Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I photographed using film and printed my own black and white images. For a short time (four years) I printed for various labs around southern California. My colleagues and I were involved in various projects, including making limited edition runs of various things for different galleries and producing prints for exhibitions and portfolios of famous photographers.
I felt I had a good working knowledge of the requirements that met customer expectations. To meet those requirements, our equipment and chemical processes were carefully controlled. Our enlargers were carefully aligned (Omega D-series were easy compared with Beseler). The enlarging lenses we used were the best we could find (EL-Nikkor, Schneider Componon-S). The chemicals were mixed in a consistent way and temperatures were carefully monitored. We used densitometers to verify everything was as expected. Lamps were left on to ensure constant temperatures in condenser enlarger heads and we waited a moment after putting a negative in carrier into the enlarger so the negative would snap into flatness (if it matters and you don't understand what I just said, ask and I'll try and explain a little further). Global image contrast was controlled by selecting paper types and/or filters. Local corrections were made using dodging/burning techniques.
We did all these things to make certain the field of film grain would be absolutely sharp from extreme corner to extreme corner across the entire print while working to reveal the subject/scene in all its potential glory. Making good prints was a mixture of alchemy, art, and craft.
Digital image processing comes with a few more tools than what were available to us "back in the day." Using these tools helps us to go beyond what was done in the Old Dinosaur Film Days.
Mulling such things over in my mind, I thought it might be interesting to comment a little on the topic. Here's a list of things we can do in digital to "improve" a basic image beyond film era global contrast and local dodging/burning. We can now correct/control:
- Optical distortion (pincushion, barrel)
- Chromatic aberration
- Optical vignetting (illumination fall-off around the edges)
- "Sharpness"
- "Local contrast"
Here's a short list of the kinds of things that won't be corrected/controlled with neither film nor digital.
- Optical coma effects
- Optical field curvature (field flatness)
There is (at least) one thing printing from film could do that is more than a little different in digital, and that is image enlarging. Non-contact printed film sizes obviously require enlargement. Digital is a different beast, though digital tools exist that enable enlargement possibilities. I've found G'Mic's DCCI2X and CNN2X upscaling tools to be fairly convincing in taking a 42mpixel image and turning it into a 160+mpixel monster.
I've said a few things about how I feel I can make an old film-era lens look like a new digital-age one. Using automated chromatic aberration correction and Capture Sharpen in RawTherapee takes my images a long ways toward matching the performance of my new digital AF Zeiss. If an old lens suffers from lower contrast, a gentle Local Contrast and/or USM application finishes the job.
Taking the Insanity a little further, yesterday I downloaded a Leica Q2 .dng file and looked at it long and hard. Given Leica's reputation I thought I might see some magic that's not commonly seen in other camera systems. However, I wasn't "grokking" it, so I turned on/off the various software interventions... and... oh!... sure enough, image processing corrects/changes the outcome, even with hugely expensive Leica.
It's all rather exciting, actually. Digital image processing software intervention can "democratize" image quality.
Old lenses? New lenses? Apparent image "sharpness?" On some level it's pretty much all the same. Which is, I'm sure, partially the point some people try to make when saying things like "equipment doesn't matter." Of course "equipment matters", but maybe not just in ways I usually think.
One Last Thought: There's something of a community of old lens user-commenters ("influencers?" - perish the thought) on various sites/platforms spouting/touting/sprouting the benefits of using old lenses. They tend to say things like "old lenses have so much "character"..." and "modern lenses are so "clinically" sharp..." If what they want is "character" maybe they should try turning off software intervention on modern lenses and see what happens. It might boggle/confuse/re-inform their world view. Not that there's anything wrong with using old manual focus lenses, right?
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