From: "Victor Bogado da Silva Lins: Jeff wrote: > > This is odd, many people have complained that film has been heading towards > > an overly saturated look for the last fifteen years or so since Velvia was > > introduced. Other than the need for low contrast, low saturation portrait > > films, it's been all about the "spice." It's not new with digital. > > > > However, I'd argue that "accuracy" is irrelevant outside of scientific work > > - for years, photography was black and white, hardly representative of the > > real world, and much of photography has been seen as an "impression" of > > things rather than the things themselves. but even in the days of black and white there was a desire within those limitations to achieve 'correct' tonal ranges by applying filters. Colour saturation with the earliest colour neg films I saw rendered subtle tones well but relatively, overly saturated some of the primaries. Later films seemed to tame the primaries relative to the subtle colours but as you say with Fuji (though I think the Agfa Ultra is also a fine contender) the current trend seems to be high colour saturation. Having said all that, the real luminosity of the world just doesn't go down on paper really well! Slide film is the worst, the contrast is high to represent the colour ranges it captures well and those either side of the exposure range are dropped - compare this to the Polaroid 'instant' slide film, the stuff that went through the hand cranked machine.. it has a massive tonal range compared to other slide films but the contrast was so low the results looked as flat as a tack. speaking realism, this flat result far better represented the scene being photographed than any high contrast film but given projector light outputs, it could never look enything other than flat. So we have one group of films rendering tonal ranges well within a limited range and another rendering a massive range with a low contrast.. which one is more 'realistic'? As to neg film getting excessively vibrant colours - I'd say the film/paper is striving to achieve what high gamma slide films do and render the tonal range within a given luminance range well. > Sure the colors are not like they were in the moment I took the picture, > but what exactly is precision? Different lights affect the colors in the > picture, different light balances also do the trick. In the traditional > pictures, each film has a different color curve, if you work with > negative you end up doing a calibration in the moment you have to print > the pictures. to eliminate colour casts yes, but printing negs we really can't alter the colour ranges individually with wet processing so photographers who cared to strived at the shooting stage with colour meters and CC filters to correct as best they could before making the exposure.. it was always a compromise though.. As Jeff said, outside of scientific work (and I'd ad advertising) colour accuracy was never a critical part of photography. > So my guess is since the eye adapts it self to diverse light conditions, > so that what is white does seem white no matter where you are. Pictures > don't have this advantage, if your light is to much distorted (like > lights in a nocturne setting, illuminated by outdoors for instance), the > colors you would get on the film would be one and the colors you > experienced were others. and this is where our memory kicks in to make the corrections needed to accept the 2D limited tonal range image as a representation of a real event :-) the Memory activity is something not to be dismnissed.. > Well, all this to say that I guess that perfection is what the > photographer wants and not what is more precise. medical, geological, forensic, insurance, record, scientific all need close accuracy, others are free to render as they wish karl
