HDR Film / integrated exposure mask

Athiril said:

Speaking of strange HDR, I've had halo'ing with Rollei ATP.

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What's your dev process? Are you agitating enough?

mr rusty said:

Interesting idea. I have no way enough knowledge to really comment on this, but what I think you are getting at is a film that controls the light in such a way that the image it produces when developed without special techniques looks like those strange HDR images that litter the net that look unnatural but in the same way when done well somewhat intriguing where the dark foreground and bright background are all perfectly exposed.

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Well, of course, the idea is not to make an unnatural digital look, but rathert to mimic what our eyes actually see.

Because of the pupil reflex, we see in HDR: our eyes automatically adjust for shadows when we look at them, and also for highlights when we look at those, and so the brain puts it all together into an HDR image... in a sense. No nasty halos or weirdness!

Because it would be at the plane of focus on the film, what I am describing would be an extremely fine-detail mask and unlikely to appear unnatural. Just think of it as a very finely graduated neutral density filter that configures itself right where you need it.

It's chemical exhaustion in your eyes behind the lens, they will exhaust to anything intense where luminosity or chroma (colour) and the resposne to that will drop, so it's masking + colour balancing somewhat. Open photoshop, and make one white layer, then a bright cyan layer above it, then full screen photoshop, stare at the cyan layer for 1 minute, turn it off, the white layer will not look white.

A 'fine detail mask' will just serve to cancel out (partially) the image. And will actually do the opposite of the results you wan't. It will not change the response of the film of a bright to dark area, that'll remain the same, but within the bright area, it's own contrast of fine details will be masked down,

Kodak made a B&W film with 2 emulsions in it. One was very fast and the other one was very slow. This method was used to allow photographing nuclear explosions and allowed extreme range so that details could be seen through the bright flash. The demos that I saw were photographs of a light bulb in which you could see the filament and the bulb and the glass through the bright glow of the bulb.

The original Kodacolor negative film had a B&W mask in it to extend the dynamic range and also to effect color correction. This was changed to the color mask which corrects color, and if you plot the curve it shows some degree of doing what is described here.

The problem with all of these is the fact that they did not do as good a job as using 3 or more emulsions in one coating and extending the range that way. So, today's films use the blended emulsion route to attain a range of up to 5 or more stops. The color mask probably helps a bit though.

Sorry I missed this. I was at a workshop for 3 days also tied up with a lot of other things.

PE