Of all places, I was surprised to find this interesting discussion on hackernews:
Some good comments in there!
Also, there’s @CarVac in the discussion, I like what he writes and he reminded me of the awesome filmulator that I have left in the corner of my computer; I do like editing my photos(*) but sometimes a streamlined workflow could work and I recall filmulator giving me excellent results with minimal fuss.
On a separate note I have appreciated somebody linking a blog post of Tim (leicaphilia) where he explains why film is better than digital; the usual discussion of the S curve embedded with film and why digital can’t replicate that… given that this is a 2016 post, and considering the great results I’m having with agx I’d like to ask the knowledgeable audience here if you think Tim’s explanation still holds true or with our modern cameras and processing tools we may approach that film-digital equivalence.
BTW Tim Vanderweert was a great blogger that died a few years ago; I was able to get his self-published book (Car Sick) years ago, at that time I thought this purchase was a compensation for the entartneitment (**) that he gave me over the years with his writing; I remember how difficult was to get the actual book and then he sent it to me some time later when he was on holiday in Italy. That was a nice gesture. Car Sick is now on my library close to the Saul Leiter, Joel Meyerovitz and the other greats.
(*) darktable is ace on editing photos and keeping them organized, esp. with the recent advancements – I am now settled on a minimal exposure+agx processing with some masked local contrast and that’s enough for the majority of the good photos! However sometimes there are photos that I want to keep and maximise their quality, and dt gives me that opportunity.
You can use Darktable in a similar manner: make up a preset that suits your taste (I recommend using sigmoid, not AgX if you really want to avoid fiddling, AgX is more versatile but sigmoid is more foolproof and robust), apply it to each photo, adjust exposure, crop and rotate to taste if applicable, and you are done.
There are a ton of neat presets too, emulating well-known films and some cameras, some of them are now bundled with Darktable, some you can just download.
Having sliders does not mean that you have to use them. That said, I think that “do not edit photos” is a rather pretentious trend, and I see YT videos about it from people who I know edit their photos and are proficient in Lightroom or whatever, and also use various AI-based NR tools.
No doubt about it, film can be great and it was perfected over decades. But let’s not forget that mostly, good photos came from people who knew the film they were using, what its strengths and limitations are, and shot accordingly. It’s not like they popped film into the camera and automatically got great results, they had to think carefully about exposure, light and colors. That’s a skill that can and has to be acquired if one wants to forego editing.
Some people just like taking photos more than they like editing. Many famous photographers didn’t even do darkroom work(Cartier-Bresson, McCurry, two that come to mind), they just took the photos and sent them to their underlings to deal with developing and printing it.
The modern version of that is asking the printing lab to adjust your photos. Many labs are more than happy to do that for a small fee, or even free if you are ordering large (>A4) prints.
55 years ago I started photography at the age of 12 by processing BW contact prints of Box Brownie negatives. I went on to a career in photography where I processed and shot millions of images on film. Then along came digital. Why do I want to cling to the past of film. I can now shoot images at 32000 ISO regularly on my Canon R7 and get results better than 400 ISO film. I have no desire to return to the limitations of film. I also don’t want to get rid of my 4K streaming service to return to a BW cathode ray tube television. I love digital photography and what I can do with it. I don’t miss the toxic chemicals used in processing film. Cyanide is one of those chemicals no longer being pumped into the environment.
Film is anything but simple, lots of manual measurements have to be done prior to make sure your shots come out right, each roll is expensive, has to be reloaded constantly, development takes a long time, is more complicated if shooting color (and the chemicals for color development are not shelf stable), and costs a lot more if you outsource it. After you have your negatives, if you plan on doing anything other than scanning them digitally, such as contact sheets or enlarged prints, you need more specialized equipment, more time, more development. With digital if you want as simple a process as possible, you take your photo and copy it off an sd card then send it to a printer if you want. I don’t see how film is more simple.
I intentionally didn’t engage with this on HN because I find they’re usually not very knowledgeable about the technical details of photography and it takes too long to explain…
Highlights are absolutely a solvable problem on digital, but you have to dedicate enough of your camera’s dynamic range to them, and then gently roll them off while using a little local contrast enhancement to avoid a flat look. I figure that if I had one of these monochrome sensor cameras (I so want the GR IV Monochrome) I would just set exposure compensation to -3 in camera since shadow noise is not an issue at all, then do +3 in post.
With modern digital stills cameras we’ve become so used to having super clean shadows (and color noise in the shadows is really ugly) so that’s just not how people typically approach exposure and editing.
On the other hand, in video the noise is less of an issue because it’s changing from frame to frame, but highlights can’t get the individual attention the way they do in stills editing so video neutral gray is often two or three stops farther from the brightest captured highlights compared to stills neutral gray.
I get how some folks just don’t enjoy spending time in front of the computer. Me, that’s a very enjoyable part of the process. To each their own. We’re lucky to live in a world of such abundance of processes for every preference.
(That post about digital not being able to replicate a filmic S-curve is bologne, though)
I think people tend to over-complicate digital editing. Just because you have countless tools available and can make infinite adjustments doesn’t mean you have to.
A rough edit of one of my insect photos takes me a few minutes. I might come back to it in a day or two and see if anything needs tweaked. I don’t even do much in the way of local adjustments. If I created some styles or set up more presets and keyboard shortcuts I could cut my editing time down drastically but I don’t really feel the need to because I’d just be cutting down the time where I’m actually looking at my photos.
Not to say that my way is the best or that everyone should do what I do, but I’ve sort of learned to see my photos for what they are and not try to squeeze blood from a stone. If the fundamentals (composition, exposure, etc) aren’t there already, it just turns into chasing a ghost. Film makes this easy: the photo is either great, mediocre, or bad, and there’s little you can do about it but learn and move on. Digital gives the illusion that there’s a better photo waiting to be discovered, when sometimes there just isn’t.
There is no such thing as an unedited photo. If someone says they don’t edit their photos, it just means someone else is doing it for them. If they only shoot JPEG, it means the camera manufacturer is doing the editing. If they shoot RAW and apply a preset, it means the person who created that preset edited for them. Which is perfectly fine, if that’s what they want.
Personally, I love editing and I’m glad we have so many options and software tools available today. I like having control over every aspect of the image and I use editing to complete my vision. We are lucky to have so many possibilities to do this now.
I did my film photography whole-hog, including darkroom work. Not simple, or easy to control. Film’s ‘personality’ comes primarily from it’s non-linear response, a lot of work went into accomodating that, witness the Zone System.
Digital gives us a linear, scene-referenced baseline upon which to inflict all manner of ‘look’. Yay.
That said, I’m going to dig out some of my old film cameras one day, and shoot a few frames (or sheets, with the view camera), just to relish the olden days…
This is true. When I teach photography I tell my students that if they love photography but hate computers then JPG is for them. JPG is like shooting color slide film. You need to get the exposure, color and everything right in the camera. That is a form of photography similar to what film was.
Most film photographers hand over their films to a lab to process and accept what is given them. I spent my whole career owning my own processing labs so I was still the master in control of the finished look. Now people don’t need a lab but just a computer and free software like DT or RT.
The last year or so I’ve had a couple of very picky clients that have more or less ruined editing for me. It’s to the point that, particularly on portrait stuff, I just use one of my Fujis and a few decent film sims I baked up and turn over the SOOC JPGs. It has made me a more contentious shooter. Most people are just going to slap some filter on it anyway before posting them to TikTok or IG. Seems like I’m wasting a lot of effort for stuff I delete after a few years.
I love taking photos, especially getting out into nature. But I enjoy developing photos just as much. I really see RAW files as raw material. I look at them in darktable with as few modules enabled as possible and think about what I want to do with them. Just like a potter takes a lump of clay. Of course, I’m happy when a photo is so “good” that it needs very little editing. Still, for me, image editing is just as much a creative process as taking photos.
