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 p.3 #9 · Sony vs Nikon color science | |
philip_pj wrote:
It's OK, it's understandable, not many people talk about it. I have a few short comments here, posted in case any readers chance upon this thread and wonder if there are any other sources for information that might shed further light on the seemingly controversial topic.
To understand how color works in your photography, you have to take photographs of typical content, hopefully a rich set of images illustrating hues, natural and mixed light sources, ideally of human beings and foliage, best practice is to cover many parts of the spectrum, to test gamut and DR, etc. in the real world. Note that all these characteristics interact: DR impacts color perception, contrast masively changes color appearance, and so on.
If you shoot bric-a-brac on your desk, with only a handful of colored manufactured objects, you are not likely to have much to base conclusions on, when looking at such complex issues as those raised here. If issues are complex, it usually suggests your mode of discovery must also be so.
So here are few cogent extracts from a series of technical papers written by ARRI's 30-year-experience product specialist Art Adams, with a link in case anyone still wants to know about the other side of the debate. I am posting these and the source because my understanding and understanding (and therefore my comments) agree with Art, and they are based on using many lenses side-by-side, for well over a decade.
"There was a time in the distant past when I thought of lenses as transparent glass. Film and digital sensors have dynamic range, but lenses are merely optics. Right? Wrong."
"I think it’s important for all of us to look critically and deeply at our lens choices so we clearly understand the differences. They are a fairly critical creative choice: after all, everything the audience sees passes through a lens first."
"The visual differences between the Signature Prime and the other lenses are significant. The first thing I noticed is that the “skin tones” of the faces look to be 1/3 to 1/2 stop brighter, something I’ve not seen in a lens before. The second thing I noticed is that the Signature Prime shadows are more open by comparison to the Ultra Prime and Master Anamorphic images. I see a lot more detail and an expanded tonal range."
"The waveforms verified both of my impressions. The Signature Primes make flesh tone brighter and shadows more open than the Ultra Prime and Master Anamorphic lenses. The crucial observation is that the Signature Prime does not show lifted blacks, which would have indicated flare. Whatever is happening in this image, it’s not due to poor flare control.
The lens coatings appear to lower contrast in fine detail without eliminating resolution. This effect increases with the amount of light within the frame, so it shows almost no impact in the shadows but ramps up in the mid-tones.
The result is a very high-resolution lens that rolls off contrast such that flesh tone is reproduced as soft and delicate. What we perceive as sharpness is an abrupt transition between areas of contrast, and that’s preserved in areas of broad detail. Skin tone texture is fine detail, and these lenses selectively smooth that over."
That's a long text lift, done so you get some flavour of just how complex lenses really are. And how much impact they impart to the cine and photography fields.
'Lens dynamic range: coatings, contrast and color' :
https://www.provideocoalition.com/lens-dynamic-range-coatings-contrast-and-color/
As our knowledge is growing about emulated 3D ('dimensionality' is the emerging term) and its determinants, bokeh becomes all the more important so here is another article which can be skimmed in a few minutes:
'Three lenses: a look at bokeh, depth of field and geometry'
https://www.provideocoalition.com/three-lenses-a-look-at-bokeh-depth-of-field-and-geometry/
Here is a fine lens analysis of four high end cine lenses used for portraiture, highly recommended:
https://www.provideocoalition.com/four-lenses-a-visual-comparison-part-1/
There is much more, from many other luminaries in the design community, but that will do to make the point for now. We are all learning how to see, as time goes on. cheers, all.
PS you can learn plenty from well-developed YT, but most of it is superficial. But we live in the age of revelation and it's exciting seeing all this material emerge. ...Show more →
This is very interesting, but also a little bit depressing. It is interesting because it leads one on to see more finely the variations in how a face (or a landscape, etc., etc.) can be rendered. It makes looking at images even more interesting than it already is. But it is also a bit depressing--the Arri Signature Primes are about $30,000 or more each! So much of this subtlety is going to be well out of the reach of virutally all still photographers.
Not that there won't be very interesting and meaningful differences among the lenses that we still photographers do use. At the moment, for example, I am trying to puzzle out what I think of the $168 TTArtisan 40mm/2.0, which seems to have some special qualities in its images as well as some problems with AF and possibly with sharpness wide open. But I do like what I am seeing with many of the faces I have photographed with it. I guess looking at Arri images and other high-end image-making optics might help us to see what more we can see.
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