Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2012/05/17
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Marty Deveney <benedenia at gmail.com> wrote: > It does - the sensitivity curves of the CCD are very different to film (any > film). On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Lew Schwartz <lew1716 at gmail.com> wrote: > Is there a graphic of this anywhere? I saw some graphs at my local dealer, but can't find them on the web. There is a graph for another sensor in this post: 7159637852_f17f2f07df.jpg<http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7220/7159637852_f17f2f07df.jpg> at RFF that looks generally similar. Also note that the currently available cameras are all pre-production and Leica has told beta testers that spectral response and its interpretation by the firmware is one of the things that will be tweaked prior to full production. > I most obvious & consistent thing > I've noticed in my M9 -> BW conversions is that faces seem to fall a > zone or two lower than I'm accustomed to seeing from film. How are you converting? Channel mixing or dumping the colour data? If you do the latter the skin tones do end up too dark, but they did the same if you tried to print colour media onto B&W paper back in the day. I find with proper channel mixing or an intelligent conversion program like SE Pro that my skin tones end up exactly where I want them. > There's an amazing amount of shadow detail to make up for this, so a little > dodging looks terrific. One of the things I am reminded of every time I use B&W film is that getting enough shadow contrast (contrast, not detail) to keep me happy, and balancing that with sharpness and overall tonality, is hard. One reason I've resisted using digital more widely is that I only shoot in monochrome and I've spent 2 decades (half my life) getting it right. I am painfully aware that the problem with digital is still highlight rendition and gradation, and when converting a digital file to B&W I have always felt like I did when I first went into a darkroom - it works incredibly well sometimes, but I don't know why, and much of the rest of the time it ends up looking either only okay, or awful. It is now time; some of my last batches of film that I took overseas got damaged by x-rays, so it's time at least for travel to go to silicon, not silver capture. Marty