A QUESTION OF RESOULTION?

The art of pointillism is directly related to photography.
The finer the grain, the more grain/pixels you have, the clearer the picture.

WHAT THE...RESOLUTION?

An easy to understand article that will literally bring clarity to pictures.

For the past five or six years, the political debate between film and digital photography has lively waged on. With the mass majority of professional photographers deciding to switch their mode of capturing into the digital arena, only a handful of hardcore film photographers exists in the world today. Myself being one of those film guys.

One of the subjects that is often debated, is the resolution of a digital image versus that of one captured on film. Which is sharper? Which has more pixels? And which, of course, produces a better image? We'll lets take a look.

This picture of Rey and his wife was taken with a 15 megapixel digital camera. It was shot in RAW format, color corrected, then exported as an uncompressed TIFF. This image, in full resolution, can be printed out to a maximum print size of 16x20, which is the size of an unfolded newspaper.

This is a cropped and magnified picture of the same photo. We can now see the pixel structure of Rey's image. Now, to the amateur photographer, not seeing many pixels, or the smoothness of Rey's skin when magnified, he or she may think that this is actually a good thing, when in reality, this is actually, a BAD THING. Smoothness represents areas of missing information. CCD's, when capturing an image, will prioritize pixels that define an object, then smoothen out the less important pixels to save file space. The camera will then apply a sharpen filter to the edges of the picture to make it look sharper than it actually is.

To the naked eye, you will not see a difference of image quality unless you were to magnify the image through the computer, or to enlarge the image to a large canvas and then walk close to it.

This is a picture of Kristie and her husband, taken on 160 Portra Film. This image has not been color corrected or sharpened, only re-sized to fit the computer screen. The film negatives were drum scanned upon processing, then printed.

Now before I begin the education process in regards to film photography, it is important to note that film resolution, is much different than digital resolution. Resolution of film is defined by grain structure. Resolution of digital photography is defined through pixels. As you can see, film and digital photography, are apples and oranges.

This is a magnified picture of the same photo above. To the amateur photographer, the above image would be interpreted as "overly pixelated" that would produce unacceptable quality when enlarged. The truth though, is exactly opposite. What you are seeing here is a photograph riddled with pixel information. DPI, literally means Dot's Per Inch. You can see through film, we are getting more dots per inch than in a digital picture. There is no smoothing or loss of information in the image. As we can see upon closer examination, the film camera has not prioritized its grain, but more so, given every grain in the shot, its own color and priority. Also note, that we are looking at a scan of a negative and a loss of 1 generation. Much higher resolutions can be achieved if we were to rescan the negative at an even higher resolution.

This image, in it's current scanned form can be enlarged to a 8x10 or a 16x20, and the grain will unnoticeable. With a little help from photoshop, one could enlarge these scans to a 20x30. From the negative, the image can be enlarged to the size of a billboard when scanned at a higher resolution.

SO THE BIG QUESTION?

Which, is better? No matter how well a digital camera may capture an image, it will always be limited to 256 colors. A film camera on the other hand, can see more colors than the human eye. Remember, x-ray machines were film cameras at one time. Film can actually see though flesh!

Does that mean film is better than digital? Not exactly.

Sometimes, it's not better to see more colors than the human eye. For example, film shoots florescent lights green, while your human eye sees it as white. Film will see tungsten light bulbs as orange, while your eye sees it as mildly yellow. Digital cameras, when shooting indoors, and in low light situations, will identify spectrums of light that are more identifiable to a human than a film camera. Plus, digital cameras are capable of incredible low light shots because they do not adhere to the characteristics of film grain, where the size of grain intensifies under low light. Digital cameras in low light situations definitely have the advantage here.

Now on the other hand, in high contrast situations such as sunsets, beach shots, film is much better at rendering a balanced exposed shot. In natural daylight, film can replicate accurately those colors seen by the human eye. More so, the sharpness of shots taken in well lit areas, film will always win the battle versus digital hands down.

AND HERE'S MY FINAL WORD...

As you can see, there are definite advantages of digital and film photography, but I do obviously side on film. Like I tell everyone, there is a reason why the "Movie Industry" is still considered the "Film industry," and why most movies, tv commercials, are still shot on film. It all comes down to the quality. Film just looks better and it feels better.

Well, I hope you learned something new today :)

Steve Young