if you were shooting RAW, you could pull enough latitude out relatively easily to make even color print film look low latitude. if you blend exposures, you can stretch to 20 or more stops of latitude, but then things start looking unrealistic.
Herb... ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 11:43 AM Subject: RE: Film Is Dead / A Contrary View > Now, latitude: As I don't know much about the science involved, I was hesistant > to comment on this, but let's see if my purely lay-person's perspective makes > sense. My experience with my digital cameras, for a couple of years, led me to > agree with the idea that the latitude of the digital was similar to that of > slide film -- i.e., very narrow, exposure quite unforgiving, forget about high- > contrast scenes. However, in processing my recent pictures from Jamaica (in > Photoshop Elements) I was really amazed to see how much detail I could pull out > of the shadows. IOW, I had scenes that, as viewed on the monitor straight off > the memory card without processing, went from white highlights to almost-black > shadows, and yet when I started messing around in PSE, I found that a great > deal of detail had been recorded in the shadows. By working with my shadow > areas in one layer, my lighter areas in another layer and then putting them > together, I ended up with images that had a lot of latitude recorded. Yes it > needed computer post-processing to get all the information to be visible on the > monitor or in a print, but the point is the digital HAD recorded all that. I'm > pretty sure I could not have got all that information out of slides, and I am > not sure I could've got all that out of negatives (harder to tell, though, > without shooting direct comparisons at the scene, which I did not do).
