RED FILTER: disappointing results
Laura Poole
the recommended 3 1/3 stops...then developed normally (1:75 in Rodinal).
However, when I made the prints, the results were somewhat disappointing.
As promised, TEXTURE was increased greatly (love it!), but the sky tones
were not as dark as I'd hoped. I'd thought they would come out nearly
black, however, they were a medium sort of gray. Is this normal? Was I
expecting too much out of this filter? If not, what can I do to get a
darker sky?
email or post responses please. thanks!
laura
Ty Monson
You can 1. wait for a day with a deep blue sky,
2. combine the red filter with a polarizer, 3. use infrared film
or 4. modify your printing technique.
Try all of the above, and have fun.
John Woo
Here are my $.02 cents on troubleshooting:
You might have overdeveloped. Keep in mind that overdeveloping is not
just a matter of time. Other thing being equal, higher temperatures and
more vigorous agitation will shorter necessary develop times.
Overdevelopment will make highlights wash out and will also bring up
shadow values (i.e. make darks appear gray). Also try shortening the
developing times a bit. Overexposing 3 1/3 can be too much even with the
filter (especially with T-max, which is notorious for
burning out in its highlights). But this depends on what you are metering
off.
One thing that works for me is to meter off the object with the
highest highlight value that you with to record with detail. Then
increase exposure 1 to 2 stops according to how much detail you want to
keep. This will keep the highlights from burning out and will also allow
the shadow values to fall pretty accurately realtive to the rest of the
gray scale.
If you are doing your own printing, experiment with other paper
grades. For instance, you might get different results with a higher grade
paper with the help of a little burning in around the sky portion of the
print.
Hope this helps.
Good luck.
--
John Woo w o o j @ p h a n t o m . c o m New York
"Hwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!...." --B. Lee
Mike McDonald
not red. To get a black sky, one should use the deepest yellow filter available.
The opposite of red is green. Use red to get the plants darker. Since the sky
has some green in it, the red does have an effect. Seems like an orange filter
would do well too. What am I missing?
Mike McDonald Advanced Technology Dept.
Harris Corp.
Email: m...@trantor.harris-atd.com M.S. 16-1912
Voice: (407) 727-5060 P.O. Box 37
Fax: (407) 729-3363 Melbourne, Florida 32902
Darren Taubman
> This has always bothered me. I always thought the opposite of blue was yellow,
>not red. To get a black sky, one should use the deepest yellow filter available.
>The opposite of red is green. Use red to get the plants darker. Since the sky
>has some green in it, the red does have an effect. Seems like an orange filter
>would do well too. What am I missing?
Your only mistake is that you think the sky is BLUE.
The sky is more CYAN than Blue, therefore the RED
filter is the one to use.
If you want really dramatic sky results, (I know you've
read it here before), try the IR film and appropriate
filter (WRATTEN 89B???) on a bright sunny day.
Ty Monson
Mike McDonald <m...@trantor.harris-atd.com> wrote:
> This has always bothered me. I always thought the opposite of blue was yellow,
>not red. To get a black sky, one should use the deepest yellow filter available.
If you start with white light, and then filter away the blue light,
you will have yellow-looking light left.
(I say yellow-looking to distinguish from light such as the sodium
emission doublet which is yellow because the nearly monochromatic
light has wavelength in a region between that which appears red
and that which appears green. - I know, more than anyone really
wanted to know.)
>The opposite of red is green. Use red to get the plants darker. Since the sky
>has some green in it, the red does have an effect. Seems like an orange filter
>would do well too. What am I missing?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The absorption characteristics of the filters.
A yellow filter excludes short wavelengths (blue); an orange filter
excludes blue and a portion of the green part of the spectrum. Both
yellow and orange filters pass red light. A red filter excludes blue
and green; it will pass long wavelengths that we see as red, or that
we don't see as infrared.
A red filter excludes a larger portion of the spectrum than any yellow
or orange filter. Also, the sky light is dominated by blue, with
significant green, and having a highly diminished fraction of red. That
is why the sky *looks* blue on a clear day. Thus, a red filter will
transmit a smaller fraction of the sky light than any other color
of filter. (excluding IR filters.) Of course, that is what you want
if you are trying to reduce the brightness of the sky in your
photographs.
Richard Webber
Blue is the "complement" of yellow.
If you start with white light, and then filter away the blue light,
you will have yellow-looking light left.
(I say yellow-looking to distinguish from light such as the sodium
emission doublet which is yellow because the nearly monochromatic
light has wavelength in a region between that which appears red
and that which appears green. - I know, more than anyone really
wanted to know.)
You're careful distinctions here have caused a terrible insecurity in
me to surface...
So what is yellow light then? Is it monochromatic light of a given
wavelength? Is it a combination of other wavelengths? Both? If
things "appear" yellow then are they *actually* yellow? Or is nothing
actually yellow? While we are on the subject, is brown really a
colour, or is it really dark yellow (as some experiments suggest)?
I'm not sure whether the answers are found in physics or philosophy,
or both.
Richard
P.S. It's not just yellow that worries me, it's all colours - I thought
I could overcome these fears by doing black and white only, but now this
spectre has come back to haunt me in the guise of filters ;-)
William Tyler
>You're careful distinctions here have caused a terrible insecurity in
>me to surface...
>
>So what is yellow light then? Is it monochromatic light of a given
>wavelength? Is it a combination of other wavelengths? Both? If
>things "appear" yellow then are they *actually* yellow? Or is nothing
>actually yellow? While we are on the subject, is brown really a
>colour, or is it really dark yellow (as some experiments suggest)?
This is sort of a matter of definition. Things look yellow to you when
the red sensitive cones and the green sensitive cones in your eye
receive about the same amount of stimulus. This can be accomplished by
giving them a mixture of monochromatic (or thereabouts) red and green,
or by giving them monochromatic yellow, or some combination.
Monochromatic yellow works because the sensitivities of your cones are
rather broad, and overlap, so they will respond to wavelengths that
are a fair distance away from their sensitivity peak. Pure yellow hits
the 'sides' of the sensitive regions of both the red and green cones.
As long as our color vision has only three distinct types of sensors,
there will always be more than one spectral way to produce a given
color sensation.
As examples, the yellow in a rainbow is a relatively pure yellow - not
a mixture, but your color TV gives you a mixture of red and green.
OTOH, B&W film has a fairly smooth, continuous sensitivity curve, and
may not respond to filtration the same way your eye will. As an
extreme example, suppose that you have a filter that passes only a
very narrow range of wavelengths in the yellow area of the spectrum.
If you shoot your TV screen through that filter, yellow images may
well appear black, since the TV image is a mixture of red and green,
not the yellow that your filter passes. (I don't know how broad the
spectra of TV phosphors are - if narrow this is definitely true - if
broad, you may get some yellow component coming through the filter.)
Bill
--
Bill Tyler wty...@adobe.com
exb...@ritvax.isc.rit.edu
is the opposite of green, red is its compliment, that is if you are dealing
with pigments.
eden
Caroline Knight
> So what is yellow light then? Is it monochromatic light of a given
> wavelength? Is it a combination of other wavelengths? Both? If
> things "appear" yellow then are they *actually* yellow? Or is nothing
> actually yellow? While we are on the subject, is brown really a
> colour, or is it really dark yellow (as some experiments suggest)?
Seeing colours and naming them is a great way to find disagreements and
differences.
A long time ago I did an oil painting course, the first part involved
cutting a small round hole in a greyish piece of card. Then when looking
at something before painting it you held up the card and looked at the
colour, isolated from its surroundings. This in itself is incredible, you
soon discovered that something which looked purple only did so because
of the way the other colours around it intereacted with it and to depict
the same interaction with paint you had to go back to the true colours -
you get far more sparkle that way.
And the second part involved learning how to name colours. There was no
such thing as black, white or brown. A black can be a very dark tone
of red or blue for instance but not black. And a brown tends to be red,
yellow or orange biased. Banning these words might seem a bit extreme
but it forces you to look more closely and really work out what the
elements are - and you can cheat at the extremes by saying pinky white,
purpley black.
I've found that this sort of appreciation for colour and ability to see
colour is useful in colour photography even though I'm not trying to mix
my paints to match. Its also created laughter when I've pointed at a scene
and said "oh look a lovely combination of red, blue and yellow" and they'd
looked and seen brown, grey and sandstone...
Of course words like complement and opposite have several meanings
as they are usually applied to both systems based on pigment mixing
and light mixing. Red is the opposite of green in a pigment system
but red is the opposite of cyan in a light system.
I've tried to work out a different system based on eye-response and
using the colour of afterimages as opposites when composing with
colours.
But you need to appreciate the other systems if you are using filters or
mixing paints!
Caroline
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Ty Monson
Richard Webber <r...@nsa.hp.com> wrote:
>In article <2i9ejk...@flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU> mon...@mycroft.ece.orst.edu (Ty Monson) writes:
> Blue is the "complement" of yellow.
> If you start with white light, and then filter away the blue light,
> you will have yellow-looking light left.
> (I say yellow-looking to distinguish from light such as the sodium
> emission doublet which is yellow because the nearly monochromatic
> light has wavelength in a region between that which appears red
> and that which appears green. - I know, more than anyone really
> wanted to know.)
>You're careful distinctions here have caused a terrible insecurity in
>me to surface...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
No reason for that.
>So what is yellow light then? Is it monochromatic light of a given
>wavelength? Is it a combination of other wavelengths? Both? If
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I don't know who the ultimate authority might be on establishing
limits to definitions of color. But "yellow" may refer to
monochromatic light having a wavelength somewhere in the middle of the
range of wavelengths defined by the middle of the visible spectrum
and the long wave limit of visible.(ie between green & red.)
Or, light that looks "yellow"
might be a spectrum having dominant intensities in that range.
In photography, a "yellow" filter may be thought of as a low frequency
band pass filter - or, a minus blue filter.
So "yellow" might refer to wavelenght character of light, or it
might refer to the stimulus response of the eye, or it might refer
to the absorption band of a filter. Simple.
The meaning of "yellow" is unambiguous when people expressly
state that they are talking about photographic filters.
>things "appear" yellow then are they *actually* yellow? Or is nothing
>actually yellow? While we are on the subject, is brown really a
>colour, or is it really dark yellow (as some experiments suggest)?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I guess you need to define "dark". What is a dark color? :-)
You are right that browns are predominantly yellow in character.
In general, colors that we perceive are complex mixtures of many different
wavelengths (or colors?) of light which simultaneously stimulate
sensors (cones) in our eyes. After the stimulation gets scrambled
around in our brains, we perceive something that we try to name as a
color. It gets complicated.
But we need not concern ourselves with those complexities to do
black&white photography. Just remember the general range of
"color" that a filter absorbs. If a subject's color is dominated by
wavelengths that the filter absorbs, it will record relatively darker.
In practice, it is difficult to find subjects where a filter makes
a dramatic difference.
kass...@aule-tek.com
>
>You're careful distinctions here have caused a terrible insecurity in
>me to surface...
>
>So what is yellow light then? Is it monochromatic light of a given
>wavelength? Is it a combination of other wavelengths? Both? If
>things "appear" yellow then are they *actually* yellow? Or is nothing
>actually yellow? While we are on the subject, is brown really a
>colour, or is it really dark yellow (as some experiments suggest)?
>
>I'm not sure whether the answers are found in physics or philosophy,
>or both.
>
How many colors are in the rainbow?
Seven.
Wrong, all of them!
Oh yeah, what about magenta?
Magenta is just anti-green!
The above is an actual conversation I had with a Doctor of
Philosophy who happens to be, among other things, Chairman of a
college physics department...
--
David Kassover "Proper technique helps protect you against
RPI BSEE '77 MSCSE '81 sharp weapons and dull judges."
kass...@aule-tek.com F. Collins
kass...@ra.crd.ge.com
Robert Feltman
blue. It has a lot of "white" in it from scatter off water vapor or con-
tamination like haze/smog/smoke etc.
If you were at 10000 feet on a clear day you would get a much better
respnse from the filter.
Its a matter of figuring out what the optical system is actually looking
at.
Even the polarizer is subject to this effect. With lots of scattered
light there are an abundance of photons that are polarized in such a way
that they arae easily transmitted through the polarizer no matter how
you rotate it or which way you poin the camera.
My son photographs in the sierras a lot, often at 12000+ feet. The air is
so clear (free from scatter points) that sometimes he is dissapointed
because the sky (using slide film) is nearly BLACK! and he kicks himself
for having even used the polarizer!
"green" foilage is not always as green as we would like and our filters do
not gie the desired effect, again, due to a lot of white light coming from
above.
Bob
David Jacobson
>
> Blue is the "complement" of yellow.
> If you start with white light, and then filter away the blue light,
> you will have yellow-looking light left.
> (I say yellow-looking to distinguish from light such as the sodium
> emission doublet which is yellow because the nearly monochromatic
> light has wavelength in a region between that which appears red
> and that which appears green. - I know, more than anyone really
> wanted to know.)
>
>You're careful distinctions here have caused a terrible insecurity in
>me to surface...
>
>So what is yellow light then? Is it monochromatic light of a given
>wavelength? Is it a combination of other wavelengths? Both? If
>things "appear" yellow then are they *actually* yellow? Or is nothing
>actually yellow?
If by color we mean the physiological (maybe I should say
psychological) sensation, then for most colors there are an infinite
number of spectral combinations that give the same sensation. This
gets into eye physiology. Bright and colored light is sensed by the
"cones". Apparently these come in 3 types, ones that sense roughly
red, roughly green, and roughly blue. But these sensors are not sharp
narrow band things, but they are wide with broad spectral peaks. So
any two spectral densities that results in the same stimulus in R,G,
and B will appear the same.
>While we are on the subject, is brown really a
>colour, or is it really dark yellow (as some experiments suggest)?
Yes, but as I said above, you could make brown zillions of different
ways, spectrally.
>I'm not sure whether the answers are found in physics or philosophy,
>or both.
>
>Richard
>
>P.S. It's not just yellow that worries me, it's all colours - I thought
>I could overcome these fears by doing black and white only, but now this
>spectre has come back to haunt me in the guise of filters ;-)
-- David Jacobson
BERNHARD SUESS
cDonald) writes:
> This has always bothered me. I always thought the opposite of blue was yellow
,
>not red. To get a black sky, one should use the deepest yellow filter available
.
>has some green in it, the red does have an effect. Seems like an orange filter
>would do well too. What am I missing?
>
>
> Harris Corp.
> Email: m...@trantor.harris-atd.com M.S. 16-1912
> Voice: (407) 727-5060 P.O. Box 37
> Fax: (407) 729-3363 Melbourne, Florida 32902
>
>
The sky is actually cyan in color (more or less, there are no pure colors).
What is called blue is what most people think of as indigo. The red filter
will darken the sky the most. It will also lighten red, relatively. And darken
green a bit. That's the theory, at least.
I have found in my experiments that there is a dark red filter (B+W #091) that
actually reduces contrast. It's only this particular filter that I've found to
work this way.
Note also that the orange filter will darken the sky more than the yellow, but
less than the red. It also has less effect on green, so is sometimes preferred
for outdoor shots that include a lot of foliage.
I have found in that past that a red filter will not darken a "typical" sky
here in the Eastern U.S. as much as an orange filter will darken the sky in
remote parts of the Western U.S. There are a lot of factors concerning how a
filter will really work and I'd recommend bracketing in any case.
Bernie Suess
a0...@lehigh.edu
kass...@aule-tek.com
>
>This is all very intersting. Several years ago my wife and I painted
>our house ourselves. (Be more honest, David, your wife painted the
>house.) We went wanted it to be esentially gray, but just a tad on
>the cool (blue) side. We picked a little cardboard paint sample in
>the store that looked the closest thing we could find to gray, but a
>tad bluish and bought that color of paint. To our great surprise,
>when we got the paint on the house, it looked sky blue! Yet if you
>hold the little sample against a wall, they are in fact the same
>color.
I believe most manufacturers of chip racks include some attempt
to simulate daylight near the rack. Of course, this is no
substitute for taking the candidate chips to the site where the
paint will be used. Examining them at noon in the parking lot
won't tell you much what the paint will look like in your office
at midnight, when most of the illumination is the glow from your
screen 8-).
The same applies to cosmetics in general, and I believe it has been noted in
this newsgroups that certain brands contain pigments that do not
reproduce well when recorded on certain films with certain types
of light.
>
>Our neighbor is a retired art teacher, and he (essentially) said that
>it is well known in the art community that colors look more intense
>when covering large areas.
>
If you are applying them over anything but white, they will also
dry up darker and possibly more intense than intended.
Also, they will look more intense toward the boundaries of the
surface. The human brain processes optical systems to do edge
detection and enhancement.
YuNoHoo
: >The most compact
: >presentation of the subject I've found so far is:
: >
: > Zelanski and Fisher:
: > "Color"
: > The Herbert Press, 1989.
: > ISBN 0-906969-94-8
: >
:
: I wholeheartedly reccomend something you should be able to find in
: your local library.
Well, if your local library doesn't do interlibrary loans it's not
worth it's weight in paper. Anyway, I suggested the above book as
a handy compact reference that most people would afford owning. The
library comes in handy when you need proof printed color editions.
: Edwin Land's article "The Retinex Theory of Color Perception" in
: Scientific American (1978,9,80?). THis is an excellent, concise
: discussion of colour perecption. I don't have the article handy,
: so I can't give a more precise citation.
Land's theories and experiments are great, but I suggest people
read some basic theory first. However, reading Land will give a
photographer a very useful understanding of why and how the eye
and the camera (er... film) "see" color very differently.
---
Haakon Styri
Haakon Styri
Both of you make sense, and there's a lot more to it. With
no intention to post a lecture on color theories to this
group I'll just make a single reference. The most compact
presentation of the subject I've found so far is:
Zelanski and Fisher:
"Color"
The Herbert Press, 1989.
ISBN 0-906969-94-8
Don't know the current price, but it should be affordable and
it's a nice introduction text and reference for more detailed
study.
---
Haakon Styri
Haakon Styri
: How many colors are in the rainbow?
:
: [stuff deleted]
:
: The above is an actual conversation I had with a Doctor of
: Philosophy who happens to be, among other things, Chairman of a
: college physics department...
Oh yeah, well - you should go read Goethe's color theory...
Anyway, this thread is fun.
---
Haakon Styri
Tim Takahashi
>
>[David's original post and David's attempt to explain deleted]
>
>presentation of the subject I've found so far is:
>
> Zelanski and Fisher:
> "Color"
> The Herbert Press, 1989.
> ISBN 0-906969-94-8
>
I wholeheartedly reccomend something you should be able to find in
your local library.
Edwin Land's article "The Retinex Theory of Color Perception" in
Scientific American (1978,9,80?). THis is an excellent, concise
discussion of colour perecption. I don't have the article handy,
so I can't give a more precise citation.
tim
Norman Diamond
>A long time ago I did an oil painting course, the first part involved
>cutting a small round hole in a greyish piece of card.
Ah, but what colour was the card, really?
--
<< If this were the company's opinion, I would not be allowed to post it. >>
A program in conformance will not tend to stay in conformance, because even if
it doesn't change, the standard will. Force = program size * destruction.
Every technical corrigendum is met by an equally troublesome new defect report.
Kevin Burke
Feltman) wrote:
Is it possible to predict the effect of the filter by spot metering things
through the filter? Maybe the meter has to be adjusted to match the
spectral sensitivity of the film one uses. Is this what Zone VI is
selling?
- Kevin