Tonal Curve of Leica M Monochrom

[Pjay]

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http://www.riveraproject.com/info/Photography/Theory/Mastering%20Exposure%20and%20the%20Zone%20System%20for%20Digital%20Photographers.pdf

 

Might be a useful read...

[zlatkob]

Yes...but when we discuss DR of modern sensors with about 14 eV, we need to understand how this fits to the zone system.  

 

 

It's good and fun to be technical and to come up with a refined system.  But speaking for myself, I'm not that technical and find that basic metering works great for my purposes.  I make adjustments on the fly and make further adjustments in Lightroom.  The camera's LCD is the best light meter for me.  The zone system is a great tool, but it's for a more meticulous way of working.  I don't carry a spot meter and wouldn't take the time to use one.  If I were still shooting film, I would take one incident reading and be done with it.

[otto.f]

Right, incident reading is way underrated, especially since the digital flood came over us. Now that you mention it, I'll pack my Gossen Digisix for my trip to Peru

[Mike Rawcs]

I'd love to see some examples in the 'Leica Monochrome Shots, Post Them Here' thread.

 

[Martin B]

http://www.riveraproject.com/info/Photography/Theory/Mastering%20Exposure%20and%20the%20Zone%20System%20for%20Digital%20Photographers.pdf

 

Might be a useful read...

 

Thanks for sharing this link! It is a good read and focuses a lot on exposing right with digital. But my original point is only briefly discussed in the beginning and in fig. 1.4. The author says "Digital cameras can sometimes capture a range of 11 f-stops from black to white, where a paper print from a desktop inkjet printer might have, at best, a range of five f-stops." Maybe this is where my original confusion with the five stops of DR came from - that this is related only to the paper printout and not to the DR of the image itself.

[Martin B]

It's good and fun to be technical and to come up with a refined system.  But speaking for myself, I'm not that technical and find that basic metering works great for my purposes.  I make adjustments on the fly and make further adjustments in Lightroom.  The camera's LCD is the best light meter for me.  The zone system is a great tool, but it's for a more meticulous way of working.  I don't carry a spot meter and wouldn't take the time to use one.  If I were still shooting film, I would take one incident reading and be done with it.

 

I understand your point that my original question was technical, but I am interested in this for a specific reason since this question came up when discussing film and digital with other fine art photographers. Nobody knew the accurate answer, and I was surprised that available information out there was not very clear about this either.

 

Seeing the number of views during a short time after I posted this question here shows that there seems to be some general interest in it, too. And I am not surprised by this at all since there is no good overview IMO which combines film, digital, and printing all in one simple summary (zones, DR, eV). This thread and provided answers here give me now a good idea how those things fit together.

 

The information provided in my two links above is outdated but not wrong in principal. Just that todays digital sensors have the same or even more DR than film has. What makes the difference is the print itself - there are many other variables to consider additionally.

[mjh]

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These days, sensors capture a larger dynamic range than common film emulsion (and this has been true for a couple of years now). As has been explained, the gamma curve can be adapted in software to look more like that of silver-halide film. This doesn’t change the fact that there is a sharp cut-off at the highlights end for sensors while there is a cut-off at the shadow end with silver-halide film (namely when the film is completely blank with no silver remaining). So while there is no reason to worry about gamma, there is reason to worry about over-exposing the sensor, just as one would worry about under-exposing film.

[Manolo Laguillo]

The Zone System did make sense in those old film days because there was no way of knowing if everything went fine 'till the film was developed.

It is a bag of tools made for pre-visualizing what the end result will like when yet in front of the scene, no less no more.

 

The history of the Zone System is very interesting. It has to do with both the widespread use of panchromatic film. The panchromatic film had to be developed in complete darkness, and it was therefore impossible to compensate for exposure errors by playing with the film development time. This had been the procedure with orthochromatic material. Those plates were developed 'under inspection', using a glass tray for the developer and with a safety light under it, in order to check on-the-go what was happening with the high densities. This was of course no longer possible with pan films. But quite luckily the pan film and the electric photometer were nearly contemporary... But the photometer did need an intelligent way of using it. Here it is where the Zone System came to help those lost souls.

[pico]

The Zone System did make sense in those old film days because there was no way of knowing if everything went fine 'till the film was developed.

It is a bag of tools made for pre-visualizing what the end result will like when yet in front of the scene, no less no more.

 

The history of the Zone System is very interesting. It has to do with both the widespread use of panchromatic film. The panchromatic film had to be developed in complete darkness, [...]

 

Hogwash on the Zone System. In my fifty short years in photography, I have never seen a straight photo that looked good when the photographer followed the Zone System creed. Those that religiously followed the System were satisfied with following rules hoping for success based upon pure metrics and their work lacked soul.

 

Even Ansel Adams never made a straight print.

 

And development by inspection with panchromatic films was alive and well at my lab in the Seventies.

[Manolo Laguillo]

Hogwash on the Zone System. In my fifty short years in photography, I have never seen a straight photo that looked good when the photographer followed the Zone System creed. Those that religiously followed the System were satisfied with following rules hoping for success based upon pure metrics and their work lacked soul.

 

Even Ansel Adams never made a straight print.

 

And development by inspection with panchromatic films was alive and well at my lab in the Seventies.

 

I agree with you, I am too against any 'religiously following' whatsoever, at least in photography :-) .

 

In the States there was this Zone System Orthodoxy. That was never the case in Spain. Ok, I instructed the ZS in many workshops back in the Eighties, and among the participants there was always somebody who needed this availability of rules because he (women are more intelligent...) needed following them for being safe.

 

The ZS is a description of how photographic materials behave, a terminology, a collection of words, an intelligent work flow.

 

 

When playing music out from the score there is always something that must be added which is not on it because it can't be written.

 

...

 

Pico, developing by inspection was for me impossible: how could you see anything under that dark dark dark green safelight?

[Jeff S]

I suggest that the OP read the book, The Creative Digital Darkroom, by Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan.  It provides a good understanding of digital concepts and how they may or may not correlate with those in the film realm.

 

With regard to the Zone System, they provide a mathematically based diagram showing film zones as percentages of black, juxtaposed with hypothetical 'digital' zones using those same percentages of black, as associated with 256 discrete tonal values.  Most importantly though, they conclude the section by noting....

 

"In drawing comparisons between the two systems, however, it is important to realize that, from a creative point of view, trying to calculate exact mathematical equivalents is not as important as understanding the needs of the image you are working on and how to go about achieving those goals."

 

 

I couldn't agree more with the latter.

 

Jeff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[fotomas]

Hello,

found this thread quite interesting, since a graph about the spectral response of the M 246 was shown here.
I got the feeling the M 246 reacts quite different from film in translating colors to gray-tones, especially my favorite TRI-X.
Thinking about what could be possible reasons for that the spectral response was in my mind for some time.
Unfortunately I found it difficult to compare the shown graphs, since they all use a different grid as a base.
To make this comparable I tried to translate this stuff to the same base. Therefor I took the TRI-X curve. The log of the specific exposure I choose for the M 246 curve might be wrong, but I'm only interested to get both curves comparable. Here is what I got:

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Hope I've interpreted this the right way. Otherwise hopefully an expert will give me a hint, how this could be compared.
If this is true the spectral response is quite different and I wonder what filter might be needed to make the M 246 come close to TRI-X. In my trials I found a yellow green-filter most pleasant, but this still is not the same like TRI-X. According to the graphs I guess must be some kind of blueish magenta filter?
 

[otto.f]

Difficult to interpret if you don't know who is who in this graph. So what's the blue line, etc. ?

[fotomas]

The blue line is the M 246 (taken from the picture on page 1).

[Martin B]

But this comparison is separate from the original discussion here. You are plotting the wavelength / spectral response of film and camera sensor against sensitivity - we discussed here tonal range in B&W. B&W only distinguishes brightness in a scene, the graphs above say nothing about the DR response discussed earlier.

 

It is an interesting separate topic still - I recommend starting a separate thread about discussing spectral response of Leica camera sensor vs. film types.

[pico]

Pico, developing by inspection was for me impossible: how could you see anything under that dark dark dark green safelight?

 

It was difficult for me, too. All I looked for was anything becoming visible on the emulsion. The guy who was best at it stayed in total darkness for hours.

[fotomas]

But this comparison is separate from the original discussion here. You are plotting the wavelength / spectral response of film and camera sensor against sensitivity - we discussed here tonal range in B&W. B&W only distinguishes brightness in a scene, the graphs above say nothing about the DR response discussed earlier.

 

It is an interesting separate topic still - I recommend starting a separate thread about discussing spectral response of Leica camera sensor vs. film types.

For me this is all related. And that these graphs are shown here in the beginning of the discussion showed me, that some other also found this aspect important.

Tonal range in B&W depends also on spectral response, apart from color(?)-depth and DR response. The tonal curve of the image can easily be adjusted afterwards in PP. On color-depth we unfortunately depend on what is given to us with the camera (I like to have the full 14 bit instead of the 12).

Spectral response I only can adjust during the exposure with a digital b&w-camera. Ok - that's the same with an analog one also, but there I can choose different films with different characteristics.

I found skin-tone from the M246 always a bit to dark and wonder what I can do about it. Normally I would choose a yellow filter. But the M 246 reacts different from film.

 

 

[Martin B]

For me this is all related. And that these graphs are shown here in the beginning of the discussion showed me, that some other also found this aspect important.

Tonal range in B&W depends also on spectral response, apart from color(?)-depth and DR response. The tonal curve of the image can easily be adjusted afterwards in PP. On color-depth we unfortunately depend on what is given to us with the camera (I like to have the full 14 bit instead of the 12).

Spectral response I only can adjust during the exposure with a digital b&w-camera. Ok - that's the same with an analog one also, but there I can choose different films with different characteristics.

I found skin-tone from the M246 always a bit to dark and wonder what I can do about it. Normally I would choose a yellow filter. But the M 246 reacts different from film.

 

 

 

It is sort of related but not related at all to my initial question raised which was sufficiently answered in earlier posts by other members. I commented to post #13 stating a similar response what I told you above. I highly recommend to start a new thread about this - again, I believe this is also interesting but simply off topic here.

[pico]

Unfiltered CMOS sensors are less sensitive to blue and more sensitive to red and deep-red, are they not? If they are, then they respond quite the opposite of film emulsions.

.

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[jaapv]

Yes, but the cover glass of the Monochrom sensors is coloured to modify the tonal response curve. There must be a graph from the Monochrom1 somewhere in the forum as this was discussed extensively three and a half years ago, I did not find it in a quick search.

I am not aware whether Leica released a similar graph for the Monochrom2.