapixels not just 1 shot about every 2 seconds like the p45.

Anyway... back to still photography: Have you ever compared the current covers of fashion mags to the covers a couple years ago? Virtually all look more or less the same today. Very flat and unnatural. Pale skin looks particularly terrible. The same pale person shot on Astia, Provia or whatever film you like looks much richer and healthier. I guess aside from the brightness level of the skin it has a big deal to do with a pleasing color shift in the different tonalities of the skin that is present in film images.

It should be easy for PhaseOne/Leaf/Sinar/Hassy to get some engineers/developers/color dudes to work on PLEASING straight out of camera color profiles, right?

Cheers
Boris
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You raise a lot of points and some are valid, some are just the changing of the times.

In regards to magazines and all print, advertising inlcuded, in general there is more post work done and more done outside of the photographer's direction, which means even if you tweaked your raw file to look like nc100, usually the retoucher is taking direction from "their" client hence they are working to the clients color pallete and retouching has become a repeition of what was done before, or done by a competitor that had results.

Now as far as the Red, it seems to shoot a great detailed file, but I doubt seriously if that Peter Jackson image doesn't have some post work done, (if it didn't it honestly needs some).

Just working in non linear editors, regardless of retouching changes the look, from avid to FCP depending on colorspace and preset gammas.

Now the final topic, movies.  The movie industry seems to have more standards for effects and color and seems to share more readily.  You can walk into technicolor and say, "i want the look of the movie 7 and they'll tell you, shoot _______film, underexpose 1/2 stop and we will process with skip bleach and during the telecine, tweak the reds by -20.  (I'm not exact on this, but that is essentially the sceanrio).

Also movies, even B grade movies have a lot of money put into the budget for finish out.

Personally I don't think most digital looks any more or less film like than film, other than we all have the ability to work it harder in post and it's very fast and easy to overwork an image.

Also since we are starting from essentially a clean sheet, we don't have the transpaency or contact sheet to lay next to the computer to try and match how the look nthat was originally generated.

Also most of us work in a closed loop and rarely share beyond our own walls, unlike the cinema industry.

What I do know is digital has put more workload on many photographers where now we are the photographer, film processor, scanner operator and retoucher, or we just hand the raws over to the clients and let them do as they wish which usually produces a more generalistic look.

Still, I find most of the newer processor, lightroom, V4 do a much better job out of the can than the previous conversions from the original cs1, c1, etc.

What I find more difficult with digital than film is I'm working a lot of setups, especially on locaiton it's harder to match the films from the different ambience light and color from each setup.

One thing I've learned to like about V4 is if you select your final images they can all be brought up into a window side by side and you can tweak each one individully to match the previous and subsequent image.  (Maybe lightroom does this also).

To me a lot of  films seemed a little dumber (which is good) than digital and picked up less ambient bounce.

JR

I think the hardest thing for the manufacturer's is to get a common read from thier users.

On one hand some want a linear file with nothing added, just a flat image they can work deep, while others want a certain "film look" right out of the camera or straight into the converter.

What I don't understand is why there are not generic films that are trully embbed as "looks".

I know some converters have these but few seem as consistent and as close of a match as the name might suggest.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 03:14:18 am by James R Russell »
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Dustbak

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #2 on: April 13, 2008, 03:50:57 am »

These examples do look horrible, so horrible even I get the urge to run back to film and I haven't touched it in 10year!

Personally I haven't had so much trouble with skintone the last couple of year but before it was horrible.

I agree with James that it is weird that there aren't a lot of good canned profiles that you can easily apply to  the raw files.

The film examples do look really nice though.
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ErikKaffehr

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #3 on: April 13, 2008, 04:21:35 am »

Hi!

Color essentially exists in the brain. If you want natural capture you can just expose a color-checker in the same light and run the ACR-calibration procedure using some of the usual scripts. That should take you as close as you can get, with reasonable effort, at least in the measurable sense.

Your artistic perception is something different. It is perfectly possible to create a picture with "correct" rendering and then apply some kind of film look. There are plugins for that.

Erik

Here are some color calibration scripts:
http://fors.net/chromoholics/
http://21stcenturyshoebox.com/tools/ACRcalibrator.html

And an article comparing three scripts
http://www.photoactivity.com/Pagine/Artico...l%20sole_en.asp


Quote
What I'm having a hard time understanding is why color is so terrible with DSLR's and MFDB's. And why manufacturers don't offer more options when it comes to color reproductions (styles or color profiles). I find myself doing selective color manipulations, paint with light, painting in shadowskin-tones, etc that I rarely ever do with film.

With film my stuff looks rather natural. With DSLR's and MFDB's my work suddenly looks all digital flat or freaks out. I have a hard time to find a balance in the colors that is pleasing to me while still looking natural. So I tend to go to far. Sure some customers like that and even book me for that look. But I prefer the rich skintones film provides.

I guess it's hard to talk about colors and feels so some examples if you care:

Unretouched film pic (I like the skintones on this one)
[attachment=6085:attachment]

Finished pic
[attachment=6086:attachment]

Isn't that kinda amazing? I didn't even need to tune the skintones.

Another film shot. Paint with light and some liquify but no colorchanges
[attachment=6088:attachment]
And now the unretouched digital file
[attachment=6089:attachment]

And the finished file:
[attachment=6090:attachment]

It's painful to see movies with great colors and skintones and then you shoot with a 50k$ MFDB/camera combo or Canon 1Ds level cam and you first need to tweak the RAW settings, then continue to massage the file in photoshop to make it look like my wifes Fuji P&S delivers from the start.

How can it be that the RED One digital video camera outputs a file with pleasing skintones like this and the MFDB needs lots of work to get there?
http://www.red.com/skin/img/gallery-still/005634.jpg
And the crazy thing is that the base RED ONE costs only 17k$ for the base camera which is quite a bit cheaper than the stil picture MFDB's à la PhaseOne P45+ (which is just a back without the camera).  And it shoots 30 frames per second at 12 Megapixels not just 1 shot about every 2 seconds like the p45.

Anyway... back to still photography: Have you ever compared the current covers of fashion mags to the covers a couple years ago? Virtually all look more or less the same today. Very flat and unnatural. Pale skin looks particularly terrible. The same pale person shot on Astia, Provia or whatever film you like looks much richer and healthier. I guess aside from the brightness level of the skin it has a big deal to do with a pleasing color shift in the different tonalities of the skin that is present in film images.

It should be easy for PhaseOne/Leaf/Sinar/Hassy to get some engineers/developers/color dudes to work on PLEASING straight out of camera color profiles, right?

Cheers
Boris
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Graham Mitchell

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #4 on: April 13, 2008, 05:33:04 am »

- I could show you film shots with poor skin rendition and digital shots which look great. You can't prove anything with one or two samples, especially for different scenes.

- video footage is usually run through post production processes so unless you know the history of the image it means nothing

- I wasn't impressed with that Red image anyway

- one thing I noticed was how poor the dynamic range was on the film samples. It can be attractive for some images but destroys others. Perhaps you just happen to like a specific film's look but any film can be immitated with digital. it's just a matter of the right post production.

- by the way, I like that image of the girl at the window. Beautiful.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 05:33:52 am by foto-z »
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Frank Doorhof

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #5 on: April 13, 2008, 08:32:32 am »

Film has a different look but to be honest I like the colors of digital better in being neutral.
Calibrate your profile and shoot with a colorchecker or graycard and you are very natural in colors.

When I shoot slide or film I do love the look and feel of the scans but they are far from natural (or at least what I call natural).
Maybe I'm just used to the clean look of digital

Let me say by the way that I love both files, I sometimes shoot film just to get a certain film look, especially BW highASA are great, and I love the Portra look.

But when it counts on neutral colors I use my digital (aptus).
With the 5D I never was really content with the colors by the way, it was good but always a bit too harsch or a small shift (even with a profile).
The leaf has up untill satisfied my need.
And the fun thing with MF is we can shoot both.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 08:32:51 am by Frank Doorhof »
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Tim Lüdin

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #6 on: April 13, 2008, 08:52:18 am »

The RED pictures look also flat when they arrive in post.
You have to load a LUT into the camera to make the picture look good from scratch or shoot in REC 709 mode. RED also shoots RAW so its always good to shoot it as flat as possible and protect your highlights so you have more room to play in post.

Today, Photoshop or Color (FCP) is your filmstock. I can create every filmstock I like in post.
But you are right, the files should look good right out of the camera.
Somehow I like more all the possibilitys I get in post. OK it is time consuming and not always fully paid but I like tweaking my stuff. 10 years ago I did it in the darkroom, now we do it in, you know.

Tim
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Boris_Epix

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #7 on: April 13, 2008, 09:38:00 am »

Quote
<CROPPED>

On one hand some want a linear file with nothing added, just a flat image they can work deep, while others want a certain "film look" right out of the camera or straight into the converter.

What I don't understand is why there are not generic films that are trully embbed as "looks".

I know some converters have these but few seem as consistent and as close of a match as the name might suggest.


James: Yes, I believe the point would be that the canned profiles are not as good as I'd expect them to be for the amount of money we pay for such tools. Some shooters I know paid less than half their MFDB's price for their car they depend on. And while MFDB's are cheaper than film (but then comes the extra time for computer equipment, processing, backup and storage) a car has many more parts that need to work to keep you on the road. Let's say color profiles are the brakes of the car. Why can't we get better brakes for the backs?

And yes I agree style comes from individual creative decisions. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get a good starting point out of the box already.

In theory you should be able to work as a photographer without Photoshop. Or are MFDB companies just in the biz to expand marketshare of Adobe Photohop?

Why do we shooters have to do the homework of the MFDB companies?


Cheers
Boris
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Jonathan Wienke

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #8 on: April 13, 2008, 09:52:02 am »

Quote
In theory you should be able to work as a photographer without Photoshop. Or are MFDB companies just in the biz to expand marketshare of Adobe Photohop?

Why do we shooters have to do the homework of the MFDB companies?

That's a rather naive perspective with today's technology. In the days of film, color decisions were made for you by guys in lab coats on Rochester or somewhere in Japan. With digital, one of the advantages is that you can "make your own film" with color settings in the RAW converter, but this means that you are now responsible for deciding the color look of your images. Take the time to adjust the Calibrate tab in ACR or the color settings in your favorite RAW converter until you get a look you like. This will take some time, but you only have to do it once.

If you use ACR, you can automate the process of adjusting to get neutral, true-to-life colors with the scripts previously mentioned, and then use that as a starting point for creative adjustments.
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Boris_Epix

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #9 on: April 13, 2008, 10:10:11 am »

Quote
That's a rather naive perspective with today's technology. In the days of film, color decisions were made for you by guys in lab coats on Rochester or somewhere in Japan. With digital, one of the advantages is that you can "make your own film" with color settings in the RAW converter, but this means that you are now responsible for deciding the color look of your images. Take the time to adjust the Calibrate tab in ACR or the color settings in your favorite RAW converter until you get a look you like. This will take some time, but you only have to do it once.

If you use ACR, you can automate the process of adjusting to get neutral, true-to-life colors with the scripts previously mentioned, and then use that as a starting point for creative adjustments.
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Jonathan: Naive is not a word that needs to fall in this conversation. And if it was then I would have to say it's naive to assume things can't be improved.

Things improve.

But manufacturers need to know that this is an area that needs to be worked on. Digital still photography has a lot of room for improvement in the high-end. On the low-end we already have agencies eat the cake by sending interns out with a small DSLR.

Let's be honest.... isn't it a bit insane to convert a file to 100+ MB 16bit TIFF. Send that to the client/retouching house and they completely redo everything. In my book I want to send a DNG to the retoucher when I'm not doing the retouching myself. The work should be done once. Example: If I adjust the file towards the blue, then the retoucher adjusts toward yellow the file was degraded in quality already.

The retoucher should get a chance to extract the best data from the data. And the RAW file should look pleasing to start with. I hate to tell the customer: Yes, that's RAW. We need to change it. Color will look better later. And then listen to them that film looked (more) right to start with already on the lighttable.

Cheers
Boris
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Jonathan Wienke

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #10 on: April 13, 2008, 10:51:46 am »

Quote
Jonathan: Naive is not a word that needs to fall in this conversation. And if it was then I would have to say it's naive to assume things can't be improved.

Its a valid point to make when you are complaining about a problem that has been solved for some time now.

Quote
In my book I want to send a DNG to the retoucher when I'm not doing the retouching myself. The work should be done once. Example: If I adjust the file towards the blue, then the retoucher adjusts toward yellow the file was degraded in quality already.

The retoucher should get a chance to extract the best data from the data. And the RAW file should look pleasing to start with. I hate to tell the customer: Yes, that's RAW. We need to change it. Color will look better later.

You can do that easily right now. All you need to do is configure your preferred color settings in ACR, and save them as your default. That can take considerable time, but you only ever have to do it once. When you convert your RAW to DNG, the DNG metadata will be tagged with YOUR default conversion settings. And if you open the DNG in ACR, you can tweak the defaults however you like, and any settings you change will be saved back to the DNG metadata. Then you send your DNG to the retoucher/client, and they open the DNG, they will see the exact same image you did when you sent the file. But the RAW file data has never been changed, only the metadata tags indicating how it should be processed.

It's doubtful you're going to get a manufacturer to create a set of defaults that please you out of the box. Every photographer has a different idea about what "aesthetically pleasing" color is, and there is no way to please everyone with a few factory presets. Capture One, for example, is well-known for giving its conversions a "filmlike" look. Some photographers love it, and others hate it. You can't please everyone with a few presets; your best option is to familiarize yourself with your RAW converter so you can get the color and tonality you want out of the box with little or no additional processing in Photoshop.
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James R Russell

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #11 on: April 13, 2008, 01:11:39 pm »

Quote
Jonathan: Naive is not a word that needs to fall in this conversation. And if it was then I would have to say it's naive to assume things can't be improved.

Things improve.

But manufacturers need to know that this is an area that needs to be worked on. Digital still photography has a lot of room for improvement in the high-end. On the low-end we already have agencies eat the cake by sending interns out with a small DSLR.

Let's be honest.... isn't it a bit insane to convert a file to 100+ MB 16bit TIFF. Send that to the client/retouching house and they completely redo everything. In my book I want to send a DNG to the retoucher when I'm not doing the retouching myself. The work should be done once. Example: If I adjust the file towards the blue, then the retoucher adjusts toward yellow the file was degraded in quality already.

The retoucher should get a chance to extract the best data from the data. And the RAW file should look pleasing to start with. I hate to tell the customer: Yes, that's RAW. We need to change it. Color will look better later. And then listen to them that film looked (more) right to start with already on the lighttable.

Cheers
Boris
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I think it's come further than you think.  When I started with digital capture the only two processors for the files were photoshop cs1 and in this case Kodak and both were limited in what you could do prior to photoshop.

The thing I've noticed is all of these cameras respond differently to particular lighting and subject and then in color and tone change depending on how you process them.

So to build your own presets you would have to take the same camera, digital and film and shoot a combination of nc100 flash-3/4 soft light, nc100-flash-no diffusion, nc100 flash and ambient-mixed with high background light and a lot of other combinations such as ambient shade, direct daylight, tungsten, hmi, etc. etc. etc.

If you own multile cameras such as Canon and Leaf, or Phase and Nikon, or in my case Canon, Phase, Nikon and Leica, (and in the past Leaf) you would have to do it with all and the process would be maddening.

I do understand where you are coming from as it can be enormously frustrating and confusing.

Early on with digital capture I shot one large project in LA and Miami , (studio and location) where the client wanted primarily film and digital as backup.

Shooting transparency Kodak epr and the original Canon 1ds the film looked better out of the camera than the Canon file, though in 90% of the cases having the film as a base it was a quick wb and tone change in the converter to emulate the film, though in 10% of the instances, it just was impossible and required photoshop and a series of layers to get closer.

Now the processors and better and more full featured, but still require a lot of slight adjustments to get it close to film.

For some reason I think film just didn't vary as much from soft light to hard, ambient shade to flash but this just may be that the presets in the converters were too general.

I think most of the difference between film and digital is the broad customer base.  A still life catalog photographer probably wants exact colors, where I shoot people and want a more global and less sensitive color look and I know that both can be achieved, but a broad preset like portrait daylight, or product daylight, really is to wide to get there.

Not to cut the makers any slack, because they could write these presets, though it would take a lot of different films, cameras, lenses, lights and a lot of time.

Now to give the retoucher one file that has everything is usually not possible.  I usually process out a high rez tiff and even if I go to photoshop, that is the look I want to acheive and I send it in combination with the raw, so the retoucher can mulitiple process out parts, or hold hightlights, etc.

Though I will say using all the cameras and backs I have used,  there is no one holy grail of "film like" look.

Well, except the Leica.  It looks like 35mm black and white film, but which one? . . . I'm not sure.

[a href=\"http://russellrutherford.com/fashion/pictures/%A9russellrutherford_p%23189_2.jpg]http://russellrutherford.com/fashion/pictu...d_p%23189_2.jpg[/url]

Then again black and white is pretty easy to emulate.





JR
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Don Libby

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #12 on: April 13, 2008, 01:18:51 pm »

I still (vaguely) remember shooting film and going into a wet darkroom to process the images of course that’s going on 30 years ago.  When I took up photography again I went right into the digital world.  Now I shoot and go directly into my “digital darkroom” to process the images.  The only thing that’s changed is that there are no more chemicals and I now have a better workflow.  I never expected the film image to come out exactly as I wanted it without some measure of post processing – just the same as with digital.  One of the major benefits to digital is that there’s more manipulation available now.  

Just my 2 cents worth…..


don

Mort54

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #13 on: April 13, 2008, 02:11:03 pm »

I occasionally think to myself that, while I greatly appreciate the convenience and low noise (grain) of digital, I miss the color and tonality of film. But then I run across an old film shot of mine and I wonder why I'm nostalgic for it. On these occasions, I can clearly see how much better my digital shots are than my film shots, in almost every way, including color. I hope the reason is that I've become a better photographer since my film days :-) But sometimes I also wonder if my fond feelings for film are just nostalgia, and nothing but nostalgia. So it goes.

Regards,
Mort54
« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 02:13:04 pm by Mort54 »
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eronald

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #14 on: April 13, 2008, 04:24:48 pm »

There are a variety of issues at work here.

Some time ago, a little company in Denmark called Phase One asked me to supply a variety of looks for the six top dSLRs of the day. 6 cameras and a variety of looks, and then they wanted to pay me about $15 per buyer of an option pack. I looked at this, figured out that something was wrong with the pricing decided to do a test by asking them to take responsibility for the profiles if somebody sued, and also sell me a camera at dealer price. They refused to do either and I didn't supply the look profiles. This tells you exactly how important color is to the companies. I've given up trying to sell color to the MF crowd: They don't get it. It has no value to them.

Quote
Let's say color profiles are the brakes of the car. Why can't we get better brakes for the backs?

And yes I agree style comes from individual creative decisions. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get a good starting point out of the box already.

In theory you should be able to work as a photographer without Photoshop. Or are MFDB companies just in the biz to expand marketshare of Adobe Photohop?

Why do we shooters have to do the homework of the MFDB companies?
Cheers
Boris
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« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 04:25:59 pm by eronald »
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Boris_Epix

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #15 on: April 13, 2008, 04:49:19 pm »

James: Well you know it's two different things to be able to do something and to just find it done. Yes we have more choices when it comes to converters. But all of the converters have different shortcommings. And quite honestly they all could benefit by some of the features OTHER raw converters provide.

I bet everybody would love it if the files that show up in the rawconverter were already at least as good as a point&shoot color and contrastwise. And then go from there.

IT IS POSSIBLE. Point&Shoot have it.

I started having always some pictures with nice colors next to my retouching computers for reference. I don't recall that I ever had to do that with film.

With film the files just pop up on my screen like this after the scanning:
[attachment=6109:attachment]

You have some very good and valid points.

I feel the difference with light is not just hard or soft but already small angle changes have a great deal of influence on the final look with digital. Film was also less sensitive to that. And yes... digital picks up color casts from surroundings very quickly. Sometimes I make use of this by placing colored flags close to the subject.


MORT: Yes you're right on that. Grain and resolution and possibly the dynamic range in absolute numbers are much better with digital. And film speed - talk about ISO 25'600. But somehow digital gives blown skies or mushy shadows that need to be fixed (double conversion in raw of the same file then masking and similar tricks) when film just gave you a pleasing pic to start with. Sometimes even without flash/fill/reflectors/diffusors.

Technically digital may be dozen times better. But where is the feel, the style, the effortless getting straight to the point where you can start improving in post.

This is an unretouched shot scanned on a Imacon 949 that was not corrected in Flexcolor or retouched in Photoshop. I just opened it now 2 minutes or so ago to resize it for web.

[attachment=6110:attachment]

Now show me your best uncorrected, unretouched digital pics to compare.

Talking about colors kinda has no point.

And thanks to all that provided their honest opinion to this possibly to provocative titled thread.

Cheers
Boris
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Frank Doorhof

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #16 on: April 13, 2008, 05:23:26 pm »

Boris with all due respect but you are cutting corners here.

Ofcourse a digital untouched file is different than film.
Remember that with film you have a different look on every film.
You can see this as a little bit of photoshop already in the film stock.

The digital capture can be seen as the most natural capture you can get, after that you have to give it some work, you have to set at least colortemp and maybe some profile.

When you compare this to the work you have with film I cannot see the problem.

When I shoot film I :
Shoot film
Bring it to the lab
Pick it up 3 days later and pay 5.00
Scan it on my scanner, which takes app 4 minutes per scan
And than store it.

When I shoot digital I :
Shoot and it's transfered to my PC for instant viewing.
After the shoot I get the look I want and copy this to all my pictures and batchprocess this, total time less than 10 minutes for the WHOLE session.
After that the process is the same as with film, go into photoshop to do the rest.

Film is beautiful, heck I use it for the same reasons you love it, instant effect.
But the workflow for film is WAY longer and more expensive than digital which is almost instant.

I have to admit however that I'm well into colormanagment and profiles for what I do, so maybe that saves a lot of time.
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eronald

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #17 on: April 13, 2008, 05:43:10 pm »

With film, you get color from a company who are selling you nothing but COLOR. The film has bad color the company woulda gone broke. That's what film is all about - color and quality control. With digital you get a camera, and then you get a Raw converter written by some huge company with zillions of other things on its mind. The main thing on the mind of all these companies is how fast they can get you to upgrade. What d'you expect ? If the quality from the converters is so bad, why d'you put up with it ?

If you want decent color, start by using the Raw converter from the company that made your camera - the camera manufacturer software tends to have crappy workflow but very good quality.


Edmund

Quote
James: Well you know it's two different things to be able to do something and to just find it done. Yes we have more choices when it comes to converters. But all of the converters have different shortcommings. And quite honestly they all could benefit by some of the features OTHER raw converters provide.

I bet everybody would love it if the files that show up in the rawconverter were already at least as good as a point&shoot color and contrastwise. And then go from there.

IT IS POSSIBLE. Point&Shoot have it.

I started having always some pictures with nice colors next to my retouching computers for reference. I don't recall that I ever had to do that with film.

With film the files just pop up on my screen like this after the scanning:
[attachment=6109:attachment]

You have some very good and valid points.

I feel the difference with light is not just hard or soft but already small angle changes have a great deal of influence on the final look with digital. Film was also less sensitive to that. And yes... digital picks up color casts from surroundings very quickly. Sometimes I make use of this by placing colored flags close to the subject.
MORT: Yes you're right on that. Grain and resolution and possibly the dynamic range in absolute numbers are much better with digital. And film speed - talk about ISO 25'600. But somehow digital gives blown skies or mushy shadows that need to be fixed (double conversion in raw of the same file then masking and similar tricks) when film just gave you a pleasing pic to start with. Sometimes even without flash/fill/reflectors/diffusors.

Technically digital may be dozen times better. But where is the feel, the style, the effortless getting straight to the point where you can start improving in post.

This is an unretouched shot scanned on a Imacon 949 that was not corrected in Flexcolor or retouched in Photoshop. I just opened it now 2 minutes or so ago to resize it for web.

[attachment=6110:attachment]

Now show me your best uncorrected, unretouched digital pics to compare.

Talking about colors kinda has no point.

And thanks to all that provided their honest opinion to this possibly to provocative titled thread.

Cheers
Boris
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« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 06:21:35 pm by eronald »
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James R Russell

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #18 on: April 13, 2008, 06:26:22 pm »

Boris,

I see where your coming from about film but looking at your examples, the contrast, the color might have a film look, but their still will be a lot of post prodcution involved to clear up the red arm that is in open shadow and the red banding in the transitional areas.

On a broad look, yes it is out of the camera film like, but piece by piece there is still work to do on a computer, wheter by you or a retoucher.

This example is as much a comparision of c1 3.8 and V4 as it is anything.

[attachment=6115:attachment]

Personally I like to start tethered and hit as close to my color and look before I start shooting, which only takes a few seconds.  With the P30 I always underexpose just slightly and then open up in the software settings and all the captures coming in pick up tha look.

For finish out, I now use V4 for various reasons, mostly I like the look and secondly I can match and grade images from different sessions on one screen.


I don't miss film now that I have stable converters. In the early days batching out thousands of images for jpegs was a nightmare, now it's pretty much set the color, make the corrections and apply.  

If I'm in a stable envrionment like studio or large production location usually the film I make on the computer tethered is the direction I stay with.

Also in the last days of my film experience I found the labs in LA to be all over the place, at least in E-6 and in C-41 you were at the mercy of whoever made the contacts.  If you had good symmetry with the lab it worked ok (and definately was easier than digital post), but if not it was a process of go back and try it again.

Now what I would like to see is better digital polaroid in a portable mode.  Not just that the medium format lcds are bad, (and yes they are not very good) but even the great Nikon lcd can trick you as what's on the back of the camera is not the same once in the computer.

I would love to see great camera lcd's that matched the processing profiles in the computer.

JR




Quote
James: Well you know it's two different things to be able to do something and to just find it done. Yes we have more choices when it comes to converters. But all of the converters have different shortcommings. And quite honestly they all could benefit by some of the features OTHER raw converters provide.

I bet everybody would love it if the files that show up in the rawconverter were already at least as good as a point&shoot color and contrastwise. And then go from there.

IT IS POSSIBLE. Point&Shoot have it.

I started having always some pictures with nice colors next to my retouching computers for reference. I don't recall that I ever had to do that with film.

With film the files just pop up on my screen like this after the scanning:
[attachment=6109:attachment]

You have some very good and valid points.

I feel the difference with light is not just hard or soft but already small angle changes have a great deal of influence on the final look with digital. Film was also less sensitive to that. And yes... digital picks up color casts from surroundings very quickly. Sometimes I make use of this by placing colored flags close to the subject.
MORT: Yes you're right on that. Grain and resolution and possibly the dynamic range in absolute numbers are much better with digital. And film speed - talk about ISO 25'600. But somehow digital gives blown skies or mushy shadows that need to be fixed (double conversion in raw of the same file then masking and similar tricks) when film just gave you a pleasing pic to start with. Sometimes even without flash/fill/reflectors/diffusors.

Technically digital may be dozen times better. But where is the feel, the style, the effortless getting straight to the point where you can start improving in post.

This is an unretouched shot scanned on a Imacon 949 that was not corrected in Flexcolor or retouched in Photoshop. I just opened it now 2 minutes or so ago to resize it for web.

[attachment=6110:attachment]

Now show me your best uncorrected, unretouched digital pics to compare.

Talking about colors kinda has no point.

And thanks to all that provided their honest opinion to this possibly to provocative titled thread.

Cheers
Boris
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James R Russell

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Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
« Reply #19 on: April 13, 2008, 06:33:26 pm »

Quote
If you want decent color, start by using the Raw converter from the company that made your camera - the camera manufacturer software tends to have crappy workflow but very good quality.
Edmund
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Edwin,

I don't know where you get the camera company software has crappy workflow.  Some do, some don't, some are rock solid, some flaky.

I use all the converters for my cameras, and for the phase from time to time go to LR, or Raw Developer, but 95% of what I do can easily, be done in 3.78 or V4 and done fast.

JR
« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 06:33:53 pm by James R Russell »
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