Do you fake it ?

in Film , Friday, November 25, 2011

The background current of film pushing against the digital torrent seems to be continuing unabated. An notable new twist is the increasing interest in, or at least marketing push, of film emulation software, of the likes of Alien Skin Exposure or DxO Filmpack. Personally I’m not that interested in faking it - I don’t see much value in disassociating the result from the process, and anyway I’m not that impressed with the results. I can understand the value to illustrators and publishers, in particular for some of the more extreme effects like aged 1962 Agfa consumer prints, but in general if you want it to look like Ektachrome, why not use Ektachrome ? It’s not that hard!

Michael Reichmann recently reviewed DxO Filmpack, and didn’t lose the opportunity to give film a bloody good kicking.

I respect Michael’s experience, although I have some reservations about the direction he’s been heading in since - apparently - money became no object. His photography seems very inconsistent these days, which is a pity. Ten years ago it could be inspirational. Now, despite his protests to the contrary, all he really seems to do is to test cameras, just with a limitless travel budget. Anyway, my point is that there are other photographers who I respect who seem to have a rather different take - from famous ones like Michael Kenna, to emerging stars like Bruce Percy, “alternative” web gurus like Kirk Tuck, Robert Boyer, and seemingly the entire readership of Great British Landscapes.

I could point to Bruce in particular as a clear example that Michael is just plain wrong. Using film - Velvia and Portra I believe - seems to have helped him to develop a very distinctive and personal style. Do his photos suffer from any of film’s perceived weaknesses ? I don’t think so. In fact, when you see so many landscape photographers piling on contrast, blocking out shadows and pushing contrast to (usually, unwittingly) squash down to get that Velva effect, it is a touch ironic. Especially when the same ones spend hours hurling invective at each other in flame wars on who’s (digital) camera has the greatest dynamic range. Then again I don’t much care for Velvia - classic Velvia that is - myself.

Reichmann again “My second impression is to once again confirm how truly poor film based imaging is / was compared to todays’ digital capture. Using a variety of images I went through every available colour transparency and negative emulsion looking for one that appealed to me more than the original processed with my usual workflow. Not a single one even came close.”. Well I beg to differ. Unless pixel peeping comes into, I can easily recall a handful of classic Michael Reichmann film images. I can’t say that so much of his digital work has stick in my memory. Maybe it’s because of the diluting effect of the avalanche of images.

From my own perspective, the image below is one I took a very long time ago, on Kodachrome 64, before I was really into photography. I’ve been trying to recapture that quality of light ever since. The closest I’ve got on digital, I think, is with the Olympus E-1’s Kodak sensor.

But digital seems to be unable to record my impression of subtle gradations such as those in this sky. It has a tendency to turn pinks into yellows or indigos, or just sees blue. Digital doesn’t get it. Probably it has something to do with white balance software. Possibly - probably even - it is representing the “truth”.  I’d never argue that film is better than digital. Then again I’d never argue the opposite. But dismissing out of hand just makes so sense, in the context of anything either than throw-away photography.

Silverfast 8 - initial impressions

in Product reviews , Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Lasersoft Imaging released Silverfast 8 towards the end of August. Unfortunately, they don’t yet support my main scanner, although they do support my CanoScan 9000F, but they have just released a public Beta of Silverfast 8 HDR. Since most of my time with Silverfast 6.6 is spent using HDR, this was welcome news.

Since it has come during a bit of a lull in both photography and especially scanning, I haven’t really had much reason to try it, but yesterday evening I thought I’d give it a go. Note, this article is written under the influence of a combined throat infection and heavy cold.

The big thing about Silverfast 8 is the user interface redesign, but that’s not the only point. However, it really dominates the update, so here it is.

The Silverfast 8 HDR Studio user interface

and here it was:

The Silverfast 6 HDR Studio user interface

Silverfast 8 introduces a modern, compact, unified user interface which, although remaining a little idiosyncratic, is a huge improvement.

I haven’t run anything approaching a full session, so I’ll just list a few early impressions. These are taken from running on MacOS X 10.6.8.

Positives:

- hugely improved UI. Massive step forward
- installs and runs following normal guidelines, including access to preference panels, etc. Uses standard OS toolbar.
- detachable tool panel, so you can “roll your own” UI to some extent
- ability to turn various edits on and off in preview (like Aperture or Lightroom)
- ability to run Silverfast 8 and Silverfast 8 HDR concurrently - I think. I’m not 100% sure as my trial of Silverfast 8 for CanoScan 9000F has expired, but I can open both launch screens at the same time. I can also run SF 8 HDR and SF 6 HDR (or AI Studio) at the same time.

Negatives (remembering that this is a Beta):

- allows quit without warning to save edited images
- the colour cast slider seems to have vanished. Now the level is set in Preferences only

Neutral:

- the image manager, Silverfast VLT, which works as a front end to Silverfast HDR 6.6, is gone.  This is not necessarily a bad thing as it is somewhat buggy and has some very poor design choices. However as a way of building up Job Manager lists is was pretty good. Maybe it will return.
- seems stable. No crashes so far.

Generally all the tools remain the same, including the superlative colour correction tools, but they’re easier to use and understand.

All in all it looks encouraging. Let’s just hope Lasersoft come up with a pricelist which takes into account that it’s not 2001 anymore, otherwise selling a product like this into a dwindling market is going to be pretty challenging.

HDR with film

in Film , Sunday, September 25, 2011

I took a set of XPan frames of a scene in Iceland back in 2009, with the express purpose of seeing if I could make an HDR composite from them, and get the gritty, high contrast, low saturation “grim up north” look so beloved of brands such as 66 North.

There are 3 exposures, one “normal”, one 1 stop below, one 1 stop above. I decided to try running them through Nik HDR Efex (NHE from now on).  On the first try I fell at the first hurdle. Although NHE has an auto-align feature, it cannot cope with input images with different sizes. Since I had tidied the scans up a bit, they were all slightly different.

The 0EV (middle) exposure

So I rescanned all three using exactly the same size, and tried again. Unfortunately, it is absolutely impossible to get three completely independent scans exactly aligned, so alignment was still required. At least now they were the same size. So, back into NHE. The input processing takes something like 15 minutes or more with these large images, but again the results were hopeless. The alignment was completely off.

So I decided to try pre-aligning with Photoshop’s Auto Align. This worked fine, very well in fact. So having nearly perfectly aligned images, I fed them back into NHE. And 15 minutes later, NHE mangled them way out of alignment. Back to the drawing board. I turned off “alignment” in NHE, and gave it another go. This time it worked, or well enough.  In terms of alignment there are still some artifacts at 100% zoom but for smaller viewing sizes it works.

So then it was off to fiddling with the wide range of settings in NHE, and eventually I got something close to what I wanted.

The HDR look: Somewhere grim in the Westfjords

However, with film as the input, NHE makes grain explode. I had to do a lot of cleaning up, especially in the sky, and the results are most certainly gritty.

It would probably have been a lot easier to do it with digital, but there is a rather unique look coming out of film here, and have got a process that sort of works, I might try refining it.

Dimage Scan MultiPro Micro-banding

in Scanning , Saturday, July 23, 2011

After 10 years or so of pretty constant use, I’m beginning to get the hang of my Minolta MultiPro film scanner. Having very belatedly discovered Scanhancer inventor Erik de Goederen’s tip for making a single-sided glass film holder, I’m also getting something close to dust-free scans. So naturally, now was the time for the Minolta to blow a gasket.

Well, fortunately it seems to be a fairly minor gasket, and in fact I may be lucky to have only been hit by it now, because it has a name in the MultiPro community: micro-banding. Somebody even built a Photoshop plug-in (Windows only) to fix it, way back. Actually I think it is more of a stuck pixel, or whatever passes for that, as the effect is of a single-pixel wide red line right across the scan. It is strange that it’s always red though.

the red line, aka “micro banding”

The fix is actually pretty simple, so you don’t need a plug-in. Before you do any other editing - and especially rotating - simply zoom in at 100% and select a thin rectangle, say 5 pixels high, all the way across the image, with the red line centered. Then select the red channel only. Then apply the Dust & Scratch filter with settings Radius 2, Threshold 2 or thereabouts.

red channel only

Dust & Scratch filter settings

It doesn’t completely go away, but you’re never going to see it at anything less than serious pixel-peeping level, and certainly not on a print.

I don’t know why it hit my scanner now. Could be old age. Could be dust, although I’ve opened it up for the first time ever, and it is remarkably clean inside. Could be because I’ve been fiddling around with fluid mounts. I don’t know, I just hope it doesn’t spread, because there’s essentially nothing available to replace it.

 

Silverfast announces version ... 8!

in Silverfast , Wednesday, July 20, 2011

With Mac OS X Lion and new MacBook Airs released today after weeks of speculation, today was a good day to bury bad news in the tech world.  So Lasersoft, God bless ‘em, chose today to announce, at long, long last Silverfast 8, the next major iteration of the venerable Silverfast: 

SilverFast, the most popular scanner software in the world, is released as brand-new version SilverFast 8. After many successful years, SilverFast will be available completely renewed towards the end of August for the most important scanners of all major manufacturers.

I guess Silverfast 7 was dropped in the Baltic Sea or something, since we’re jumping straight from 6.x to 8, or maybe it’s just in recognition that nobody could possibly make us wait this long for a new version.

So, we’re promised such joys as a new user interface (let’s hope they didn’t hire PhaseOne’s designer), multitasking (gasp) and much goodness. The bit that leaves me a bit worried is “for the most important scanners of all major manufacturers”.  The place of the Minolta Dimage MultiScan Pro in that august assembly must be less than guaranteed.

Well, I for one am looking forward to this more than OS X Lion.

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