Matt Grum
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 p.9 #15 · Digital Medium Format / 35mm equiv difference | |
Krosavcheg wrote:
/begin generic post/
Reason I started this thread because I:
1. ...find FM Alt Forum members to be objective and knowledgeable
2. ...find MFD shots to stand out for some reason
3. ...want to find out if it's self-induced belief that the shots stand out?
4. ...want to find that reason and lay it out clearly in technical terms
5. ...want to know if "that" what makes MFD photos stand out can be exactly replicated in PP
6. ...want to know where to look for something that does job for me with minimal haemorrhoids in PP
1. I'm not really an alt forum member so make no claims about knowledgeability
2. I can agree with this point.
3. This is the tricky part, certainly there's a degree of confirmation bias, i.e. if already believe there's something special about medium format, and you're told that an image was shot on MFD then it may look better to you than if you were told it was shot on 35mm.
But there are cases when you see an image you like, look it up and find out it was MFD, so there's no confirmation bias there. There are however still many factors at play, such as the fact that medium format systems are adopted by successful commercial photographers with a huge amount of experience, and large budgets for locations, models, makeup, lighting, PP. I know you don't want to hear about that stuff, but it's simply impossible to separate the quality of the camera, from the quality of the person behind the camera, the person in front of the camera and the person in front of the computer.
Here's how I see it. Lets say you have plenty of light and you shoot the same scene with a 35mm DSLR and an MF back, keep the angle of view the entrance pupil the same you will get the same DOF, same degree of diffraction. Superficially the images will look the same, but on closer inspection the MFD image will look better, on account of the longer focal length, larger f-stop, sensor tuned to perform in good light.
But if you were to just look at either the 35mm shot, or the MFD shot it might be difficult to tell which format it was from. In short MFD looks better, but not in all cases will it look so much better as to be immediately recognisable as MFD, if you didn't know what a 35mm shot of the same scene would look like.
4. There isn't one reason, see above
5. Yes you can do anything with PP. You can convert your 5D3 image to greyscale and painstakingly paint back in the colour exactly as it was in your mind's eye, or exactly how it appears in a MFD shot of the same scene, in minute detail. You can manually smooth and tweak every gradient in the image. What you can't do, is replicate the exact look of MFD easily.
6. I know you were not soliciting advice on lighting but it's hard to overstress how important it is, simply put photography is light.
Joakim nails it:
theSuede wrote:
In reality you don't really "see" anything. What you look at is your brain's second-hand interpretation of what your eyes report! Where this gets really tricky is in mixed light scenarios. Your brain sorts this out like a thousand-part stitch where each and every detail in the "brain image" gets its' OWN perfectly white balance little island of ramifications. This means that you don't "see" mixed lighting the same way in reality as when you see it on a screen or on print.
Part of what leads to capturing "bad colour" that you just can't get to look right in PP is mixed lighting. Light bounces off every surface, meaning on your location shoots the nice white light from your main octa bounces of the slightly green walls casting green light on one side of your subject, and off the slightly blue floor cast blue light up from below.
This multicoloured light is most apparent when you push the image around in PP and boost shadows. The shadows are shadows because they're not lit by the main light. They're lit by the dirty coloured floor and walls. Your brain corrects it but the camera doesn't. You can correct in post but you're in for a hard slog, which you want to avoid, as it just takes the fun out of editing.
To fix the situation in camera you need to take total control of the lighting. Instead of letting the main light bounce of your environment to provide fill, choke the main light so that it only hits your subject, and get a second nice clean white light to simulate the fill you'd get.
You'd be amazed how nice the colours come out with only white light hitting your subject, even with Canon's CFA. The shadows will be pure and not too dark as you're controlling DR with your fill and the result is an image you can push around much further in PP without it falling apart.
Once you taken your lighting as far as it can go, it then makes sense to make the jump to MFD to push what is a good look a bit further.
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I know