I’m A Print Snob
I don’t give a hoot about how photographs appear on-line. Especially true of black & white photographs. I enjoy prints on paper, happen to just adore smaller intimate prints with a lot of whitespace on a fantastic paper. This is not new, I’ve enjoyed experiencing photographic prints on paper at about 6" x 9" as long as I can remember. This is how I proofed all of my 35mm and 120 roll film for personal projects long before digital rolled around. I know I am of the dwindling minority of dead-tree picture producers in the world. I can’t see that changing no matter what medium or form factor my camera happens to be. Possibly that could change when we all have 16-bit/channel retina LCD’s, who knows. It’s not just some techno stuff that matters. Beyond just the tonality or resolution there’s something about the artifact itself that I enjoy.
At around the half-way mark in any personal project is when I start to consider treatments for what will ultimately be the final output. That’s where I am at with The Marilyn Project. I’ve started to produce copious amounts of small proof-prints. Laying them around or tacking them up all over my workspace. I like to live with various treatments for a while before settling on “the one”. I twittered-ed-ed (tweeted?) this fact along with a few pictures of pictures the other day and much to my surprise four people asked me if there was any way they could get a print. I think most of them never even heard of the project nor saw any of the raw material I’ve been publishing for the last two months. The answer was “of course you can”. I would much rather share a few small prints with people than have thousands of drive-by’s on the web.
I thought I would share a bit of process with thoughts behind it since a few asked me in-depth questions regarding medium, materials, cameras, film, etc. First up let’s talk about film, or not. I regularly use 35mm and 120 film on personal work. Sometimes just because I want to, sometimes to slow me down and get me back to stuff that matters. On other occasions I freely mix digital and film, I’ve become quite adept over the last 15 years at matching up the results on the back end within reason.
The Marilyn Project to this point has been shot entirely on my Fuji XT-1; No film. I don’t anticipate that changing mid-project. There’ no compelling reason to do so — The XT-1 is about the same size as an OM-1, maybe a hair bigger but smaller than a Nikon FM by a tad. My collaborators react to it in a similar way to those two small cameras so it’s fine. Funny considering I made a decision within the first five minutes of this endeavor turning into a project that I wanted a 35mm film feel. That brings us to process…
Digital, film, or a combination of both there’s not a lot of variation in how and when I attend to all of the “after the shooting” stuff that needs to be attended to. I’m in no rush to process the results. I don’t fiddle around with minute adjustments frame by frame. I make contact sheets. Well I make contact sheets with one treatment when I shoot film. By and large I do the same with digital. I apply a one size fits all treatment upon import and leave it that way until I get to the proofing stage. I don’t bother with frame by frame expousre or contrast tweaking let alone local ajdustments. That’s far too much of a distraction when I need to be focused on actually getting pictures in the can.
I rarely bother with any corrections at all, some batches are a little to dark. Some may be a little to light. Contrast varies a little. I may change to a slightly different on-import preset variation. Just like I would if I were souping the film. Similar broad brush stroke flavor with minor variations over the course of the entire project. I don’t “fix” these by design as I don’t know what I want the whole thing to look like in the end. Many times I will go back to some sort of “mistake” and use that as the basis for a final treatment in the end. I don’t want to erase these variations at this stage. I don’t obsess about the details or experimenting with endless tweaks or looks, I just let that happen. That all changes when I start to print, especially when I am mixing film and digital. The killer for me for the longest while was getting a similar look in terms of film grain. On The Marilyn Project that’s going to be the case even though it’s pure digital because I know I’ll be printing very large — at least from a 35mm film point of view where grain aesthetics become front and center.
I’m Also A Grain Snob
I probably own every film simulator known to man-kind. Most of those acquisitions were due wholly to my never ending search to match up the way film grain looks in larger print sizes when I had projects spanning years shot on Kodak TRI-X or TMAX 3200P along with digital. I’ll cut to the chase and give you a rough idea of my current assesment on how well a few of the tools in my stable do.
- Lightroom CC — blows, possibly better than it used to be but looks not at all like real film at large print sizes.
- Exposure 7 — the winner right now in both appearance and how easy it is to get various digital to match up with real film results side by side.
- Nik Silver EFEX Pro 2 — wow, that’s a mouthful now. Is there a non-pro version? Why not just drop the pro thing? For years this was my go-to film grain emulator. It still has it’s positives and trumps Exposrure 7 in many ways including UI. Come on Alien Skin what kind of photo tool doesn’t have local adjustments or for god’s sake a histogram??? Still a good tool for grain simulation but not quite as good as Exposure 7 and definitely harder to make match camera to camera…
- Capture One — A newbie in terms of grain simulation but man it’s good for a RAW processor. I may switch to Capture One and be done but… Am I the only one that thinks the UI is clunky? Hell, I hate the LR UI but I cannot see how Capture One is less clunky. Why oh why did Apple Kill Aperture again? Man, Aperture with Capture One’s RAW processor inside and LR/ACR local adjustments would be fantastic.
Here’s a taste of what a few of these look like with various defaults:
Oh, gee they all look the same on the web — even that big. Well big if you are looking at them on a giant screen, they’re itty-bitty on a phone or whatever. I don’t give a shit about the variations in contrast, density, or any of that. I can fiddle with that all day in any of the tools. Which one is more “accurate” version of TRI-X? None of the, all of them, whatever considering how I might develop and print TRI-X could be light years different than the way you do. TRI-X can look like anything just like almost any BW film can except for any massive change in overall characteristic curve (but your paper can be different and alter that somewhat in the print).
Interestingly I didn’t change any of the defaults to try to match-up the results. I use the baseline LR RAW conversation as the input to all of them. I did however pick a variation on TRI-X that matched each other as closely as possible from the box-stock variations supplied with each. Funny how Silver EFEX “normal” TX looks a lot like VSCO puhed 2 stops which looks a lot like Exposure 7's version of TX pushed 1 stop. Sort of like way back when people chose film based on anecdotal variations in development the first time they tried it. Forgive the long diatribe regarding analog crap, I merely wanted to drive home the point that simulating any of that or making one look like the other is not at all difficult. Choose your way to get there, there are seven-hundred tools to mess with contrast and density in all of the choices you can make.
Grain is a different story at large magnifications — like when you print 35mm film at 24" x 36" or even larger. The way it looks at close viewing distances has a huge impact on aesthetics and overall look. Here’s a more microscopic view:
There’ they all look like hell at somewhere around 40x magnification. Well they do if you are looking at everything but grain. Take a look, pick your poison. You may like a particular grain more than another but it’s hard to say there’s not an odd-man-out here. Take a close look at LR grain emulation vs the other two. Lightroom looks nothing like the other two in terms of overall image construction. It’s to uniform, it tends not to vary to much in the way it looks based on detail or tonality/density of the image. It may if you are not used to looking at film grain but take it from me the other two look a lot like the way real film works. What’s more is both are far more controlable (especially Exposure 7) than LR in terms of the way it manifests itself rather than just how big and how much of it there is.
On an ending note, all of these are a bit too small for a real 2 stop push of TX. More like TX developed to a lower CI but then again the two winners here are not emulating TX pushed two stops.
