ND and Contrast filters

[novice9]

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I have been shooting portraits in harsh light and am considering purchasing at a minimum a 0.6 ND filter for my 90 2.0 apo. Will a high quality ND filter have any material negative impact on image quality?

 

Separately, are there good filters to meaningfully reduce overall image contrast? I assume not or HDR wouldn't be such a big deal. But I have been reading about so-called low and other contrast filters that purport to reduce contrast without compromising sharpness.

 

Thanks.

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[lars_bergquist]

No ND filter will reduce image contrast (i.e. the differences between shadows and highlights), they only reduce the overall light level, equally at both ends.

 

The only filters that do reduce image contrast are soft filters. But they do also reduce image detail.

 

The situation is more or less the same with lenses. There are (mostly older) lenses that deliver a lower general contrast than the current top-of-the-heap optics. But while these lenses may be quite sharp in their delineation of larger features, they do mostly fail to show the crisp small detail that modern lenses show.

 

The old man from the Darkroom Ages

[250swb]

You don't necessarily need to use HDR if you are shooting RAW to increase your dynamic range.

 

Generally speaking if you use a slight underexposure (because its easier to get recoverable tones from shadows) when it comes to processing the RAW image you can make one version that is perfect for the shadow and mid tones, one version of the image that is perfect for highlights, and blend the two together in post processing. Most HDR software or Photoshop will do this for you from two TIFF (or JPEG) files.

 

Steve