"but I absolutely hate the way digital looks when converted to B&W"..

[CB Photo]

....Is what I read on a photo review yesterday.

I have had people tell me that they can tell if a photo was shot with film or digital and many times you can...but excuse me....EVERY PHOTO ON THIS WEBSITE IS DIGITAL. It may have been shot on film but make no mistakes it was turned into a digital image. So my question to everyone is: can you tell if a photo is shot with digital and converted to B&W ..and is so...how?

I have a wet darkroom as well as a film scanner, photo quality printer and a digital camera so from what I have done I am not sure if a person can tell if a photo is digital or film. And what else I have learned from the few photos I have sold..the peopl could care less. They like the image, it is high quality and it provides them with a feeling...

I am just wondering what everyone thinks.


Thanks

[another view]

First off, you're right - any image on a computer screen is technically a digital image. I've seen good and bad B&W, whether it was digital capture, traditional film, color neg printed B&W, scanned film, wet print...

My two cents - when I think B&W, I usually think of a look like Tri-X which has some grain to it. It's nowhere near as clean as a DSLR at ISO100; ISO800 gets a little closer to that look, but it's not quite the same thing. Not that any one way is necessarily better than any other - just my preference for B&W is film and silver print. I don't have a darkroom so most of what I do is either scanned film or digital capture but if I had the time and space I'd probably do my own wet prints to get that look.

[Asylum Steve]

"So my question to everyone is: can you tell if a photo is shot with digital and converted to B&W ..and is so...how?..."

Easy. You can't, unless ..

...it was converted poorly. The things that give away b&w digital conversions are the same things that give away digital images in general: artifacts, tonal banding, digital noise, and of course, poor use of filters, masking, or resizing.

"but excuse me....EVERY PHOTO ON THIS WEBSITE IS DIGITAL. It may have been shot on film but make no mistakes it was turned into a digital image..."

Ah, that's the thing. We have to establish our terms. When I use the term "film image", I mean a wet-process (traditional darkroom) print that was made from a film negative or transparency.

In my eyes, a film original that is "digitized" by scanning, then edited on a computer and used as either a print or web file has indeed become a DIGITAL image.

Of course I realize not everyone will share this view, and that's cool. To me it really doesn't matter much, and trust me, I don't spend (no make that waste) time talking about it at length.

Bottom line is you can take a shot with a digital camera, convert it to b&w, print it out, and if it was done right no one can tell it wasn't film...

[opus]

I agree with Steve. A trained eye can make a digital B&W look like film ... but the key is they've got to know what the qualities of film are and then duplicate that digitally. You can't just go into photoshop and "convert to greyscale" and badda-boom, you've got it.

More than that, I don't really know, as I'm not really into the technicalities of film. I think film has more consistent qualities to it, whereas digital has such wide-open possibilities, that more could "go wrong" on the conversion in digital.

But to make a blanket statement such as the title would show ignorance, IMO.

[drg]

This is why I frequent PR and the web. Part of the feedback I'm seeking is how well what I have before me in the analog world translates in the virtual world. There are some wonderful examples on this site alone from both ends of the spectrum good and bad of what can be acheived/happen.

Its all digital photography in the end when I look at it on my monitors. Whether this has some sort egalitarian effect or not I don't know, but I defy anyone to say with certainty what is originally digital, color, or b/w prior to it being converted and or digitized.

I mentioned on the thread in question about "regraining" the items in question via "adding noise" for which there are lots of tools. Kelly is correct that it isn't simple and requires some training/experience to get it right. The reverse is also true in that making a halide image look right digitally isn't just a click or two on the options menus. Books have been written on this subject.

There are stylistic and artistic reasons for all of the above. Lets face it, some photos look better with as little grain as possible. B/W imagery that works well is about the composition, subject, light and dark and infinitie variation thereof, but it doesn't depend on color for its thrust. Color image use all of the same thing as B/W but gets an extra dimension. One's not better than the other, they tell the story differently.

This is for me a subject that in the end has about as much importance as whether I'm using the latest Nikon or Canon or whatever your choice of poison, because . . . .

Its the photograph that counts!

-CDP

[jar_e]

In a sense, to make a digital file (read: a picture from a digital camera) to a 'film' black and white standard, and post process it that much is a tad overkill for me. Sure, you can't just do grayscale, but to add noise and such, I just don't like that for an image. Sure, noise is good at times, but I just never like adding too much to a picture. I enjoy improving it (colors, levels, etc.) yet not adding digital effects.

Meh, that's just me,

Jared

[Dzerzhinski46]

Much of what has been said, I agree with. A good digital image can rival a print image any day. One of the things I dislike about digital manipulation, is when people try to imitate a particualr film, without success. It is not only degrading to the film, but to the digital artform as well. Digital has its advantages, but so does film. It is poorly done imitations that is dislike. Digital gives a crisp black and white image, quite unlike film. But of course, in the hands of a master, a digital image can have the same characteristics as a kind of film. If you are just trying to be cute, it doesn't work. Just my thoughts on the matter.

Drew

[Flight]

....Is what I read on a photo review yesterday.

I have had people tell me that they can tell if a photo was shot with film or digital and many times you can...but excuse me....EVERY PHOTO ON THIS WEBSITE IS DIGITAL. It may have been shot on film but make no mistakes it was turned into a digital image. So my question to everyone is: can you tell if a photo is shot with digital and converted to B&W ..and is so...how?

I have a wet darkroom as well as a film scanner, photo quality printer and a digital camera so from what I have done I am not sure if a person can tell if a photo is digital or film. And what else I have learned from the few photos I have sold..the peopl could care less. They like the image, it is high quality and it provides them with a feeling...

I am just wondering what everyone thinks.


Thanks

I took some graphic reproduction classes at the community college level and they tell you that a scanner is a digital camera, so you are right, these are digital pics.

It probably makes a difference that a scanned B&W pic "settings" would be optimal in a B&W pic over a converted digital picture because it's a B&W picture.

They may think converting a digital pic to greyscale is making it B&W, but it's not. You got to work the channels.

I don't think people see many digital B&W pics that were converted by someone who knows, very well, what they are doing.

I could be wrong, but I don't think they could tell.

[mattp]

I completely disagree that there is anything wrong with digital b&w, just as I would disagree that there is anything wrong with digital colour. I know some people are fixated on chemicals for their photography, but really that's just an accident of history.

Photography is all about producing an image - whether that image is created as a daguerrotype, a polaroid, a Velvia slide or on a digital CCD seems irrelevant to me, beyond the fact that each has a particular style, and one may be preferred to another by a photographer depending on the eventual result they want to create. Beyond that, even a digital image can be completely transformed depending on the printing process it goes through, and whether it ends up printed on a particular type of paper, or even on perspex, or metal.

To start suggesting that one is 'better' than another seems to be no more than a personal artistic preference. It would seem akin to stating that you really hate pointillism, or that watercolour can never be as 'good' as oil paint.

That's not to say people can't express a preference, but as has already been said, I would be surprised if someone could always tell whether an image was born chemically or digitally if they weren't actually told - partularly when we are all relying on computer monitors to judge them.

regards

matt

[adina]

Okay, so maybe you can tell. But so what?

What's wrong with having a really good digital black and white?

I've spent the past two years trying to find the perfect conversion. What have I found? Pretty damn good ones. Does it look exactly like film? Nope. Do I want it to? Not really. I suppose if I was going for something specific, I'd spend the time to tweek it. But mostly, I have a digital black and whte. That probably looks like a digital black and white.

[CB Photo]

Hello all.

This is what I like about this forum, everyone has a great perspective on all the different subjects. I agreee with everything said by all of you...maybe it is just me wanting to believe or confirm that all the digital stuff I have invested in over the last couple of years is indeed going to produce good prints.

Sure, it is hard to reproduce some of the effects one can get in the wet darkroom but same can be said for what you can do on the computer...anyway...I realy need to go in the wet darkroom and make as few prints or I need to free up the 10x15 space in my workshop (my wife would jump on the space as soon as it was free)!

I am glad we, photographers\artist, have evolved to this point now where we accept different forms of media for photography.


Thanks everyone!!!