Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Medium Format / Film / Digital Backs – and Large Sensor Photography => Topic started by: Jonathan Cross on November 23, 2025, 02:28:20 pm
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It seems that medium format cameras can have 15 stops of DR. I am finding it very difficult to find the DR of pigment printers using different papers. Can such printers have that amount of DR? The same applies to monitors. If they cannot, what is the point of a camera with 15 stops of DR if any medium for seeing the image cannot replicate or exceed that DR?
Jonathan
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Nope, not even close! The 'best' you might get on a print with glossy paper and an ink jet is maybe, maybe 350:1 contrast ratio. Doing a complete calculation (DR to contrast ratio) is above my mathematical skills (but doable), the point is, a print, whitest white to darkest black, isn't anywhere near the ratio of a camera DR. Another reason why using the Simulate Paper White/Ink Black makes the image look so bad. The display too has a much wider DR than a print.
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...what is the point of a camera with 15 stops of DR if any medium for seeing the image cannot replicate or exceed that DR?...
The point is, as I see it, to have more latitude in editing.
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All outlined here:
https://www.lumita.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pscs3_rendering_image.pdf
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All outlined here:
https://www.lumita.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pscs3_rendering_image.pdf
Thanks Andrew. This is a very interesting article.
Jonathan
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All outlined here:
https://www.lumita.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pscs3_rendering_image.pdf
Thank you very much for the link.
It puts into understandable language that which I thought I knew, and turns it into more detailed information than my mind was saving. The problem is, with age, that which was clear at the time of initial reception of the information, becomes less nuanced as time passes… in other words it becomes easy to forget exactly why one does what one does, and just work on a basis of habit.
As all my current stuff now comes courtesy my old iPhone, the base line is set at jpeg standard. I understand that that‘s a lossy format, and what I do, once I get the file into the computer, is save it as a Tiff, which is not lossy. But there’s a psychological problem for me with that: long ago I was told that you can’t turn a jpeg into a Tiff. My Photoshop seems to disagree, and shows the altered files as Tiffs. Obviously not expecting the conversion to Tiff to improve on the information held in the original jpeg file, I do expect that subsequent work on it as Tiff does not allow things to get any worse as the processing of the image continues. (This precludes any dumb mistakes that I may make all by myself!)
Am I right here, or just fooling myself by thinking that converting those jpegs to nominal Tiffs is actually what has been achieved?
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But there’s a psychological problem for me with that: long ago I was told that you can’t turn a jpeg into a Tiff.
You can convert a JPEG into a TIFF, sure. The "damage" was done, so GIGO:Garbage In Garbage Out.
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You can convert a JPEG into a TIFF, sure. The "damage" was done, so GIGO:Garbage In Garbage Out.
Thanks for the information! Glad to know that changing file format did prevent further deterioration.
Insofar as GIGO goes, I can manage that trick with Raw, too! ;-)