8 ms·

Why dark and light is complicated in photographs

159 points by d4a 5y ago

whoisburbansky 5y ago
The tone of the article stands out to me; not much in the way of exaggeration or opinions on “the best” way to do a certain thing, but an almost dispassionate tour of some of the different ways we’ve thought about light and dark artistically, over time. Thoroughly enjoyed the read!
- twoWhlsGud 5y ago
  Agree on the nice historical summary. The end of the final paragraph struck me in particular: “My photos are a collaboration between me and the algorithm designers and camera manufacturers, and they reflect a combination of aesthetic decisions made by each of us.” The one downside of taking pictures with such a strongly opinionated technology is that your pictures are going to look like everyone else’s (or increasingly just weird). Ansel Adams developed his darkroom technique over decades - and as the author mentions, applying them took hours of meticulous labor. So his output really did look different from most other peoples’. You can still differentiate your photographs on the basis on their subject matter, of course. But if everyone is shooting out of the same algorithmic pipeline, making your pictures look better technically is going to be increasingly hard. (And given current limitations, someone knowledgeable in the field today can still usually tell the difference between photographs taken with good lenses carefully deployed and cell phone output. But it’s unclear how long that will be true.)
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    Lenses can be added to cell phones through 3rd party attachments. And aren't these ML options able to be turned off? It should make the phone camera much more like a standard camera.
  - whoisburbansky 5y ago
    Doesn’t the same criticism apply to the aesthetic choices baked into film? It seems to me that the amount of technical expertise it takes to post process a phone-captured RAW file in Lightroom compares favorably to the amount of expertise it would take to have a physical dark room and tools to dodge and burn. If anything, it seems to me that it’s gotten easier to master the tools necessary to make your pictures look technically better.
    - quartesixte 5y ago
      Yes and for during the height of the film era what film stock you chose, along with your choice of push/pull on the stated ISO levels, was part of any project’s aesthetic choices. It is immensely easier to do in light room what previously took hours in a dark room and years to master. We can now spend more time thinking about specific aesthetic choices and less time making test strips of 1 stop intervals on a small strip of the sky to correctly dial in exposure. That’s a process that can take a very long time, involve lots of chemicals, and expose you to some carcinogens. I love film photography but it is laborious.
ElephantsMyAnus 5y ago
It seems to me there must be some kind of error in color calibration of most cameras. They make shadows much darker than they are, and bright areas much brighter than they are. It's not from a lack of dynamic range.
- marban 5y ago
  The error is the photographer. People just got used to ultra-correction of modern-day phone cams.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  How is it not from a lack of dynamic range? Colour transparency film (e.g. Fuji Velvia -- RVP50) shows the same thing as clearly. You basically can't map real world light into the dynamic range of a typical camera without causing some of this experience, can you? The question is how you determine how dark shadows should be -- your brain is doing a lot of work to hide from you the tricks it uses to make shadows appear less dark than they might be with a linear response. Or even how they would look with a non-linear response that is even across the "frame"; your brain is doing localised dodge/burn type work, constantly. Camera manufacturers have "tastemakers" for this stuff on digital, just as film manufacturers used to have them for film.
  - ElephantsMyAnus 5y ago
    It is different because it is obvious that shadows are darker than in reality while highlights are much brighter than in reality. Any brain filtering would have to affect the photos as well, even if it was true. No common image format uses linear response. It would explain this problem if cameras treat them as linear. Maybe they should just make the cameras take physically correct colors, instead of relying on people, as the typical person will always choose extreme contrast that will make the camera unusable. (and can be easily increased in editing)
    - LocalH 5y ago
      > Any brain filtering would have to affect the photos as well, even if it was true. Not when the dynamic range of reality is much greater than that of photographs, and your visual system is one of the best visual processors in existence. It’s like reducing a 24-bit image to 16-bit - the image is “good enough” to identify the subject, but it is quite lossy. Photography itself is a lossy process.
antiterra 5y ago
Talking about film is particularly complicated, as film does not have an entirely linear response to light. This is called reciprocity failure and means that you often need to expose way longer than 2x the time to have the effect of 2x the light. For digital, the data directly from camera sensors almost always needs some correction, de-mosaicing or massaging to generate an image viewable on a screen. This requires the camera to make what ends up being an aesthetic decision on what the photo looks like. Detail isn’t just how bright or how dark, but also the available gradients in between. This means there are cases where the dynamic range is automatically expanded (instead of clipped) and contrast unnaturally increased in order to have a photo that isn’t just mud. Ultimately, this means that technical considerations map directly to artistic ones, and there is no objectively correct image from sensor data. The idea that a ‘no filter’ picture conveys some kind of divine truth is a myth.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Good point about the meaninglessness of a “no filter” concept. The article is very interesting in regard to lightness mapping, and there a another, related subject of hue mapping. This is a good part of the reason why pictures from different camera brands look different. Your description of reciprocity failure is not quite right. The idea is that if you double the time the shutter is open and also decrease the aperture by one stop, you should not change the amount of light hitting the film (you will change other things, of course). The overall brightness should be the same when you make these “reciprocal” adjustments. This does in fact hold pretty well within a certain range of shutter speeds. Reciprocity failure occurs at longer or smaller speeds, where the reciprocal relationship doesn’t quite work.
  - antiterra 5y ago
    Night photography, pinhole photography and a number of other common applications absolutely do encounter perceivable reciprocity failure, so there’s nothing wrong with my description.
    - leephillips 5y ago
marban 5y ago
And one day you'll look back at all your Jpegs and wonder why you messed up all your memories with tasteless HDR effects.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  HDR capture (preserving more than 8 bits of light level, preserving meaningful detail in the shadows and not clipping highlights) preserves more of a scene than non-HDR JPEGs. Tone-mapping is the "tasteless HDR effect" which I have mixed feelings about (and can absolutely be done poorly, resulting in light halos around darker objects).
antattack 5y ago
I'm surprised article claims that photography and film are no longer 'racist'. Most of my photos are underexposing dark complexions. It might be to do with limited dynamic range though, but still exists.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  Is it dark complexions or everything dark. It might be that it is only when it is a a face you notice the lack of details.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    “Racist” is being used metaphorically. The choice of film chemistry to use will affect what sort of faces are captured well, and what sort of faces are captured poorly.
    - Ma8ee 5y ago
      Not only the chemistry or the sensor, but also the exposure. If you want to see details in dark areas you need more light.
- rkuska 5y ago
  Roy DeCarava has one of the most beautifully developed prints of black people. Here is an interesting article on that subject https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/a-true-picture-of-black-skin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/a-true-picture-o...
markdown 5y ago
Quite a topical article, considering the controversy around how they made a potentially great Batman movie unwatchable by turning large parts of it into a radio drama where you can't see anything and have to figure out what's happening with nothing but your ears.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Oh this is the most perfect description of the second worst trend in cinema. The worst trend being loud music and mumbled dialogue that make it impossible to experience even as a radio drama.
  - firecall 5y ago
    So often I cannot understand what people are saying! As an examples, I was watching the show '1883' and half the time I cannot understand the dialog! Now I have the most expensive best new Sony 65" you can buy, so I'd expect the sound to be at least half decent. So it's not my out-of-the-box speakers. I feel like I'm constantly having to turn the TV up! Some Googling had people on forums suggesting it's 'muddy mixing' whatever that is, and that shows are now mixed for Surround Sound. However when I watch a 'normal' TV show like South Park or an average British SitCom, I can understand every word. The situations is bonkers and its turning me off even bothering to try and watch some shows!
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      Everyone's Bane.

159 points by d4a 5y ago

The tone of the article stands out to me; not much in the way of exaggeration or opinions on “the best” way to do a certain thing, but an almost dispassionate tour of some of the different ways we’ve thought about light and dark artistically, over time. Thoroughly enjoyed the read!

twoWhlsGud 5y ago
Agree on the nice historical summary. The end of the final paragraph struck me in particular: “My photos are a collaboration between me and the algorithm designers and camera manufacturers, and they reflect a combination of aesthetic decisions made by each of us.” The one downside of taking pictures with such a strongly opinionated technology is that your pictures are going to look like everyone else’s (or increasingly just weird). Ansel Adams developed his darkroom technique over decades - and as the author mentions, applying them took hours of meticulous labor. So his output really did look different from most other peoples’. You can still differentiate your photographs on the basis on their subject matter, of course. But if everyone is shooting out of the same algorithmic pipeline, making your pictures look better technically is going to be increasingly hard. (And given current limitations, someone knowledgeable in the field today can still usually tell the difference between photographs taken with good lenses carefully deployed and cell phone output. But it’s unclear how long that will be true.)
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Lenses can be added to cell phones through 3rd party attachments. And aren't these ML options able to be turned off? It should make the phone camera much more like a standard camera.
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  Doesn’t the same criticism apply to the aesthetic choices baked into film? It seems to me that the amount of technical expertise it takes to post process a phone-captured RAW file in Lightroom compares favorably to the amount of expertise it would take to have a physical dark room and tools to dodge and burn. If anything, it seems to me that it’s gotten easier to master the tools necessary to make your pictures look technically better.
  - quartesixte 5y ago
    Yes and for during the height of the film era what film stock you chose, along with your choice of push/pull on the stated ISO levels, was part of any project’s aesthetic choices. It is immensely easier to do in light room what previously took hours in a dark room and years to master. We can now spend more time thinking about specific aesthetic choices and less time making test strips of 1 stop intervals on a small strip of the sky to correctly dial in exposure. That’s a process that can take a very long time, involve lots of chemicals, and expose you to some carcinogens. I love film photography but it is laborious.

ElephantsMyAnus 5y ago

It seems to me there must be some kind of error in color calibration of most cameras. They make shadows much darker than they are, and bright areas much brighter than they are. It's not from a lack of dynamic range.

marban 5y ago
The error is the photographer. People just got used to ultra-correction of modern-day phone cams.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
How is it not from a lack of dynamic range? Colour transparency film (e.g. Fuji Velvia -- RVP50) shows the same thing as clearly. You basically can't map real world light into the dynamic range of a typical camera without causing some of this experience, can you? The question is how you determine how dark shadows should be -- your brain is doing a lot of work to hide from you the tricks it uses to make shadows appear less dark than they might be with a linear response. Or even how they would look with a non-linear response that is even across the "frame"; your brain is doing localised dodge/burn type work, constantly. Camera manufacturers have "tastemakers" for this stuff on digital, just as film manufacturers used to have them for film.
- ElephantsMyAnus 5y ago
  It is different because it is obvious that shadows are darker than in reality while highlights are much brighter than in reality. Any brain filtering would have to affect the photos as well, even if it was true. No common image format uses linear response. It would explain this problem if cameras treat them as linear. Maybe they should just make the cameras take physically correct colors, instead of relying on people, as the typical person will always choose extreme contrast that will make the camera unusable. (and can be easily increased in editing)
  - LocalH 5y ago
    > Any brain filtering would have to affect the photos as well, even if it was true. Not when the dynamic range of reality is much greater than that of photographs, and your visual system is one of the best visual processors in existence. It’s like reducing a 24-bit image to 16-bit - the image is “good enough” to identify the subject, but it is quite lossy. Photography itself is a lossy process.

antiterra 5y ago

Talking about film is particularly complicated, as film does not have an entirely linear response to light. This is called reciprocity failure and means that you often need to expose way longer than 2x the time to have the effect of 2x the light. For digital, the data directly from camera sensors almost always needs some correction, de-mosaicing or massaging to generate an image viewable on a screen. This requires the camera to make what ends up being an aesthetic decision on what the photo looks like. Detail isn’t just how bright or how dark, but also the available gradients in between. This means there are cases where the dynamic range is automatically expanded (instead of clipped) and contrast unnaturally increased in order to have a photo that isn’t just mud. Ultimately, this means that technical considerations map directly to artistic ones, and there is no objectively correct image from sensor data. The idea that a ‘no filter’ picture conveys some kind of divine truth is a myth.

leephillips 5y ago
Good point about the meaninglessness of a “no filter” concept. The article is very interesting in regard to lightness mapping, and there a another, related subject of hue mapping. This is a good part of the reason why pictures from different camera brands look different. Your description of reciprocity failure is not quite right. The idea is that if you double the time the shutter is open and also decrease the aperture by one stop, you should not change the amount of light hitting the film (you will change other things, of course). The overall brightness should be the same when you make these “reciprocal” adjustments. This does in fact hold pretty well within a certain range of shutter speeds. Reciprocity failure occurs at longer or smaller speeds, where the reciprocal relationship doesn’t quite work.
- antiterra 5y ago
  Night photography, pinhole photography and a number of other common applications absolutely do encounter perceivable reciprocity failure, so there’s nothing wrong with my description.
  - leephillips 5y ago

marban 5y ago

And one day you'll look back at all your Jpegs and wonder why you messed up all your memories with tasteless HDR effects.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
HDR capture (preserving more than 8 bits of light level, preserving meaningful detail in the shadows and not clipping highlights) preserves more of a scene than non-HDR JPEGs. Tone-mapping is the "tasteless HDR effect" which I have mixed feelings about (and can absolutely be done poorly, resulting in light halos around darker objects).

antattack 5y ago

I'm surprised article claims that photography and film are no longer 'racist'. Most of my photos are underexposing dark complexions. It might be to do with limited dynamic range though, but still exists.

Ma8ee 5y ago
Is it dark complexions or everything dark. It might be that it is only when it is a a face you notice the lack of details.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  “Racist” is being used metaphorically. The choice of film chemistry to use will affect what sort of faces are captured well, and what sort of faces are captured poorly.
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    Not only the chemistry or the sensor, but also the exposure. If you want to see details in dark areas you need more light.
rkuska 5y ago
Roy DeCarava has one of the most beautifully developed prints of black people. Here is an interesting article on that subject https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/a-true-picture-of-black-skin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/a-true-picture-o...

markdown 5y ago

Quite a topical article, considering the controversy around how they made a potentially great Batman movie unwatchable by turning large parts of it into a radio drama where you can't see anything and have to figure out what's happening with nothing but your ears.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Oh this is the most perfect description of the second worst trend in cinema. The worst trend being loud music and mumbled dialogue that make it impossible to experience even as a radio drama.
- firecall 5y ago
  So often I cannot understand what people are saying! As an examples, I was watching the show '1883' and half the time I cannot understand the dialog! Now I have the most expensive best new Sony 65" you can buy, so I'd expect the sound to be at least half decent. So it's not my out-of-the-box speakers. I feel like I'm constantly having to turn the TV up! Some Googling had people on forums suggesting it's 'muddy mixing' whatever that is, and that shows are now mixed for Surround Sound. However when I watch a 'normal' TV show like South Park or an average British SitCom, I can understand every word. The situations is bonkers and its turning me off even bothering to try and watch some shows!
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    Everyone's Bane.