But what about that “no body hair” criteria? I must be part Neanderthal, or part gorilla.
I'll continue to shoot film too, because I love it. But once you've refined an approach to generative fill and other AI techniques (with digital/film/hybrid) it's easy to see the usefulness and utterly seamless improvements that can be made to images, no matter the capture medium. These are not "hey look at the shiny new buttons I can push" changes, but rather bedrock changes that sober photographers can use productively. These are amazing times for digital, film, and print media.I believe the next cycle has begun with products like Topaz AI. They are using machine learning farms to augment the editing process to give the post production process the ability to make the print what is should have been - in focus, color corrected, and so forth. This combined with the mindless snapshottery of iPhones and other personal devices (Topaz isn't very expensive) will make digital photography increasingly the domain of AIs. Whether this is yet another branch off the tree of light or the destruction of human driven digital photography remains to be seen.
I'll still shoot film, thanks...
Okay...prune away
If we are talking only about what's published online (because what else can we see in large numbers?), sharpening is rarely a problem. What we see are mostly downsampled images, where downsampling was done after sharpening, so the artifacts are simply not visible as much in relatively tiny online photos. What I see is the opposite: excessive sharpening of film scans! In fact, film is allergic to sharpening for reasons I won't go, but the artifacts of film scan sharpening are visible even in downsampled JPEGs published online, including this forum.
IMO, the overuse of sharpening is the chief reason why so many people think that Rodinal "increases grain", for example.
The developer Rodinal is what is known as an acutance developer (Acutance = Sharpness) This was achieved pre war when Rodinal was first formulated. It depends upon high dilution of the stock chemical minimum of 1-25 and the optimum is 1-50 How this works is in conjunction with minimum agitation. Usually 10 inversions of the tank immediately after filling and one inversion every 30 seconds hereafter. What this does is create an 'edge effect' between areas of different tone because in darker areas of then negative the developer is exhausted more quickly than that in lighter areas.
This has two effects. The individual grains are made more prominent which is why the grain appears larger and the individual areas of tone become more obvious if looked at on a large print (no smaller than 12x16) where it will be seen that between the darker and lighter tones there is a very fine clearer line of emulsion where the developer has exhausted more quickly on the darker parts of the negative.. In fact, because this happened between INDIVIDUAL grains is the very reason the grain appears more obvious. It is also why in the original Agfa instructions, Rodinal was not recommended for films above 200iso.
It (Rodinal) is very definitely is not what is termed a 'fine gain developer' where the apparent lack of grain is due to a mild solvent effect on the grains of the emulsion and side by side comparison of two identical negatives, One developed in Rodinal and the other in a fine grain developer will show Rodinal has an APPARENT extra sharpness over the other
Some may argue about this but it was a question posed to all students undergoing the British City and Guilds examination back in 1968. This was the answer I gave and was marked correct. Anyone who does not agree with this explanation, I suggest do not know what they are talking about.
Thanks, no worries.I can prune, but it is a lot better if you start the new thread, than if I start the new thread.
In order to move a post, I need a destination.
I have a achieved both high acutance/edge effects with dilute Pyrocat-HD agitating only 3 times over an hour of stand time - Extreme Minimal Agitation. So fine apparent grain an edge effects absolutely can coexist. See Post #31 here.
Have you ever heard of unsharp masking? Do you know it's origins?
@BMbikerider no need to burst into spontaneous lectures on developers. Everyone knows what Rodinal is but very few have the equipment and skill to scan it without digitally enlarging the grain. That is the point of my comment above: sharpening is a far bigger problem for film users than digital users.
And if you want me to be more direct, I can: DSLR users on average have better digital image editing habits and skills than film photographers who scan. Therefore, pointing at excessive sharpening as "digital problem" is unfair. It's the other way around. You want proof? Go and explore thousands of botched/over-sharpened scans in the media section.
And if you dismiss the over-sharpening problem (and I think we should), then the answer to the OP's question has been posted above: film resolution depends on subject contrast and exposure to a greater degree than digital. Discussing people's habits is besides the point. Case closed.
You can tell your enlarger to render the film section with that one grain "medium gray", but then you'd need a large area with many grains to create another area which is just 1% brighter. This is where film resolution completely falls apart. If you want to render two patches with an 1% translucency difference, you need at least 100 grains in each patch.
what is your definition of sharpness or what are you lookingfor?
No you don’t. Grain is not binary. You get a grain with 1% more or less filament structure.
A pure non technical opinion along the lines of 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' may be the reason.
Resolution or sharpness with film is due to the lens, tripod and how sharp film ran resolve the image taking into consideration contrast and colour.
Resolution or sharpness with digital sensor is down to the lens, tripod and the quality of the sensor and any in- camera sharpening done by the camera or by 3rd party software.
The main problem being a lot of images from a digi are over-sharpened. (My opinion)
In this case this either happens due to crystalline/physical/whatever differences between two grains, i.e. noise, or because a different size/number of develop centers was formed. So you may end up with 11 instead of 10 silver atoms forming a development center and indeed the larger one will likely develop to a slightly larger size. Latent silver specks with 100 atoms would only happen in very strong exposures. Therefore, if you want to correctly represent an 1% difference in luminosity, then you still need 10-20 silver grains to make this happen.
A single crystal can in theory hold the whole range. Whether it does it, is another matter.
Same way the capacitance of a cell in a sensor is affected by all kinds of noise and nonlinearities too, that is invisibly corrected and compensated for in-camera.
But again, silver halide crystals are stacked, offset to different degrees and of different sizes and shapes through the stack.
That linked article sounds about as authoritative as a political poll based on only two people sitting at the bar in a bowling alley. It's more article "filler" or fodder than anything else.
That linked article sounds about as authoritative as a political poll based on only two people sitting at the bar in a bowling alley. It's more article "filler" or fodder than anything else.
I found two images on petapixel, which seem to support my claim of "subject matter contrast determines film resolution". In this article they make the umpteenth comparison between analog and digital and (among others) compare image resolution from a Mamiya 7 against the output of a PhaseOne IQ180.
If you look at the comparison between IQ180 and Velvia 50, you see very comparable resolution in the "Nikon" label (high contrast), but more or less mush in the Velvia 50 sections with low contrast.
If you look at the comparison between IQ180 and CMS 20, the low contrast areas look very similar, but the CMS 20 "Nikon" label looks a lot crisper.
This is not some strange miracle, but instead follows directly from the requirement from multiple grains to render a low contrast transition.
I believe all you have done is to show that the results for CMS 20 are limited by the scanner.
The article quotes 50 mpx for 645, 54x 41.5 = 2324 square mm. For 35mm, 36x 24 = 864 square mm.
So for a 35mm scan of CMS 20 that would be 50 x 864/2324 =18.6 mpx, a bit more taking the value 80 mpx for 645 also quoted.
This is pretty small compared to the true resolution provided by CMS 20.
It astonishes me that anyone would would rely on a Petapixel article for anything other than funny anecdotes from wedding photographers and fishing with a GoPro.
The article quotes 50 to 80 mpx for a Mamiya 645 scan , for the Mamiya 7 it quotes about 150 mpx.
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