Digital film & photos:Why does the color suck

Factual Questions
1

I saw a trailer for a movie shot entirely on digital film and even though the story seems interesting I doubt I will see simply because of the absolutely crappy colors that come with the digital process. And it isn’t just this film, (and NO, I can’t remember the name of it)

The pictures that my dad takes with his digital camera have the same “problem,” the colors look I don’t know…“washed out” is probably the best way to describe it.

Compared to photos taken with an “old fashioned” camera and the digital stuff might as well be in black and white.

Can any of my fellow dopers offer a reasonabley sane explaination for me?

2

I know nothing about digital movie film, but with digital still cameras there could be a number of things going on.

First, how do you view the digital images? On a screen vs a print for the film? If so that could be why things look different, light vs ink. The monitor could be mis-callibrated so the image colors are wrong from the start. Digital images often need to be color corrected because of these things.

The prints I make on my Epson Photo printer are pretty indistinguishable from regular prints. I run my images through PhotoShop to correct them first, that really helps.

3

Wasn’t Star Wars: Attack of the Clones shot digitally? Even if it was shot on film, it certainly would have been scanned and edited digitally before being put back onto film. Some theatres had digital projectors installed and showed the film digitally. Those colors didn’t look washed out or crappy to me.

Some old or cheap digital cameras (and some new and expensive ones) do produce inferior pictures. But the digital medium is evolving rapidly and there are many fine digital cameras on the market. Most catalog photography is now done digitally, and more and more photojournalists are going digital. I haven’t seen any reduction in image quality in those areas over the last ten years.

4

Bad optics? I don’t know. Most of the digital photos I’ve seen are pretty damn impressive, at least from the professional models. I haven’t noticed this problem either with the movied digitially filmed (is that an oxymoron? “digitally captured” perhaps?)

Sometimes you do have problems in deep shadow areas with “digital noise.” However, good software has pretty much eradicated that problem.

Look at the photos at my friend’s website. Those were all shot on digital Canons. I cannot find any complaint with the color saturation or rendition in those shots. The colors don’t seem quite as saturated as, say, Fuji Velvia transparency film, but they’re better than the colors you get with most neg films.

Sorry, no real answer, but I just don’t share your observation.

5

http://www.foveon.com/X3_tech.html

[quote]
To capture the color that other image sensors miss, Foveon X3 image sensors use three layers of photodetectors embedded in silicon. The layers are positioned to take advantage of the fact that silicon absorbs different colors of light at different depths, so one layer records red, another layer records green and the other layer records blue. This means that for every pixel on a Foveon X3 image sensor, there’s actually a stack of three photodetectors, forming the first capture system with a full-color image sensor.

All other image sensors feature just one layer of photodetectors, with just one photodetector per pixel. To capture color, pixels are organized in a grid, or mosaic, resembling a three-color checkerboard. Each pixel records just one color—red, green or blue. That approach has inherent drawbacks, no matter how many pixels a mosaic-based image sensor might contain. Since they only capture one third of the color, mosaic-based image sensors must rely on complex processing to interpolate the two-thirds they miss. Interpolation leads to color artifacts and a loss of image detail. Some cameras even intentionally blur pictures to reduce color artifacts.

With its revolutionary process for capturing light, Foveon X3 technology never needs to compromise on quality, so you get sharper pictures, truer colors and fewer artifacts. And cameras equipped with Foveon X3 technology do not have to rely on processing power to fill in missing colors, reducing hardware requirements, simplifying designs and minimizing lag time between one shot and the next./quote][

6

Forgot to add how new Foveon chip based cameras compare to standard digital camera technology.

7

Forgot to add how new Foveon chip based cameras compare to standard digital camera technology.

8

All images captured, analog or digital, have to be color corrected. We take this for granted because when we drop off our roll of film the lab does this automatically. Film development is very advanced where some cameras will modify exposure to the film and when you develop it, they will modify the process in developing the film correctly. But, now, with people taking digital pictures and then prinitng them out, they are forgetting, liek otehr have pointed out here, that they have to color corrected.

I mean, you have to color correct for the camera, for the paper, and for the inks uses. Also, you have to have the gamma set correctly on your monitor. And even so, it will still look different than on paper. So, it is a very COMPLICATED process that most people don’t feel like dealing with. There is really no sure wya to snap and print your film. The only way I see this possible is if you paid someone to calibrate your system and the never touched anything after that. Then, you might be able to do that.

Also, a lot of companies make digital camera’s with the concept that they are for snapshots to be spread on the web. So, color quality, etc, is not their highest concern. The better digital cameras provide much more stunning pictures when it comes to quality. Not only is this because they have decided to put decent lenses on them, but, the image processing that the camera does to each shot --the MOST IMPORTANT part-- is much more advanced. Megapixels alone means nothing unless the image is processed correctly.

And, the resolution of digital cameras is limited to about 50 line pairs per milimeter. This is because of the Nyquist limit, liek with CD players, the sampling rate has to be at least twice that above of what you want for accurate capture. SO, they actually capture 100 lp/mm but you will get only 50. However, some advanced digital cameras, Nikon D1 series, have very extensive digital processing and can achieve pictures of much higher resolution because of the algorithms used. Which is why this camera is so expensive. And, if you are wondering why there is a resolution limit, its because of the fact that if you make the pixels any smaller they become to insensitive to light and you will be limited to bright light conditions. So, because you can’t just swap out the camera CCD element, like you can swap out film speeds, you are stuck with this limit.

As for the Foveon technology, the problem is that each detector, although it will detect for each color, detects the colors at different depths within the pixel. This may not sound like a big deal, but IT IS. The reason being that the image coming outside the back of the lens is rarely coming out in a straight line (except for a focal length, varies with camera format). So, the detector may pick up only a partial amount of the light required or the sensor over will pick it up.

I think… 7-10 years… then digital will be there.

9

Possibly related comment. A few years ago I was taking a photography course and our instructor was discussing film. She said that much of the film produced these days is designed to oversaturate color and that most photo processors also have their equipment set to enhance the colors. This is because most people like “colorful” pictures and so pictures with artificially enhanced color look “better” to most people. According to what she told us, Kodak tends to oversaturate reds and yellows and Fuji tends to enhance blues and greens. (She said that Fuji Velia professional grade film is especially bad about oversaturation.)

The same thing is being done in movies and television, which explains why modern movies and shows look so much more colorful than earlier releases.

She used this as a springboard to explain why we should either develop our film ourselves or get it developed at a particular store which would compensate for the oversaturation (and which she, coincidentally, worked for so I naturally took her explanation with a grain of salt.)

Still, anecdotal evidence based on my own observations seems to support the idea that colors in standard photography tend to be oversaturated. Maybe the digital colors are more accurate but only look duller because we have become so used to the enhanced colors used elsewhere? Try enhancing the colors in your digital photos using Paint Shop Pro/Photoshop/Gimp/Whatever you use and see what it looks like.

10

Dunno about digital movies, but for home computers, color correction is more reliable on Macs than on Windows PCs. This is because the MacOS (both MacOS X and the earlier stuff) use ColorSync, which (theoretically) ensures color consistency across all your devices. If you have a ColorSync profile for your monitor and your peripherals, the OS will tweak your images so the colors are consistent.

It’s not completely trivial to set up, but it’s not too difficult, and definitely helps to make sure that the red you see on your screen ends up as red on your printer, and not some muddied brownish-orange.

11

Digital typically has lower dynamic range, i.e. the range of brightnesses it can produce. On a typical computer screen the brigthness of each color of each pixel is expressed as an 8-bit number, i.e. 0 to 255. This means that the brightest pixel is only 255 times brighter than the darkest (but not completely black) pixel, or a dynamic range of about 2.4 (log base 10 of 255). I’m not sure what typical photographic film is, but high-end film scanners are advertised as having dynamic ranges of up to 4 (i.e ratio of 1:10,000), so I guess that’s about it.

I don’t know the specific numbers for movies, but I’ve been told that digital has worse dynamic range.

12

Digital filmmaking does a lot of things different than tradition filmmaking. Dgital treats light, color, motion and depth of field completely differently that film. The trick is to stop judgeing digital compared to film. They are not the same. They are different aesthetics.

Film aesthetics are not natural- it is a way of seeing things that must be learned. It’s ideosycries (such as the way it treats light) are things that we have grown to appreciate through constant exposure to film. But it is not the natural or standard way for images to be.

Digital aesthetics is another thing we shall learn as we are exposed to more and more digital movies. Emulatiing film is a goal that if pursued will always lead to failure. What digital needs to do is find itself and use it’s unique characteristics to it’s best advantage. It will never be superior to film according to film’s standards, but I think on it’s own standards it will become as beautiful and rich a medium as film, perhaps even more so.