Great B&W's on Digital?

Can they really be achieved, or is film the way to go?

I've recently been going through a Black and White phase in my editing but am never thoroughly satisfied with the results. They just don't look the same as when I was in my intro photo classes and got to shoot film, develop, and print traditionally. There seems to be a very different feel between Black and white from film and black and white born digital. I shoot everything color so that I capture everything in the scene and have the option to do BW in editing should I decide to try it out. I was told this was the way to go, instead of simply choosing the BW option in camera.

I feel like BW film has a tendency to compress broad ranges of tones into a few shades from black to grey, whereas digital edits to BW have a greater range causing them to to look less dramatic. AM I right in thinking this?

Examples of my edits (sorry I dont have any scanned film):

I recently did a test. I had an experienced wet printer show the same images printed traditionally and scanned then printed digitally (on a Baryta paper, Harman GLoss FB AI) to some experienced traditionalist photographers. The end result was that the digital prints actually had better D-Max and shadow detail while the wet print had a tiny bit better highlight tonality. In the end, the digital versions were preferred by the group.

It's hard to tell from looking at a web jpeg too. Here are two different images, the first traditional scanned 35mm Tri-X, the second 100% digital, 11MP capture (Click thumbs for larger version)...

Traditional:


100% digital:


Frankly, the scan looks like 35mm film to my eye while the digital capture looks more like a medium format film capture by comparison...

Cheers,

Jack,

As an avid B&W and LF photographer, your opinion is always valued.

Part of the differences are more extensive than tonalities. May I add to your good words some points which you appreciate and know as much as anyone. The ability of the digital sensor to penetrate the shadows is a great advance. The rendering of the highlight details in film can be wonderful, but this too will be overcome by digital with a rapid fire of camera prior to the real exposure or switch off of individual pixels as they approach filling the sensel well.

Still, film, being made up of piles of silver will always have it's own character.

Further, large format film photography uses lenses and generally longer focal lengths which have unique characteristics of compression and distribution of sharpness and contrast that are not found easily in the smaller modern formats where optimization of the tiny real estate has been nothing less than an obsession.

Asher

This gives me an opportunity to ask a question that's occupied my mind for some time.

First of all, let me tell you a story...........

Several years ago I was at my local hi-fi dealer waiting to audition a new CD transport/Arcam Black Box combination. In another room someone was listening to a Linn Sondek feeding active Naim DBLs. It was so beautiful that I went home and almost cried because I knew I could never afford it.

That's my feeling about B&W film versus B&W digital. Digital may be sharper and clearer, but is 'hard' and a bit harsh.

The question is "Does a B&W print made purely from film have a greater tonal range than the 256 levels available in the digital equivalent?". My impression is that old B&W prints are much smoother than digitised ones.

Regards,

Stuart

I think Asher hit the nail on the head; black and white film has its own character. I sometimes turn up the ISO in my Nikon D300 to get some noise in the picture. This adds some character (I like 'grain') but it will always be different than black and white film. Notice I do not say better. On a stormy, overcast day I would probably bring a film camera with ISO 400 film because I think this would give me the feeling I want. Doing a still life, I might very well use digital. The difference is intuitive for me at the moment but perhaps some day I will be an advanced enough photographer to describe why I prefer film or digital for any given subject.
Cheers, and keep both film and digital images coming (the horse photos are lovely, by the way).

StuartRae said:

The question is "Does a B&W print made purely from film have a greater tonal range than the 256 levels available in the digital equivalent?". My impression is that old B&W prints are much smoother than digitised ones.

Click to expand...

I'll go with different character too

The "256 levels of tonal range" in a B&W digital print is a bit of a misconception IMO. First you can print from a 16-bit grayscale image and have 65,000 levels of tonality or you can also print an 8-bit or 16-bit per channel RGB image in grayscale, overlaying three grayscale images for total grayscale output in the millions or trillions of shades as with color. Second, a good print driver will dither any single-channel output to smooth out tonal transitions AND the newer photo printers have more than one color of black ink to lay down, additionally increasing tonal range. This is why B&W prints look so good on the newer inkjet photo printers

What film does have that the digital sensor doesn't is some physical depth in the capture layer; thus there is a capture "layer" instead of a capture plane or surface. The thickness present in the layer allows for dispersion of light between the light-sensitive crystals, and this effect, called "halation," is one main attribute I think gives film some added smoothness. Of course film also derives unique character from the physical grain pattern in that capture layer.

Cheers,

Another special advantage, for me at least, is that film is an incredible storage medium for detail rich images. Anyone can afford to rent a LF camera to take fine images that can be enlarged building size. The film is inexpensive per project.

For me it's a form of quiet artistic therapy and access to beauty on a special scale. It's worth considering for the artist where numbers of shots required are limited and the time pressures of commercial photography aren't there. With a modest outlay one can be shooting 4x5 film and getting image files that will far surpass what a stitched image can do with a moving (yes, of course, meant to have the double entendre) landscape.

I still will stitch images because digital responds to impulse and I don't want to miss out on anything I want to explore in an image. However, given the time to assemble images, I realize that one excellent sheet of film can be far more efficient use of creative energy. One just has to be set up for that.

David Goldfarb approaches this by also having a magic folding film camera, the 6cmx6cm Perkeo II I believe. That allows for impulse but only 12 per roll of film!

Asher

I think that you really need to simulate the film and paper to do digital black and white, rather than just use the channel mixing techniques most folks use. One of our plug-in developers created a Bibble plug-in named Andy that I just can't get enough of... you can choose the film and paper and control the exposures to a certain degree. Granted the grain is still not quite the same, but it's much closer to the same feel than other methods I've used and I do like some of the modern tonings that you can do in digital that aren't really possible in the dark room. I've only shot and printed medium format black and white for a short period when I was taking full advantage of being a Kodak employee working in Rochester, so I don't claim any expertise. I do love being able to try out the different films and papers on a scene instantly and I think it makes up in part for the lack of silver grain (and interesting missteps with the developer that sometimes plagued me)

-Colleen

thanks for all the extremely informative posts.
so with all that said, what approaches do you all take for creating a B&W final product if you've already shot color digital, and just decide it might look better B&W?

Nich Fern said:

thanks for all the extremely informative posts.
so with all that said, what approaches do you all take for creating a B&W final product if you've already shot color digital, and just decide it might look better B&W?

Click to expand...

Hehehehe... There is the rub, isn't it?

In my case, I have to work to see in B&W instead of color. And I have not yet mastered it at the point of capture... Here is a recent example. I was leading a workshop in Moab, and while doing an IR example, captured this "false color" IR image. Seeing it on review on my LCD, it looked really cool and I was jazzed. It still looked pretty cool after some light processing:



But then, I realized the strength of the image was in the composition, shapes, tones and tonal range, and they were what I was attracted to, not the weird color; the weird color was only interesting because it was weird... Here is the final, the above image converted to B&W in CS3 with some local adjustments applied:



Cheers,

I definitely see what you mean. Though the color on the original was different and the shot looks great, turning it into pure black and white emphasized what was great about the shot.
Those are epic landscapes... donde?

Nich Fern said:

I definitely see what you mean. Though the color on the original was different and the shot looks great, turning it into pure black and white emphasized what was great about the shot.
Those are epic landscapes... donde?

Click to expand...

Exactly. And thank you. That particular shot is from Moab, UT --- Arches National Park at "the fins" a half hour before sunrise, taken just a few weeks ago to be precise

Cheers,

Jack_Flesher said:

... , I realized the strength of the image was in the composition, shapes, tones and tonal range, and they were what I was attracted to, not the weird color; the weird color was only interesting because it was weird...

Click to expand...

To me that's the essence, shapes, tones, subjects being sculpted by the angle and 'quality' of the light, that's what's needed for successful B&W images. Composition is reduced to the essential tonal differences which will guide our eyes.

I do not consider graininess to be a part of its strengths, unless one attempts to emulate a film capture.

Bart