CL vs Medium Format

[pgk]

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I am puzzled by what you mean by 'pop', and how it is different from 'punch', 'three D character' and 'microcontrast' - these are all terms I struggle with. Care to expand on them using other more explicit words? 

 

If you do a web search (not so easy as these words have innumerable connotations in photographic circles) you will find that these terms are largely subjective and are difficult to quantify. Quantification of subjective terminology is notoriously difficult. There apparent visualisation is also very subject dependent (and lens presumably). I would steer clear of attempting to 'define' any because in the past it simply leads to argumentative discussions without resolution. 

[colonel]

Thanks for this interesting comparison.

 

I am puzzled by what you mean by 'pop', and how it is different from 'punch', 'three D character' and 'microcontrast' - these are all terms I struggle with. Care to expand on them using other more explicit words? 

 

pop and punch and 3D are used interchangeably

 

there is nothing scientific about emotion

 

contrast and micro-contrast are related to the fall-off speed between different tones and light ranges. they can be simulated by the clarity slider in lightroom, but this is much rougher then having the falloff delivered by the lens

 

it is further accentuated by the colour range of the lens (mostly to do with the coatings) and the sensor

 

people sometimes see higher edge contrast on objects in a picture as delineating them from the rest of the picture, e.g. jutting out or looking "3D" or having pop

Edited March 28, 2018 by colonel

[LocalHero1953]

I accept that these words mean different things to different people, so I try not to use them myself. What I was asking was what the OP meant by 'pop', as it was one of the first things he commented on in his comparison.

[scott kirkpatrick]

It's still dark in the OP's time zone.  I have never detected a consistent meaning to "3D" as an adjective, but I think "pop" is likely to be quantifiable as the contrast at relatively high spatial frequencies in an image consisting of largely midtones.  This supports the color contrast that we expect to see in natural surfaces and fabrics.  Capturing a yellow taxi in front of a blue storefront is easy.  But when a fabric with contrasting thread colors or animal fur with multiple colors stands out, that's what I would call "pop".

[Jared]

stop showing off your X1D, you are making me jealous

 

Yes its better then the CL, it bloody should be for the price

 

Enjoy all !

 

Hey, don't take it that way!  After doing the test, I was actually posting the results here on the CL forum because I was so pleased with how close it was.  Yes, the medium format camera has more resolution and, I think, a bit more "pop" (which I'll get to in another post), but you do need to zoom in to 100% to really see anything that would make me care much, and that isn't how most people use most photos these days.  The CL is much less expensive, much more flexible, less than half the size, less than half the weight, and even in a test that is stacked against it such as this one performed admirably.  I know your post was good natured, but the take home should really be comforting to people who have bought into the idea that an APS-C camera can carry on Oskar Barnack's vision.  I think the CL does that admirably and expect it will get much more use from me than the X1D.  

[fsprow]

My wife (and best critic) says the MF large prints (both from my X1D and H6D-100c) appear to have characteristics which "come out of the paper".  Personally, I believe this is due to increased information (color, acuity) near the edges of objects -  but I'm not going to second guess her.  I learned better many years ago.

Edited March 28, 2018 by fsprow

[Jared]

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Thanks for this interesting comparison.

 

I am puzzled by what you mean by 'pop', and how it is different from 'punch', 'three D character' and 'microcontrast' - these are all terms I struggle with. Care to expand on them using other more explicit words? 

 

As others have pointed out, some of the terms used by photographers online are very poorly defined and may not relate well to any particular quantifiable measure.  "Pop" is certainly one of these, as are "Punch", "3-D", and, I would argue, micro contrast which I also used.  Likely these terms are all related and all include more than one physical attribute.

 

In the case of this particular image, what I meant by "Pop" is how much an image or an area of an image appears to jump out of the page at you.  In a color image, I think of it as a combination of how vibrant the colors appear and how much contrast is visible in smaller areas of detail. I think of it as a synonym for "Punch", though for me "Punch" can also refer to the emotional impact of an image so I tend not to use that term as much.  These definitions are far from universal, but that is what I was trying to describe.

 

Micro contrast is the more challenging term for me since that's the one I think should have a precise, even quantifiable definition, but I'm not sure it does.  I feel like micro contrast should be identifiable on an MTF chart.  Here is how it's been explained to me, and I'm taking it as a sort of definition-in-progress.  First, I'll back up a bit and define a couple other terms.

 

The resolution of a lens or lens and camera system is generally defined as the point at which contrast level between two closely spaced black and white lines drops below a certain pre-determined percentage (10%?).  To make it universal across different formats, it is generally measured in line pairs per millimeter.  Within a given format it is often given in line pairs across full picture hight.  It is related to "sharpness" but doesn't entirely define sharpness. While it is quantifiable, it has more than one component.  The definition, though, is fairly well agreed upon.

 

The next term is acutance.  This term is often considered a synonym for "sharpness" (rightly or wrongly) and is related to resolution.  I think of it as one of the attributes of resolution. Specifically, as the line pairs I mentioned earlier get blurred by diffraction and other factors, the black line starts to become lighter and the white line starts to become blacker until you are just left with gray as resolution disappears.  How fast this transition occurs--how sharp the delineation is between light gray and dark gray--is acutance.  I think this definition is generally accepted.

 

Next comes contrast.  When people discuss contrast in general--in the raw photograph or in a print--they are discussing the total difference from the darkest areas of an image to the lightest areas of an image and how those different tones are managed.  Tones in photographs are generally not linear.  Something that is twice as bright when measured by a scientific instrument virtually never has twice the reflectance in a print.  The first problem is that your eyesight is logarithmic in its response to light.  The second problem is that the total range of brightness levels available in a print or even on a screen is much smaller than the total range in the original scene.  How you choose to represent those different tones is related to the contrast.  Just to give a concrete example, often portraits are fairly low in contrast.  That tends to even out skin tones and hide blemishes.  Many landscape photographs have high contrast because it makes details more starkly visible.  If you look at an MTF chart, a high contrast lens is one that has close to 100% transfer on the 10 line pair per millimeter line and on the 20 line pair per millimeter lines.  Frankly, this is an attribute of almost all modern lenses.  These days, when contrast is eroded it is typically by veiling glare (internal reflections) and that is fairly rare given modern multi-coatings.

 

I know I'm rambling.  I'm avoiding the most challenging definition.  Micro contrast.  Here is my working definition, though, again, it's far from universal.  Remember those line pairs from the resolution definition?  Acutance describes how quickly you transition from dark gray to light gray and back.  I think of micro contrast as how dark the dark gray gets and how light the light gray gets regardless of how quickly you make the transition.  Obviously, it is related to acutance (since you can't get all that dark or all that light if you don't transition pretty quickly), but it isn't determined by acutance alone. High acutance is a pre-req for high micro contrast. You can have high acutance and poor micro contrast but probably not the other way around.  You can move quickly from a dark area to a bright area--have a sharp delineation--and yet not get very dark or very bright. The total range of tones and hues in an area of fine detail is what I think of as micro contrast.  This is, in my view, one area where larger formats stand out over smaller formats.  They seem to get less muddy in these transitions, regardless of resolution.  Whatever the resolution limit happens to be, if you are near the limit and still maintaining dark blacks and light whites and lots of distinct tones in between you have high micro contrast. I think this may contribute to the "pop" I mentioned in my original comments that was still visible even after down sampling.  Some of that pop may come from differences in saturation (though I tried to equalize those as much as possible in post).  The rest, I think, is attributable to micro contrast, though I can't offer much evidence beyond arm waving at this point.

 

Hope that helps.  I know these discussions can devolve due to the lack of precision in the definitions.  At least you now know my working descriptions for these attributes. 

Edited March 28, 2018 by Jared

[Jared]

pop and punch and 3D are used interchangeably

 

there is nothing scientific about emotion

 

contrast and micro-contrast are related to the fall-off speed between different tones and light ranges. they can be simulated by the clarity slider in lightroom, but this is much rougher then having the falloff delivered by the lens

 

it is further accentuated by the colour range of the lens (mostly to do with the coatings) and the sensor

 

people sometimes see higher edge contrast on objects in a picture as delineating them from the rest of the picture, e.g. jutting out or looking "3D" or having pop

 

I left "3-D" out of my last set of working definitions.  I don't have a good one for that.  Same for "Plastic" which you see occasionally and is problematic due to translation issues.  I try to avoid using "3-D" because it could either refer to "pop" or "punch", or it could refer to subject separation due to depth of field, or some combination of the two.  It seems to have very different meanings to different photographers so I skip that one most of the time.

 

Gosh, this is almost like trying to describe the taste of a nice wine!  So easy to create a picture in someone's mind by using descriptive words, and so hard to know whether you created the intended picture or one that's completely different.

[Jared]

I accept that these words mean different things to different people, so I try not to use them myself. What I was asking was what the OP meant by 'pop', as it was one of the first things he commented on in his comparison.

 

I took a stab at listing my own definitions in the last couple posts.  Others will have different definitions and, doubtless, lots of refinements but at least you now know what I intended.

[LocalHero1953]

I took a stab at listing my own definitions in the last couple posts.  Others will have different definitions and, doubtless, lots of refinements but at least you now know what I intended.

Thanks for the explanations - that helps my understanding a lot.

I have a particular personal hang up about how photographers tend to be very poor at talking/writing about visual matters (you are not). I don't claim to be good at it myself, but I think it important that we should try to explain things clearly rather than rely on commonly used terms that no one agrees on!

[colonel]

I left "3-D" out of my last set of working definitions.  I don't have a good one for that.  Same for "Plastic" which you see occasionally and is problematic due to translation issues.  

 

 

I think you'll find that "plastic" means someone ODed on the nose reduction slider

[Jared]

Thanks for the explanations - that helps my understanding a lot.

I have a particular personal hang up about how photographers tend to be very poor at talking/writing about visual matters (you are not). I don't claim to be good at it myself, but I think it important that we should try to explain things clearly rather than rely on commonly used terms that no one agrees on!

 

 

My university studies were all in astronomy and astrophysics, so I hate the idea of a physical object that can't be accurately modeled, whether it's a photographic image or a galaxy.  I always want to understand things from first principles.  Sometimes that is helpful in life, other times it just gets you in trouble.  Photographs are surprisingly challenging to deal with from first principles.  The optics, the diffraction, the perspective, the circles of confusion, the chromatic aberration--these are all fairly straightforward.  But when you start adding in more descriptive terms like "pop" and "3-D" and "micro contrast" and the like it gets harder.  Not impossible, but definitely harder.  

 

Next throw in things like composition, balance, emotional content of an image, story telling, and all the aspects of a photograph that relate to human perception and things get really hard to quantify.  Plus, as an astronomer, I often run into things that seem to be completely backwards to me.  For example, artists talk about warmer tones as reds and yellows and cooler tones like blues and greens.  In astronomy, this is exactly backwards!  Blue objects are hot and red objects are (comparatively) cool.  Yikes!  I get in fights with my sister all the time regarding colors.  She works part time doing interior design, and that profession's use of hue, tint, tone, and shade is different from a photographer's use of the same terms. Makes things very confusing.  Often at the end of it we were just arguing about semantics.  End result?  I agree with you that I'd rather work off clear definitions.  Mine are not necessarily correct and are certainly not agreed upon, but it at least helps with the communication.

[Jared]

I think you'll find that "plastic" means someone ODed on the nose reduction slider

 

That's definitely the general idea in photography, but try explaining that to a birder who is talking about the view through his/her binoculars!  Suddenly, there is a whole new, very different definition to the term, and I'm pretty sure it started with a mis translation (or at least a poorly explained translation) on the Leica website and press releases regarding their newest Noctivid binoculars.  As an amateur astronomer with a bunch of binoculars I definitely struggle with that one.  Not just in terms of an imprecise definition, but even understanding a general point or concept.  In photography, I think I know what "plastic" means.  In binoculars?  

 

And don't even get me started on fun terms like "organic" or "digital looking" or "film like."

[LocalHero1953]

I think you'll find that "plastic" means someone ODed on the nose reduction slider

And waist reduction slider?

[Jared]

And waist reduction slider?

 

It's funny... I took a picture of my middle daughter last night for a school ID.  I thought I did a reasonably nice job with the lighting, capturing her personality, addressing skin blemishes since she is a teenager who worries about such things.  It's only a school ID, but I still have standards.  She took one look at the picture and decided her face was too oval and she wanted it rounder.  I ended up compressing the aspect ratio a touch to make her happy.  Very much like the "waist reduction" slider you mentioned.  

 

By the way, can't tell from the photo whether it was taken on the X1D or the CL!

 

 

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Edited March 28, 2018 by Jared

[scott kirkpatrick]

I heard a seminar this week by the guy at Stanford who wrote the selfie-to-portrait distance slider that models faces fairly precisely in order to produce the reduction of distortion that would occur if the picture had been taken at five feet distance with a longer focal length rather than at arm's length with a 28mm-eff iPhone.  The result is not just a more natural, familiar face, but most importantly -- smaller noses!  They have been getting a lot of press out of this because they used it with a group of cosmetic surgeons to show that this could "reduce the number of unneeded voluntary rhinoplasties."

[thighslapper]

With all this business, science is unfortunately confounded by the fact that everything is interpreted by a rather flaky organic imaging and processing system. The human visual process is prone to heavy processing with a lot of material added based on memory and expectations ..... the visual cortex is effectively a huge clarity slider with automatic white balance, exposure, with heal and clone added in for good measure.

 

Similarly you can process camera images to prove or disprove almost anything ...... and carrying out impartial tests is quite difficult. Ideally you would require someone to take photos under identical conditions, a second person to process to an optimum standard, and then a panel of viewers to score both prints and screen images of various sizes to a variety of attributes. Even this is not without problems. Bias is everywhere.

 

To date I have never seen any valid comparisons of ‘overall image quality’ that stand up to critical scrutiny. Expounding at length on DR, resolution, noise, micro contrast and a multitude of other attributes only gets you so far as they are measured by scientific instruments rather than the human eye ......

Edited March 30, 2018 by thighslapper

[eraydinc]

Most common camera comparison problem...

 

 

 

 

500px.com/eraydinc

[Jared]

With all this business, science is unfortunately confounded by the fact that everything is interpreted by a rather flaky organic imaging and processing system. The human visual process is prone to heavy processing with a lot of material added based on memory and expectations ..... the visual cortex is effectively a huge clarity slider with automatic white balance, exposure, with heal and clone added in for good measure.

 

Similarly you can process camera images to prove or disprove almost anything ...... and carrying out impartial tests is quite difficult. Ideally you would require someone to take photos under identical conditions, a second person to process to an optimum standard, and then a panel of viewers to score both prints and screen images of various sizes to a variety of attributes. Even this is not without problems. Bias is everywhere.

 

To date I have never seen any valid comparisons of ‘overall image quality’ that stand up to critical scrutiny. Expounding at length on DR, resolution, noise, micro contrast and a multitude of other attributes only gets you so far as they are measured by scientific instruments rather than the human eye ......

 

 

It's almost like, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics," yes? I can't argue with anything you said.  There is only so much that I think I am "proving" with this comparison--primarily that one can get very similar results out of two very different formats if one is careful with technique and if the subject and lighting are within the capabilities of both cameras.  Much beyond that, and there are too many variables that are next to impossible to eliminate.  You are correct that the biggest factor is probably the human one. 

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[Jared]

Most common camera comparison problem...

 

 

 

 

500px.com/eraydinc

 

Not certain what point you are making.  The futility of camera comparisons?  Just poking fun?  If it was a light hearted jest, no problem!  If you had a more serious point to make, I didn't get it.