Future of Photography..?
Carl Madson
[time for a tangent]
Seeing as how 2001 is just a little over a decade away, I was wondering what
our resident sages/crazy people thought might be happening in the realm of
photography/imaging/etc.(?) in ten years (and the intervening period).
Will film still be popular? What percent of consumers, and serious shooters,
will be using electronic imaging devices instead, and will we 'lose' many
folks to video cameras? Will home imaging (/editing/printing/..) computers be
commonplace?
What of the big manufacturers? Any guesses as to where they'll be then? (Or
will there be any up-and-coming competitors?)
What about professional photographers? Will advertisers be looking to avoid the
high costs of location photography, and choose instead some computer or imaging
based alternative? Will the same subjects be popular?
Prices: estimates on new and collectible equipment..?
Will darkroomers gradually transition from chemicals to electronics, will there
be a mix, or ? Only a small set of darkroomers for fine-art photography? Will
regulations put an opressive damper on the use of chemicals at home?
What about the fine arts market? (Will 16x20s from Kodak disks be hip? ;-)
How about ethical issues? The manipulation of 'truth' via imaging techniques?
Showing the world as it really is, vs. making it look better than it is? And
the ever-popular censorship issue?
..und so weiter, ad nauseam...
[I was just mulling this over, thinking of being able to modem digitized images
to a local shop and have them make prints, or slides, or coffee mugs.. or even
being able to afford my own digitizer and printer and do manipulations at home.
Film is so strong now and seems to continually improve; it's also such an effi-
cient sampling and storage medium (WRT time and space, respectively) that it
should be around in a big way even 10 years from now. However, digital imaging
offers so many additional tools that the parallel film-imaging path seems in-
evitable, IMHO. I don't have any idea what the fine-art market will be doing in
a decade, since it's always a bit hard to track; I do suspect that high costs
of location photography will prompt some companies/advertising agencies to try
to combine some studio-based model and product shooting with imaging-based
manipulations of stock photography, for backgrounds & atmosphere. Also, this
method relates to an ethical question: when images can be manipulated at will,
how much of the public's tacit acceptance of photographic 'truth' will be lost?
Will advertisers use more computer-generated imagery, since people find it less
important that the image be a photograph, and thus more 'real'? And so on..]
--Carl Madson, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Greg Finn
>Will film still be popular? What percent of consumers, and serious shooters,
>will be using electronic imaging devices instead, and will we 'lose' many
>folks to video cameras? Will home imaging (/editing/printing/..) computers be
>commonplace?
My somewhat uninformed opinions are:
Ektar @ 400 pixels/mm (200 lines/mm) for 35mm film @ 24mm by 36mm
active area = ~140 million pixels/image. Multiply that times three
die layers and a few bits of intensity/layer and you obtain on the
order of a Gigabit/image. 120/220 format and large format film take a
larger number of bits to represent corresponding to their active area.
Current best CCD array that I have seen is from Kodak (1.3 million
pixel @ $14,000. single quantity price). There is a $25,000. F3 Nikon
databack in beta test that uses this. Therefore CCD image capture
seems today to be ~100 times lower resolution that today's better 35mm
films. Will our lenses let us get to 200 lines/mm? The very best
ones are rumoured to get close now. Ask someone who really knows ...
the data should be available.
Compression could in the future reduce the size of the STORED image
considerably. However, the compression algorithm still needs to see
all the bits to begin with. Data rates are impressively large also.
At five frames/second 5 Gigabits/second gets moved about somewhere.
I would class this as a HARD problem. I don't think this becomes a
practical target to talk about for the year 2000 unless fantastic
strides in integrated circuit technology occur. I will assume that if
they do occur that the compression chips needed to reduce storage
requirements would also be available.
On the issue of high quality printing. Printing from film is a
parallel process. Xerographic style imaging is a serial process. The
former has a linear resolution advantage of at least five even at a
quite large magnification ratio. You are dealing with dye molecules
on the one hand and ink particles on the other. Many people agree
that "good" requires 2,000 dots/inch. 400 dots/inch has been a
practical limit for many years in the Xerographic arena. I have been
told that ink particle size is one of the reasons. Make of that what
you will. Quality color Xerographic printing is still quite expensive
per print. The machines are very expensive and so are materials. I
recently priced some at about $70,000. base sticker. Good luck on the
question of color fidelity. Someone out there is probably an expert
on Xerographic R&D. They should chime in, maybe I'm all wet. I think
that this is another HARD problem.
Digital imaging and manipulation is driven primarily today by
television and graphic arts industries. Normal magazine and TV use
require relatively very low resolution images. In this domain all the
above problems are gone already or soon will be. Real time TV
compression/decompression chips are just around the corner but at only
250,000 to 500,000 pixel resolution/frame. This should improve to
HDTV standards soon thereafter. Motion picture people are interested
in elimination of the film distribution problem ... hoping for
something like video CD's with heavily data compressed images as the
delivery medium to the theatre. Of course, they would still need some
way to screen the image at film resolution. I am really uninformed
about that area.
>What of the big manufacturers? Any guesses as to where they'll be then? (Or
>will there be any up-and-coming competitors?)
Nearly hopeless to predict this. Consider Federal Express and
so on. Who can tell? Look how GE, Sperry, Burroughs ... died in
computers. Who would have though Kodak would be big in batteries???
Who thought the US would be the biggest debtor nation just several
years after being the biggest creditor nation?
>What about professional photographers? Will advertisers be looking to
>avoid the high costs of location photography, and choose instead some
>computer or imaging based alternative? Will the same subjects be
>popular?
I think they will for lower quality ads, quite soon. High
profile synthetic commercials are all over TV. As image synthesis
software improves this becomes tangible even for work with models (Go
rent the movie "Looker" starring Susan Dey. It was an absurdly far
fetched film ten years ago and we are already discussing this as a
real possibility ... in ten more years ... could be). Synthetic
imaging will be able to do things that you cannot do in the darkroom
or with a camera ... create images to suit from scratch. This should
be very interesting to artists.
>Will darkroomers gradually transition from chemicals to electronics,
>will there be a mix, or ? Only a small set of darkroomers for fine-art
>photography? Will regulations put an opressive damper on the use of
>chemicals at home?
I think that fewer people will be using darkrooms as part of
their business certainly. Already foolish regulations are hampering
hobbyists in some "enlightened" municipalities. This is a bit
different though than asking if film will die out. Scanners already
exist that capture as many as 13,000 pixels/inch from negatives or
transparencies. This allows editors to "look" at high resolution
images in whole or in part and manipulate them without necessarily
printing them first.
> ... How about ethical issues? The manipulation of 'truth' via
>imaging techniques? ...
Already a big ethics/copyright problem and it will probably
get much worse. You can digitally copy/cut/paste/alter someone's
copyrighted image. Who owns the modified image. What gave you the
right to modify the image in the first place? Look at what ABC News
already did setting up phony videotape stings made to look "real".
to...@hpldsla.sid.hp.com
enough:
35mm Better qualty than most of the consumers can make use of (much better
then needed)
110 Satisfactory for most entry-level consumers
Disc Died a young death because of insufficient quality.
For electronic still photos to replace film in the print-as-final-product
market, they must get as good as 110 format. 35mm would be nice, but lots more
expensive for little benefit, market-wise.
The price must be lower than SLR's for that market.
Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop
by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an
economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon.
Sensors will drop in price by at least an order of magnitude, and maybe 3,
once a mass-market for them is established.
Software in-camera to "remove" dead pixels (by interpolation from the neighbors)
will allow many more CCD chips to be usable than are now. Reject rates drop
dramatically, followed by price.
A new use of electronic stills will become popular: TV viewing. The adapter
will have to cost <= slide projectors. Low quality is acceptable, even for
High Definition TV, because the screen will still be the limit.
At-home image manipulation can become as popular as home tape recording was
in the 60's. Many people will have access to computers that can accept a
digital image processing board. There could be a new kind of mini-lab that
could handle that medium.
Tony Arnerich
007
In article <19...@unix.SRI.COM> mad...@unix.UUCP (Carl Madson) writes:
>Seeing as how 2001 is just a little over a decade away, I was wondering what
>our resident sages/***crazy people*** [my emphasis - 007] thought might be
happening in the realm of photography/imaging/etc.(?) in ten years (and the
>intervening period).
>
>Will film still be popular? What percent of consumers, and serious shooters,
>will be using electronic imaging devices instead, and will we 'lose' many
>folks to video cameras? Will home imaging (/editing/printing/..) computers be
>commonplace?
I think that electronic cameras will break into the "point and shoot" market.
Their ease of use and quick turnaround are very appealing to snapshooters.
Film will still be popular, probably as popular as now or more so. Computer
imaging still doesn't hold a candle to good ol' silver halides for resolution
and color. Some computer scanners do a damn good job, but CCD's? Not anytime
in the near future. (There was a recent post detailing this subject so I
waste precious bandwidth by elaborating further.)
Home editing will be very popular among the snapshooters with their CCD still
cameras. Don't want ugly uncle Bob draining that beer in the background? No
problem! A few keystrokes and it's bye-bye Bob! Auto color-balancing will be
handy. People could experiment with toning without all those harsh chemicals.
More snapshooters could experience the wonder of black and white. It would
be very easy to convert a color picture to black and white. Another keystroke
(or maybe keys will be obsolete?) and the print could be sepia toned, for
that high-tech old-fashioned look.
>What of the big manufacturers? Any guesses as to where they'll be then? (Or
>will there be any up-and-coming competitors?)
The big film manufacturers might jump on the high-tech bandwagon and offer
the new electronic doo-dads to consumers, or they may choose to focus more
on professional/advanced amatuer supplies. (That would be nice ;-)
>What about professional photographers? Will advertisers be looking to avoid
>the high costs of location photography, and choose instead some computer or
>imaging based alternative? Will the same subjects be popular?
The old-timer professional photographers will always use the antiquated
silver-halide film process, at least until the computerized technology far
surpasses the quality available with silver. (And probably for a while
afterward, too ;-)
Location photography will always be around. Advertisers will constantly need
new scenes, even if only to add to their database. :-) Computer generated
images, even if quite detailed, will always lack the originality of good
old mother Nature. People will soon grow tired of "perfect" photos, and
appreciation of on location photography will grow, even if it does wane
for a time.
Subject choice is almost entirely unpredictable. I imagine it will depend
greatly on the culture at the time. I do think that there will be a wider
variety of subjects chosen; artists will be more free to express themselves.
This reign of censorship will be short-lived. Ooops! Better go dig out
the flame-proof suit. ;-> Nothing quite like an opinion to get people all
fired up! (pun intended, why stop now?)
>Prices: estimates on new and collectible equipment..?
Prices will go up, they always do. Photography equipment, especially the
"good stuff" (Old Nikons, Mamiya, etc.) seem to hold their value and resist
inflation more than other things. There will always be an immense used
equipment market, unless the manufacturers get the brilliant idea to put in
"planned obsolescence", in which case the prices on the good used equipment
will skyrocket, and the popularity of the crap equipment will plummet.
(For a good example, look at the United States' auto industry. Uh, oh.
I feel another flame coming... ;-)
>Will darkroomers gradually transition from chemicals to electronics, will there
>be a mix, or ? Only a small set of darkroomers for fine-art photography? Will
>regulations put an opressive damper on the use of chemicals at home?
The term "darkroom" necessarily implies actual light-sensitive film being
used. There is no need for a dark room when using a CCD camera. (Though it
may be desired ;-) I don't think that the two forms of photography will mix
well. The old-fashioned silver photography will probably be used, and then
transferred to computer via scanners. (I've done this myself, actually.) This
way editing can be done by computer on those awful, inflexible prints before
publication.
I doubt regulations will put any damper on the use of chemicals at home.
Photo chemicals simply aren't that nasty. They aren't nearly as nasty as many
home chemicals that are much more common, and much more misunderstood. If
anything, more chemicals will be allowed in homes in the future as science
advances and people gain a familiarity, if not understanding, of the new
household science. (As an example, take microwave ovens. Very few people know
exactly how the process works, but they are very common. Another example is
the television set, though I think more people know how a TV works, since
it has been around so much longer.)
>(Will 16x20s from Kodak disks be hip? ;-)
Gee, I always wanted to be able to count the individual atoms in a
silver grain! :-) 16X20's from Disk will NEVER be hip!
>How about ethical issues? The manipulation of 'truth' via imaging techniques?
>Showing the world as it really is, vs. making it look better than it is? And
>the ever-popular censorship issue?
CCD photos will certainly be impossible to use for documentation. It's just
too damn easy to manipulate them! The theory that a photo constitutes proof
has already begun to erode. This will merely help the process along.
As I mentioned earlier, people, being the fickle things they are :-), will
soon grow bored with perfection and demand something new. Censorship grows
more out of a public attitude than with how easy it is to censor something.
However, it will be easier to hide the censorship from public view with these
imaging techniques.
--WARNING! BEGIN OPINION---
Actually these techniques are in use TODAY to censor the things we see, uh,
the things we DON'T see actually. In several movies I've seen on the networks,
even suppsedly reputable networks like FOX broadcasting, I've seen blatant
and offensive examples of hidden censorship! From the time-honored "try to
imitate the actor's voice saying something non-offensive even though what
he/she really said fit the entire plot of the film so much better so certain
tight-a*sed people don't start writing letters to the sponsors" trick, (pause
for brain-breath) to actually digitally editing the film so the nude dancers
are now wearing (very jiggly ;-) bathing suits. The first method usually
fails, 'cause they never get the voice quite right. The second method is
fiendishly effective. I've watched movies on network and then seen them on
tape, and boy, was I ever surprised/pi*sed off! Well, I could go on for hours,
but this isn't alt.censorship, so I'll get on with my article.
--END OPINION--YOU WERE WARNED, BUT DID YOU LISTEN? NOOOOOOOO---
One thing silver will ALWAYS have over computers is permanence. Silver
lasts as close to forever as anything when processed right and stored
correctly. (Note that the color dyes cannot make the same claim.) Data on
magnetic media is very fragile, and don't I know it! :-( I don't think
advertisers will risk a million-dollar photo on a $1.50 computer disk.
Color dyes (includes black/grey dyes) will eventually fade, so your
color plots of these pictures will eventually die. Archival black and
white will live on forever, even if only in the form of archival color
seperation prints. And so long as even archival photography lives on, there
will be bored lab technicians, yearning to break the boredom, who will try
something new and creative. (Take it from an old lab technician! Well,
actually I suppose I'm a young lab technician, but it's the same idea.)
Photography is FOREVER!
(I mean REAL photography, none of this pseudo-techni-photo! Uh, oh.
Now I REALLY have to find that suit! ;-)
>
> --Carl Madson, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Keep in mind that much of my article is speculating *way* past the 2001
suggested by the author. My (brief) predictions for 2001:
o CCD cameras will be popular with amatuers who don't want to mess with
the hassle of using film and are willing to sacrifice image quality.
(The same people who put slide shows on videotape. Agh! Kodachrome abuse!)
o Film technology will advance greatly. Grain will shrink, sharpness
improve, etc. etc. Self-balancing color slide films will appear and
flourish among amatuers and on location professionals. Ambient light
photography will become more popular. This will be exagerrated by the
usual increases in film speed. ISO 102400 here we come! Actually, at best
we'll get a *real* 3200 or 6400 ISO film. (None of this see-how-far-we-can
push-800-film bit!)
o Camera technology will make it impossible for anyone's pictures not to
"turn out". Hence it will be very easy for almost anyone to make mediocre
pictures. Pros will hate this technology and stick to their autofocus,
autoexposure cameras. None of this auto-composition crap! (And they'll
have my full support!)
o Fuzzy logic is used in the standard autofocus, autoexposure cameras that
everyone (except beginners) will use. The cameras will have an OPTIONAL
zone-system interpreter put in where the photographer can specify which
zone he wants where, and the camera will expose to comply. Maybe it will
even suggest which filter to use on the paper. (Everyone uses variable
contrast paper except the especially crotchety. :-)
o The Pentax K1000 will still be manufactured, despite about 30 attempts by
Pentax to discontinue it. (Or is that 1991? Can't recall...)
Well, the ol' fingers are getting Key-sore. (When are they going to get those
thought-to-screen translators! ;-) So I'd better call it a day.
Sorry so political today (aka feeble attempt at avoiding flames :-) but I had
a chem final this morning. If you understand the connection, I like you
already!
-- 007
--
000 000 7777 | SBO...@HMCVAX.CLAREMONT.EDU
0 0 0 0 7 | SBO...@JARTHUR.CLAREMONT.EDU
0 0 0 0 7 | "Reality is for the unimaginative" - ???
000 000 7 | "Nejat, can't you control your frosh?" - the dean to my RA
Eugene N. Miya
Opinions follows (send mail if you want elabortation).
>Will film still be popular?
I do not think it will be replaced by magnetic or other digital storage
techology. So yes.
>What percent of consumers, and serious shooters, will be using electronic
>imaging devices instead, and will we 'lose' many folks to video cameras?
You should ask Kodak for figures. I wrote them when I was younger.
And a division of Kodak is on the net. I use a video camera for
reasons different than I use my K1000s or Mamiya. Sure, some loss
occured, but B&W photography still exists.
>Will home imaging (/editing/printing/..) computers be commonplace?
I think against for different reasons. The 2001 equivalent to MacPaint
won't be either "painting" or photography.
>What of the big manufacturers? Any guesses as to where they'll be then? (Or
>will there be any up-and-coming competitors?)
They will diversify. Kodak will be into workstations 8^), Canon will have
copiers and Faxes. And.....
>What about professional photographers?
Composition will always be around. You would probably want a professional
to cover your child's wedding. Institutions will still have professional
documentors.
>Will advertisers be looking to avoid the high costs of location photography,
>and choose instead some computer or imaging based alternative?
This gets debated every SIGGRAPH meeting. Location versus synthesis
will be a fad, to go back and forth. Quality synthetic computer imaging
is not cheap.
>Will the same subjects be popular?
Didn't some one write there are only 9 major themes and everything else is
a variation? Shakespeare perhaps. I know Life believes this.
>Prices: estimates on new and collectible equipment..?
More functional. More expensive. Expect to pace inflation.
>Will darkroomers gradually transition from chemicals to electronics, will there
>be a mix, or ? Only a small set of darkroomers for fine-art photography? Will
>regulations put an opressive damper on the use of chemicals at home?
You have seen Holzman's Beyond Photography book?
I think people who want to deal with the analog, real world
will continue to mix chemicals.
>What about the fine arts market? (Will 16x20s from Kodak disks be hip? ;-)
If art is restricted to 16x20, this would be like thinking drawings are
done on 8.5x11 pieces of paper. It will be around.
>How about ethical issues? The manipulation of 'truth' via imaging techniques?
>Showing the world as it really is, vs. making it look better than it is? And
>the ever-popular censorship issue?
Ethics? Truth? We have a CPSR/SIGGRAPH meeting for you......
Photography has many uses beyond the storing of personal memories.
Surveying, X-raying, reporting news, entertainment, education,
these are all important variations on a theme.
Image analysis and image synthesis are "beyond" regular photography,
but the snapshot will still be around in 2001. And probably VHS as well.
8^)
--e. nobuo miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eug...@orville.nas.nasa.gov
{uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene
Paul Siu
60% still photo camera, and 40% film. Fuji seems to take a different view,
they feel that prints are always more convienent, and higher resolution.
Kodak pretty much feel the pretty much the same way.
In my opinion, the popularity of electronic camera is dependant upon the
popularity of computers. If this so call multimedia become a reality, then
more people may want electronic cameras.
Ron DeBlock
can be produced. I have several reasons for believing this way:
1) Even the average consumer expects high quality in a print. I've heard many
people complain about fuzzy, grainy, low-resolution prints. That's why disk
cameras died off, and 110 is not as popular as 35mm.
2) It's much easier to pass a stack of prints among a group of people than
to set up a viewing session on the TV. Similarly with photo albums.
3) Prints can be easily mailed to freinds and relatives.
4) Prints can be hung on the wall for permanent display.
When good quality prints can be made as inexpensively as today's prints,
that's when still video will catch on.
--
Ron DeBlock N2JSO If God had meant for Man
r...@mtunf.att.com to see the sun rise, He
!mtunf!rdb would have scheduled it
later in the day.
Philip Gladstone
Ron> When good quality prints can be made as inexpensively as today's prints,
Ron> that's when still video will catch on.
I don't agree. 90% of my prints go into the big 'semi-dead' print box.
My filtering / choosing process takes place AFTER I have the actual
print. If the option was to view the pictures on (say) a TV at low
resolution and then take the disc/whatever down to the photo store to
get 4 or so printed, then this could afford to be comparably priced
with printing a roll of 36.
This works out at between 1 to 2 dollars (US) per print -- I guess
that it costs 4-8 bucks to D&P a roll of 36.
If the display on the TV set also allowed cropping information to be
added to the disc, this would be really nice, and might command a
premium price.
Philip
--
Philip Gladstone Dev Lab Europe, Data General, Cambridge, UK
Listen three eyes, don't you try and outweird me, I get
stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Robert Claeson
>>>>>> On 20 Dec 90 19:37:21 GMT, r...@mtunf.ATT.COM (Ron DeBlock) said:
>Ron> When good quality prints can be made as inexpensively as today's prints,
>Ron> that's when still video will catch on.
>I don't agree. 90% of my prints go into the big 'semi-dead' print box.
>My filtering / choosing process takes place AFTER I have the actual
>print.
Well, this is one of the reasons why I shoot slides and have them
developed unmounted. My girlfriend, however, still prefers negative
colour film, and has the lab develop the negatives with a contact
sheet. No prints are being made at this stage. She then chooses what
negs to have prints made of, and what sizes. Both she and I uses
low speed, fine grain films and wants razor sharp big prints, and I
don't think that there will be any video media that can compete
favourably with chemical films for decades to come. Newer, more
fine-grained emulsions are being released every year. No doubt, my
recent $8000 35mm camera investment was a safe one.
--
Robert Claeson |Reasonable mailers: rcla...@erbe.se
ERBE DATA AB | Dumb mailers: rclaeson%erb...@sunet.se
Jakobsberg, Sweden | Perverse mailers: rclaeson%erb...@encore.com
Any opinions expressed herein definitely belongs to me and not to my employer.
Sam Wang
> -----deleted
> fine-grained emulsions are being released every year. No doubt, my
> recent $8000 35mm camera investment was a safe one.
>
> --
> Robert Claeson |Reasonable mailers: rcla...@erbe.se
> ERBE DATA AB | Dumb mailers: rclaeson%erb...@sunet.se
> Jakobsberg, Sweden | Perverse mailers: rclaeson%erb...@encore.com
I'm much more interested in finding out what camera system you've spent
*** $8000 *** for than what film you use in it. Was it made of platinum
or what?
--
Sam Wang Visual Arts Clemson University stm...@hubcap.clemson.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------------
ONG ENG TENG
> recent $8000 35mm camera investment was a safe one.
You just invested $8000??? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. What have you done!
I have about $2,500 worth of Nikon stuff, yet I probably wouldn't
hurt too much if someone runs over them with a tank! This coming from a
guy who was willing to give an arm for a mere FM body ever since he
was appointed his high school's (student population 1,500) one-and-only
official photograher for his junior and senior years, who spent
his first real salary entirely on Nikon stuff, his second
month salary on Leica M-series and his third month salary
on Leica R-series stuff (my family? well, their mouths can wait).
Yes, I could care less if the 3-year old next door play Lego with my
fisheye lens and mint F2AS body. That's what I think of the future
of conventional photography equipment.
As resolution of still video gets better, computer will replace the darkroom;
laser printer will replace the ol' D-76; and Mr. Fuji? Fuji who? (ok, maybe
a few more years is needed). They say that if they improve on cars like they
had improve on PC's the last few years, we would have Honda's that fly to the
moon. Wanna guess what will happen to photography once every other home
has a PC, the price of color laser printer comes down, and the
Taiwanese clone makers has nothing else to work on (after the latest
686 PC)... than maybe super-resolution color still video cameras?
Lawrence Bullis
>From article <1990Dec28....@erbe.se>, by p...@erbe.se (Robert Claeson):
>> No doubt, my
>> recent $8000 35mm camera investment was a safe one.
>
>You just invested $8000??? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. What have you done!
You're all wrong! Anybody really interested in photography will
be coating her own emulsions, compounding his own chemicals, and
building its own cameras out of cardboard and tape, just as they
have been doing all along.
There will always be something to spend money on. So don't worry!
If photography disappears, you could try drawing with burned sticks.
Larry Bullis lbu...@milton.u.washington.edu
School of Art
University of Washington
Ron DeBlock
>has a PC, the price of color laser printer comes down, and the
>Taiwanese clone makers has nothing else to work on (after the latest
>686 PC)... than maybe super-resolution color still video cameras?
Why STILL video? Super resolution moving video and the mechanism
to make high-quality prints cheaply would be even better.
That way, folks can make movies to show on the TV and print out stills
to hang on the wall or mail to friends and relatives.
This would be great for wedding and sports photography - no worry about
missing the right instant. Just record it all, and print out the right
frames later.
ONG ENG TENG
> Why STILL video? Super resolution moving video and the mechanism
> to make high-quality prints cheaply would be even better.
OK, Mr. "Why STILL video?", this is why -
Today's TV resolution is 480 to 525 lines (?), so, super-resolution
can be say 2000x1500 pixels (this is NOT the superVGA) and each pixel
requires 3 bytes (one byte for each primary color, red/green/blue), so
each frame requires 2000x1500x3 = 6 megabytes. Now let say
30 frames per second, how much memories we need for an hour's taping?
6 megabytes x 30 x 3600 = 648,000 megabytes = 648 gigabytes
or more than 1/2 terabytes. Even in a few years, I doubt they can
squeeze that kind of memory (either tape, disk, or RAM) into a
portable cartridge of any kind.
ONG ENG TENG
> It is clear the writing is on the wall. However, don't expect the photo
> manufacturers to rollover and play dead. They will improve their products
> madly, because, if they don't, it's curtains.
The difference between photo manufacturers (i.e. camera, lens, and other
photo accessaries makers) and the computer clone makers are that
the photo guys have a semi-monopoly, they can raise their price to
whatever the market will bear (and they have for decades now), whereas the
clone makers have true competition. You think the photo guys wanna be in
the same market as the clone makers?
ONG ENG TENG
>
> How much memories we need for an hour's taping?
>
> 6 megabytes x 30 x 3600 = 648,000 megabytes = 648 gigabytes
>
> or more than 1/2 terabytes. Even in a few years, I doubt they can
> squeeze that kind of memory (either tape, disk, or RAM) into a
> portable cartridge of any kind.
>
>
> (*3*) orders of magnitude. Ever heard of iterated function systems?
> 1000-fold compression is the name of the game. And don't forget that one can
> play games like sending only the parts of they frame which has changed, etc.,
> etc. Conclusion: Real time video is here today (on your Macintosh or PC)
> with high definition just a blink away.
Can anone explain can how a thousand time compression works? I can imagine
how they can make a LCD/LED color panel with 2000x1500 pixels, but a thousand
time compression? You have to do some selling. (and please do).
Vladimir G. Ivanovic
The difference between photo manufacturers (i.e. camera, lens, and other
photo accessaries makers) and the computer clone makers are that
the photo guys have a semi-monopoly, they can raise their price to
whatever the market will bear
Welcome to Economics 101: Price your product so the market will just clear.
If you don't you're not making the return you could.
(and they have for decades now), whereas the
clone makers have true competition.
Hmmm, let's see now. Fuji doesn't compete with Kodak and Canon doesn't
compete with Nikon and none of the mail-order places in NY compete. I guess
you're right.
You think the photo guys wanna be in the same market as the clone makers?
What's your point here? The clone market is a commodity market whereas the
VCR/imaging market is high technology.
--
==============================================================================
Vladimir G. Ivanovic Sun Microsystems, Inc
(415) 336-2315 2550 Garcia Ave., MTV12-33
vlad...@Sun.COM Mountain View, CA 94043-1100
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself. Your mileage will vary.
==============================================================================
Vladimir G. Ivanovic
Can anone explain can how a thousand time compression works? I can imagine
how they can make a LCD/LED color panel with 2000x1500 pixels, but a thousand
time compression? You have to do some selling. (and please do).
"The Science of Fractal Images," H-O Peitgen, D. Saupe, eds. Springer-Verlag,
1988, Chapter 5, Fractal modelling of real world images. This is an ancient
reference.
Michael Barnsley's company, Iterated Function Systems (?), is developing
systems which will do real-time compression/decompression using unpublished
algorithms (you can't patent algorithms) derived from the Collage Theorem.
Recent news accounts suggest that the latest all-digital HDTV proposal by AT&T
and some other company is due primarily to advances in data compression.
ONG ENG TENG
> Welcome to Economics 101: Price your product so the market will just clear.
> If you don't you're not making the return you could.
> compete with Nikon and none of the mail-order places in NY compete. I guess
> you're right.
Well, when the clone makers start on making super-resolution cameras and
other accessaries that will infringe on the traditional photo market,
Nikon and Canon will have to compete with the clone makers. Perheps you
miss the first part of this issue-in-discussion. Either you or someone else
has already acknowledged indirectly on this board that such compatition is
inevitable. Do you have (or read) all previous articles in this discussion?
ONG ENG TENG
> 1988, Chapter 5, Fractal modelling of real world images. This is an ancient
> reference.
I have played some with fractal graphics. Wooooo... can it REALLY
input and compress video image on the fly (and I mean thousand time
compression)?
> Michael Barnsley's company, Iterated Function Systems (?), is developing
> systems which will do real-time compression/decompression using unpublished
> algorithms (you can't patent algorithms) derived from the Collage Theorem.
Ha, ha. Unpublished? Hhmmm... he might have something (or everything).
But the secrecy part does remind me of the infamous "Yang" (sp?) 286-AT
motherboard few year back (yeah, the 286 AT that runs at 200 MHZ?). But
again, he might be wholely legitimate.
> Recent news accounts suggest that the latest all-digital HDTV proposal by AT&T
> and some other company is due primarily to advances in data compression.
Did they say how much advance? How many times compression? Cost an arm
and a leg, maybe?
scott.t.questad
I don't know. Your average clone maker looks for inexpensive parts that he
can put in a box that will have a lower cost to him than the next clone maker.
I think the competition will be with the accessory/software vendors. Look
at the digital scanners that are currently available. For the clone maker
to jump into computerized photography would take a significant investment plus
R&D, which is not a strong suit of your average clonester.
Scott
Ron DeBlock
<Now let say
<30 frames per second, how much memories we need for an hour's taping?
<
<6 megabytes x 30 x 3600 = 648,000 megabytes = 648 gigabytes
<
<or more than 1/2 terabytes. Even in a few years, I doubt they can
<squeeze that kind of memory (either tape, disk, or RAM) into a
<portable cartridge of any kind.
Good point, but consider the following:
1) I have on my desk a tape drive which uses 8mm video tapes to store
2.4 gigabytes of data. Since I got that drive, the manufacturer
(Contemporary Cybernetics) has released a drive that will store
10 GB on the same tape. That's a factor of 4 increase in a year's
time.
2) A Seagate sales representative told us that their goal is to double
storage capacity every year, without building a larger physical unit.
I have a 1.2 GB disk drive (5.25 inch, full height). Since I got
that drive, Seagate has announced a 2.4 GB disk.
Ten GB on a small tape is available NOW. Using Seagate's estimate of storage
capacity increases (which is conservative, IMHO), a 1 TeraByte unit should be
available in 8 years.
I've seen 1 TB optical disk systems about 1 cubic meter in size.
Data storage technology is advancing VERY rapidly. I keep an eye on storage
capacity, since I deal with digitized speech in my work. I'm concerned with
storing several hundred hours of speech on a desktop PC.
ONG ENG TENG
> I don't know. Your average clone maker looks for inexpensive parts that he
> can put in a box that will have a lower cost to him than the next clone maker.
> I think the competition will be with the accessory/software vendors. Look
> at the digital scanners that are currently available. For the clone maker
> to jump into computerized photography would take a significant investment plus
> R&D, which is not a strong suit of your average clonester.
By the word clone makers, I mean folks who design and produce motherboard,
not those cheap-components-in-a-box setup (anyone could do that!).
ONG ENG TENG
Good point. But can you put them into a box the size of today's camcorder
bearing in mind you still need a good battery to run the memory device.
William M Barnick x73638
>From article <VLADIMIR.9...@prosper.EBB.Eng.Sun.COM>, by vlad...@prosper.EBB.Eng.Sun.COM (Vladimir G. Ivanovic):
>
>input and compress video image on the fly (and I mean thousand time
>compression)?
>
>> Michael Barnsley's company, Iterated Function Systems (?), is developing
>> systems which will do real-time compression/decompression using unpublished
>> algorithms (you can't patent algorithms) derived from the Collage Theorem.
>
Just to add some comments to above ... First of all you can PATENT ALGORITHMS.
I previously worked in the Imaging Science Lab, you would put these people
out of business if you couldn't patent algorithms.
Secondly, compression is a trade off in image quality. Yes you can get
compressions up to 1:1000, but you really don't want to print the stuff.
There are many good compression algorithms on the market right now that
do a good job and hide the amount of error. You see, part of the problem
with compression is losses. There are two types of compression on the
market lossy and lossless. A *lossless* compression can completely restore
an image upon reconstruction, but its compression ratio is usually quite
low. The more common compressions are *lossy* such as JPEG and Image Squeeze
(Image Squeeze is marketed by Kodak). Depending on how much you compress
will result in how much image detail can be lost upon the uncompression.
In mathematical terms you can see how much detail difference/loss has occured
by subtracting the compressed/uncompressed image from the *orginal* image.
Certainly the differences are usually very small and can not always be seen
within the image content, but occasionally you will find an image that
fools the compression in such a way as to create a poor uncompressed result.
Also there are many ways to compress, compression algorithms that take
into account some knowledge of photoscience and color space usually have
better results that the blind type of compressions which treat the image
as nothing more than a block of data.
Third point, someone had mentioned digital images as large as 1000 x 2000
pixels. That is certainly good enough for HDTV, but is barely enough
for a high quality print image. Color negative film still has a lot of
detail in the 2000 x 3000 pixel range, not to mention the very low grain
of Ektar films. As PhotoCD becomes available and there are more sources
for digitally scanned images you will begin to see the image detail issues.
See Ya ...
WMBarnick
Disclaimer: Opinions are solely my own.
Robert Claeson
>From article <1990Dec28....@erbe.se>, by p...@erbe.se (Robert Claeson):
>> No doubt, my recent $8000 35mm camera investment was a safe one.
>You just invested $8000??? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. What have you done!
Bought a camera, two expensive lenses and a flash. The whole setup should
cost around $4000 in the U.S. The $8000 price is what one has to give for
it in Sweden.
Greg Finn
> ... someone had mentioned digital images as large as 1000 x 2000
>pixels. That is certainly good enough for HDTV, but is barely enough
>for a high quality print image. Color negative film still has a lot of
>detail in the 2000 x 3000 pixel range, not to mention the very low grain
>of Ektar films.
Ektar/Velvia resolves approx. 180-200 lines/mm. ==> 360-400
pixels/mm or about 150,000 pixels/sq. mm. Since 35mm film has an
active area of 24mm x 36 mm ==> 864 sq. mm., this implies aproximately
130 million pixels/35mm image. My data books make me reasonably sure
of this. Some technical expert on the area please correct me if I am
wrong. By way of comparison, the Kodak image chip (7mm x 9mm) at 1.3
million pixels is claimed to have the highest commercial resolution
today.
Each pixel contains color and intensity information. How many
bits of data/pixel? Assume three planes of color data, say, RGB.
There is intensity data in each plane that is at least as good as
video displays today that use eight bits. 20 bits/pixel of color and
intensity data is an approximation. The 130 million pixels ==> 2.5
billion bits/image or a bit more than 0.25 billion bytes/image. This
is the full fidelity, uncompressed image data requirement.
For the last 40 years R&D has been done looking for
commercially viable, higher resolution and thinner screens. The
cathode ray tube, 1930's technology, still remains largely
unchallenged. The best color tubes of which I am aware have not
passed 2000 x 2000 pixel resolution. This is a really big stumbling
block. The amount of data/35mm frame and by implication the
incredibly high transfer rates necessary to store this in under a
second is another reason why this is a hard problem.
Whether or not the mass market will dump film and settle for
much lower resolution but clearly practically achievable video images
in the near future is an imponderable. Where the lower resolution is
acceptable, such as TV, newsprint, or lower quality magazine images,
digital imaging will probably replace film. It is already doing so.
Thomas Permutt
> Ektar/Velvia resolves approx. 180-200 lines/mm. ==> 360-400
>pixels/mm or about 150,000 pixels/sq. mm. Since 35mm film has an
>active area of 24mm x 36 mm ==> 864 sq. mm., this implies aproximately
>130 million pixels/35mm image. My data books make me reasonably sure
All of the discussion along this thread seems to ignore the fact that much
of the information recorded on film is in fact noise. For a fairly extreme
example, take those donuts you get when you have a point source out of focus
with a catadioptric lens. Sure, they have size and color and zillions of
other bits of information in them, but what do they tell you about what you
saw? Hardly anything--they tell you about your lens. Similarly chromatic
fringes, blurring by focus or movement, dust specks, distortion of straight
lines into curves (it takes very few bits to describe a line if it really is
straight).
Electronic imaging will be better than silver film when, if and to the
extent that we learn to characterize the signal in an image, which will not
only allow compression but also improvement by removing the noise. I don't
think it is a matter of pixels and resolution. Do you take a lot of pictures
of resolution test targets, or things that look like them? I don't: I'm
interested in resolution only because of the limitations of the medium, which
make errors in recording parallel lines a lot like errors in recording things
I'm interested in.
This is not to say that photographers do not make artistic use of the
limitations of the medium. Of course, you like those donuts, blurs and so on.
But the same will be true of new media with different limitations. The point
is, electronic imaging should not be judged on its ability to reproduce the
same noise, but on its ability to convey a beautiful signal, whatever that is.
For my ears the main advantage of compact audio disks has very little to do
with the number of bits on a disk. It has to do with the fact that coughs in
the recording session and scratches in the disk do not look to the digital
processor anything like music, so they are not played as sounds.
William M Barnick x73638
>In article <16...@venera.isi.edu> fi...@dalek.isi.edu (Greg Finn) writes:
>> Ektar/Velvia resolves approx. 180-200 lines/mm. ==> 360-400
>>pixels/mm or about 150,000 pixels/sq. mm. Since 35mm film has an
>>active area of 24mm x 36 mm ==> 864 sq. mm., this implies aproximately
>>130 million pixels/35mm image. My data books make me reasonably sure
>
>All of the discussion along this thread seems to ignore the fact that much
>of the information recorded on film is in fact noise. For a fairly extreme
>example, take those donuts you get when you have a point source out of focus
Your statment is rather misleading, much of the information recorded on
film is infact *not* noise. That is a leading advantage of film today.
The Signal/Noise ratio is much lower that that compaired to video types
of Signal/Noise ratios. Grant it that we are comparing apples and oranges
but the fact is that you can usually store quite a wide dynamic range
on film while video still has a much narrower range (besides the lower
pixel count). Also you can carry this even a step further, when talking
about color space you will find far more colors available on present film
than on a video screen (although neither color map overlaps the other
entirely.
>
>I don't
>think it is a matter of pixels and resolution. Do you take a lot of pictures
>of resolution test targets, or things that look like them? I don't: I'm
Once again you are being misleading or misled ... the issue is that if a
test target looks bad there is no way your images will look *good* no matter
what your subject. Just like your sterio system is usually quoted as being
able to play up to 20,000 hz (even though few can hear this high), it is just
as important that film response be above what most people can perceive.
>
>For my ears the main advantage of compact audio disks has very little to do
>with the number of bits on a disk. It has to do with the fact that coughs in
>the recording session and scratches in the disk do not look to the digital
>processor anything like music, so they are not played as sounds.
Once again, sorry but you have been miss informed. If you have a CD disk
you will hear the "coughs in the recording session", but you will not hear
the "scratches in the disk". It is really to technical to discuss in this
photo news group, but check it out yourself. The audio CD's are designed to
avoid and replace bad data before you even hear it as sound because of
the method in which the bits are placed on the disk.
See Ya ...
WMB
(just my own opinions)
Mitchell Wyle
>1) I have on my desk a tape drive which uses 8mm video tapes to store
> 2.4 gigabytes of data. Since I got that drive, the manufacturer
> (Contemporary Cybernetics) has released a drive that will store
> 10 GB on the same tape. That's a factor of 4 increase in a year's
> time.
It is not clear that Exabyte 8mm will survive the onslought of DAT
(4mm) which is a "standard" and not proprietary. DAT tape drives are
already less expensive and if audio consumers start going dat, the
media will soon follow. At work, we currently use exabyte drives so
we'll continue to buy and use 8mm, but if we had to start over from
scratch, we'd probably go with dat.
Those 10 Gb are compressed. Real storage is *only* 5 Gb ;-O. Data
densities on magnetic media will probably peak out this century, but
there might be a factor of 100 times the current density to be squeezed
out.
>2) A Seagate sales representative told us that their goal is to double
> storage capacity every year, without building a larger physical unit.
> I have a 1.2 GB disk drive (5.25 inch, full height). Since I got
> that drive, Seagate has announced a 2.4 GB disk.
Seagate is not doing all that well financially. Be careful whom you
bet upon and keep your eyes open to other vendors.
>Ten GB on a small tape is available NOW. Using Seagate's estimate of storage
>capacity increases (which is conservative, IMHO), a 1 TeraByte unit should be
>available in 8 years.
I agree with this prediction, but put the availability date two years sooner.
>Data storage technology is advancing VERY rapidly. I keep an eye on storage
>capacity, since I deal with digitized speech in my work. I'm concerned with
>storing several hundred hours of speech on a desktop PC.
Also, don't forget those silly, clever mechanical things like jukeboxes,
which add a factor of 20 to available storage.
The Kodak photo-arhival on CDs might pan out if more CDs get attched to
computers. I personally plan to get a CD drive for my PC to use
encyclopediae, writers' tools, and other neato-computer-stuff but would
prefer not to spend more than $300 for the drive, so I am going to wait
another year or so. There is no technical reason that you can't plug
your diskman into your computer now; Sony/Phillips just want to milk
the computer market a bit longer...
$20 is not expensive to archive 100 slides or prints. The fast access
and database capabilities for your computer or tv screen is already
worth it for pros and probably to many serious amateurs. I can't see
spending lots of time in a color digital darkroom (on my pc) trying to
crop/expand/manipulate photos, though. The quality and resolution is
still too poor.
* * *
My problems with digital photography are:
1. The transduction stinks. Scanning b/w pictures with a 300 dpi x 24-bit
grey-scale scanner is an art. I rarely get much more resolution than
simply xerox copying the picture.
color scanners, from what I've seen are not much better.
the current still video digital cameras produce pictures which are
nowhere near as good (in any respect) as normal photos. Why trade
down?
2. The software is all weak. Passing filters over pictures to improve
their quality is still an art. Choosing proper parameters is very
difficult. It is much easier to work in "analog" on location and in the
darkroom with 19th century technology photography tools.
3. The gear is expensive for the manufacturer to produce. The NeXT-
dimension board for the NeXT machine is nice. It's not nearly up to
the quality we need to do photography but is good enough for video.
It is too expensive. I don't see market demand bringing the price down
soon.
Every few years, a new technology hails the death of classical
photography. First there was color photography. "Black-and-white will
die!" they said. Then came instant pictures. Remember polaroid? Then
came home video. Now we have these silly, expensive digital toys.
Real photography is not going away soon.
Go ahead, convince me I'm wrong.
ONG ENG TENG
> [deleted]
> Every few years, a new technology hails the death of classical
> photography. First there was color photography. "Black-and-white will
> die!" they said. Then came instant pictures. Remember polaroid? Then
> came home video. Now we have these silly, expensive digital toys.
>
> Real photography is not going away soon.
>
> Go ahead, convince me I'm wrong.
Maybe not death, but let say... (traditional photography) be used for
only magazine work and other specialitie. The home market can easily
electronic way because
1) you don't have to take the film to the lab
2) you don't have to wait (ok, even for an hour)
3) you don't have to pay (for developing and printing) each time you
shoot
4) no nosy lab people looking at your private pictures and maybe even
printing some for themselves to keep
5) store more easily and safer since negatives in my opinion requires
more stringent enviroment for storage; also negatives take up
more space eventually
6) can be transmitted thru phone line (modem or something newer)
without lost of details (yea, grandma wants the picture too!)
7) more important: if you don't like your look, maybe you
can do a little change (to your photo) a little here and there...
Of course, all these relies on the technology (that reaches the market)
in a few years from now, not that of now. Convinces?
yera...@cthulu.enet.dec.com
In article <1991Jan5.0...@eng.umd.edu>, tper...@eng.umd.edu (Thomas Permutt) writes...
>In article <16...@venera.isi.edu> fi...@dalek.isi.edu (Greg Finn) writes:
>> Ektar/Velvia resolves approx. 180-200 lines/mm. ==> 360-400
>>pixels/mm or about 150,000 pixels/sq. mm. Since 35mm film has an
>>active area of 24mm x 36 mm ==> 864 sq. mm., this implies aproximately
>>130 million pixels/35mm image. My data books make me reasonably sure
>
>All of the discussion along this thread seems to ignore the fact that much
>of the information recorded on film is in fact noise. For a fairly extreme
>example, take those donuts you get when you have a point source out of focus
>other bits of information in them, but what do they tell you about what you
>saw? Hardly anything--they tell you about your lens. Similarly chromatic
>fringes, blurring by focus or movement, dust specks, distortion of straight
>lines into curves (it takes very few bits to describe a line if it really is
>straight).
>
>Electronic imaging will be better than silver film when, if and to the
>extent that we learn to characterize the signal in an image, which will not
>think it is a matter of pixels and resolution. Do you take a lot of pictures
>of resolution test targets, or things that look like them? I don't: I'm
>make errors in recording parallel lines a lot like errors in recording things
>I'm interested in.
>
>This is not to say that photographers do not make artistic use of the
>limitations of the medium. Of course, you like those donuts, blurs and so on.
>But the same will be true of new media with different limitations. The point
>is, electronic imaging should not be judged on its ability to reproduce the
>same noise, but on its ability to convey a beautiful signal, whatever that is.
I can see two arguments against your assertions. First, that many of the
images that *I* take are in fact like resolution test targets, and second,
that what I'm recording is, in fact, recording mechanism noise, not
image.
Last things first (recording system noise): Well, aren't things like
lens nonlinearity (pincushion/barrel) one of the primary issues that
divide lenses that are merely sharp versus those that are truly excellent?
Don't we rate lenses (and films) as to how accurate a rendition they
provide, on how little they've affected the image? I know that I do.
What makes an image like a resolution test target? I claim it's having a
large amount of detail, and that detail is important. Removal of that detail
makes the image either significantly less appealing, or completely
worthless.
I'll admit that in portraiture there are large areas of either insignificant
detail or no detail at all. But I rarely do portraiture; I admit
frankly that I'm not very good at it.
What I do use a camera for often (and enjoy, and delude myself into thinking
that I know what I'm doing) is shoot scenics. Slow film (almost always Ektar
25), tripod or _solid_ brace against a rock, tree, etc. (I remember vividly
spending several minutes hanging onto the railing of a bridge, waiting for a
lull in the traffic so the bridge would stop vvvibbbrattttingggg. The results
of that exposure were worth the wait.
But- you say- I can't possibly see all that detail in a little
3.5x5 print. I agree. I use the 3.5x5 as proofs and get blowups of
the images that are worth it. Depending on my mood and pocketbook,
either I do them myself or get them done on a local Create-a-Print
machine (I don't like letting my prized negatives out of my sight;
a phobia that I'll have to overcome if I ever want a 20x30.)
I'll admit that on many of these images the detail present isn't
the information; a fractal compression algorithm would probably
work very well against the foliage-covered mountains and river.
It would probably take several Cray-minutes to run, too, and I certainly
can't carry the Cray around (I'd need the Cray somewhere between my
image sensor and the recording medium; I can't just backend process
the image at the darkroom).
The other area where I take pictures is of text; pages of books.
It's cheaper for me to bulk-load Plus-X and photograph the pages
of library books I want copies of than for me to use the local
Xerox (tm) machines. It's also more convenient- no lines to wait
in, 70 pages of information fit in one negasaver; etc. It takes a
magnifying glass to get the information back, but that's OK. I know
it's there, and I _can_ turn the saved image back into paper for
perhaps 3 cents per double-page spread (which I rarely need to do).
Besides, not every place has a convenient Xerox(tm) machine. I was at
a friend's house, she had a recipe for black-bean soup that I wanted.
So I took a picture of it. No problem.
(Sure- if I had a Kurzweil "reading machine" or an OCR scanner, I could
have processed the text down into ASCII characters, and gotten some
phenomenal compression ratio. But again- I don't *have* a Kurzweil,
and even if I had one, I probably wouldn't carry it around with me.
-Hints-
When doing any sort of document work, it's much more studly to use a
Minox, but a 35mm is easier. If using an autoexposure camera,
use override metering or the "sunny-16" rule. Documents are sufficiently
white that they will fool just about every camera autoexposure
system that I've ever used. A 1.5 to 3 stop overexposure is about right
(depends on how white the base paper is. Newsprint isn't even close to
white). If you can't go to full manual, quarter your film speed dial
setting (i.e. shoot ASA 400 film at the ASA 100 setting) to get an
adequately white background.
(of course, if your documents are printed in white ink on black paper,
reverse everything I said. For colored paper, meter a blank (unprinted)
area, and then add two stops more light.)
Watch out for glare coming off the surface of glossy paper. It's
darn annoying to dodge and burn around, and it will fool even your manual
metering.
-Bill
Copyright 1991 William S. Yerazunis (aka Crah the Merciless)
All rights reserved, no responsibility taken.
"It is thermodynamically impossible to stuff a genie back into a bottle."
William Warburton
> with the number of bits on a disk. It has to do with the fact that coughs in
> the recording session and scratches in the disk do not look to the digital
> processor anything like music, so they are not played as sounds.
This paragraph highlights a point that has been occurring to me occasionally
when seeing articles in this thread (I should apologise in advance for the fact
that I havn't studied all of the thread and may be duplicating/offending here).
The comparison of photography and audio recording may well be all too appropriate
here. It seems to me that there is a real risk of analogue photography going the
same way as analogue audio. I make the following observations and leave the reader
to assess the implications.
In analogue audio, the majority of the end users were using poor quality
equipment to play music (that is, inexpensive record/tape decks) therefore CD
had a very high perceived advantage despite it's higher cost. It is arguable that
analogue equipment provides better quality reproduction to those who are prepared
to indulge in it but for Joe Public CDs sound "better". Since Joe Public and his
mates buy most of the music, the record companies are only pressing CDs. The rest
of us are left with... well, we don't really know yet, but it costs more and is
harder to get hold of.
In analogue photography, the majority of the end users are using poor quality
equipment to take pictures (that is, inexpensive P&S cameras) therefore Digital
Photography (DP ?) may well have considerable perceived advantages (as discussed,
in the "Future of Photography" thread ?) e.g. image manipulation on home computer,
easy access to picture library, no D&P, instant pictures...
I can forsee a situation arising where keen amateurs can buy quality cameras
and use real film as long as they are prepared to use specialist services to
obtain film D&P etc. at whatever price these services will then command.
The photography "industry" will be geared up to provide services to people
using digital equipment at various levels e.g. P&S, Sophisticated Cameras with
Interchangable lenses and Higher resolution, Specialist gear for press work etc.
This is OK by me as long as I perceive (subjectively, I don't mind about the
numbers if I can't see the difference) no degradation in the quality of the
pictures I take ( an improvement would be nice ). This was not the case in the
transition to digital audio where I perceive a considerable degradation in the
quality of music reproduction between my (admittedly very expensive) record deck
and the CD machines I have heard (which include some very expensive equipment
as well: Quite beyond my means).
Whatever happens it should be interesting and will cater for most photographers
(since that is where the profits are). If my requirements are different from the
majority in some way (as, for example, my desire for quality audio reproduction
is) then I would not be surprised to find that I cannot afford to fulfil them.
W.
Greg Finn
>All of the discussion along this thread seems to ignore the fact that much
>of the information recorded on film is in fact noise. For a fairly extreme
>example, take those donuts you get when you have a point source out of focus
>with a catadioptric lens. Sure, they have size and color and zillions of
>other bits of information in them, but what do they tell you about what you
>saw? Hardly anything--they tell you about your lens. ...
Tell that to someone generating a 16 x 20 inch blowup from a
portion of a negative. Evaluation depends upon the application. If
digital imaging can't reach the limits that analog film has reached
... then its application domain is likewise limited by comparison.
>Electronic imaging will be better than silver film when, if and to the
>extent that we learn to characterize the signal in an image, which will not
>only allow compression but also improvement by removing the noise. I don't
>think it is a matter of pixels and resolution. Do you take a lot of pictures
>of resolution test targets, or things that look like them?
A large blowup IS a resolution test target.
>For my ears the main advantage of compact audio disks has very little to do
>with the number of bits on a disk. It has to do with the fact that coughs in
>the recording session and scratches in the disk do not look to the digital
>processor anything like music, so they are not played as sounds.
That is a subjective statement. For others it is the fidelity
that is most important. The fidelity of CDs is due to an application
of pure mathematics. There are absolute statements that can be made
about it (absolute reconstructible fidelity to the recorded
information from 1 Hz to 22.2 KHz if anti-aliasing filters utilized in
recording). Talk to someone who knows Fourier analysis and sampling
theory. Coughs in the recording session are faithfully reproduced, if
recorded, along with wheezing, page turning noises .... The digital
to analog circuitry does not look for coughs. Scratches on the disk
if small enough are eliminated via the error dectection and correction
codes placed onto the disk along with the music.
Thomas Permutt
>In article <1991Jan5.0...@eng.umd.edu> tper...@eng.umd.edu (Thomas Permutt) writes:
>>All of the discussion along this thread seems to ignore the fact that much
>>of the information recorded on film is in fact noise. For a fairly extreme
>>example, take those donuts you get when you have a point source out of focus
>
>Your statment is rather misleading, much of the information recorded on
>film is infact *not* noise. That is a leading advantage of film today.
>The Signal/Noise ratio is much lower that that compaired to video types
>>
>>think it is a matter of pixels and resolution. Do you take a lot of pictures
>>of resolution test targets, or things that look like them? I don't: I'm
>
>Once again you are being misleading or misled ... the issue is that if a
>test target looks bad there is no way your images will look *good* no matter
>what your subject. Just like your sterio system is usually quoted as being
I certainly don't mean to mislead. I agree that if your camera and film
can't take good pictures of test targets, they can't take good pictures of
anything else, either. On the other hand, I might be able to paint or
describe or produce an electronic image of something nice without being able
to do the same for a test target. This is the sense in which I mean that
the importance of resolution is a characteristic, indeed a limitation, of
the medium itself.
You have seen those pictures of Abraham Lincoln with about 20 pixels, right?
They still look to the human eye like Lincoln. So suppose I have a
computer that recognizes Lincoln and retrieves and pops out a picture of him
taken on 8x10 film, while you take a 35mm picture of him. I could
then show a better-looking picture, with better "resolution," than yours,
even though I only recorded 20 pixels.
I am not saying there is such a computer, or will be soon. I am saying that
if you have a medium that is very good at recording for individual points
whether the image is light or dark there, and not at all good at recognizing
patterns, you get in the habit of thinking that quality is determined by
how many such points you can have. If on the other hand I had a system that
could recognize a donut as an out-of-focus point source and print it as
a very small, bright dot, I might learn to like it, even though it produced
an image different from the one projected on the film by the lens. I think
such improvements are more likely in an electronic medium than in a purely
chemical one.
Thomas Permutt
>
>Last things first (recording system noise): Well, aren't things like
>lens nonlinearity (pincushion/barrel) one of the primary issues that
>divide lenses that are merely sharp versus those that are truly excellent?
>Don't we rate lenses (and films) as to how accurate a rendition they
>provide, on how little they've affected the image? I know that I do.
>
orange photons from the same source and push them along different paths
to the same place on the film. Another way to achieve the same effect
would be to take photons that pass through the red and blue and green
and orange areas in a color fringe on a negative produced by a bad lens
and make them go to the same place on a print. This requires being able to
distinguish a chromatic fringe from a rainbow. My claim is that in the
future about which we are speculating, a computer that can do this might
cost less or work better than a good lens.
>What I do use a camera for often (and enjoy, and delude myself into thinking
>that I know what I'm doing) is shoot scenics. Slow film (almost always Ektar
>25), tripod or _solid_ brace against a rock, tree, etc. (I remember vividly
>spending several minutes hanging onto the railing of a bridge, waiting for a
>lull in the traffic so the bridge would stop vvvibbbrattttingggg. The results
>of that exposure were worth the wait.
>
So suppose instead of simply superimposing all the instantaneous images that
went into your camera in the fraction of a second that you left the shutter
open, you had a camera that could say, "This one, from the first millisecond,
looks a lot like this one from the last millisecond, but shifted. Let's see
what it looks like if I register them before superimposing." Now vibration
doesn't produce a blur anymore, right?
>
>The other area where I take pictures is of text; pages of books.
>It's cheaper for me to bulk-load Plus-X and photograph the pages
>of library books I want copies of than for me to use the local
>Xerox (tm) machines. It's also more convenient- no lines to wait
>in, 70 pages of information fit in one negasaver; etc. It takes a
>magnifying glass to get the information back, but that's OK. I know
> .....
>(Sure- if I had a Kurzweil "reading machine" or an OCR scanner, I could
>have processed the text down into ASCII characters, and gotten some
>phenomenal compression ratio. But again- I don't *have* a Kurzweil,
>and even if I had one, I probably wouldn't carry it around with me.
>
Exactly the point. If you are willing to think of your books as collections
of ASCII characters rather than as black and white spots, there is not
nearly so much "information" in them as it seems if you count pixels. I
think eventually the same will be seen to be the case for other photographic
subjects, and machines that you can carry around may work better than
cameras for some "photographic" purposes, while storing much smaller numbers
of bits than it's claimed are recorded on film.
Mike Swatko
Distribution: world
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
In article <1991Jan5.0...@eng.umd.edu>, tper...@eng.umd.edu
(Thomas Permutt) writes:
> All of the discussion along this thread seems to ignore the fact that much
> of the information recorded on film is in fact noise. For a fairly extreme
> example, take those donuts you get when you have a point source out of focus
> with a catadioptric lens. Sure, they have size and color and zillions of
> other bits of information in them, but what do they tell you about what you
> saw? Hardly anything--they tell you about your lens. Similarly chromatic
> fringes, blurring by focus or movement, dust specks, distortion of straight
> lines into curves (it takes very few bits to describe a line if it really is
> straight).
>
> Electronic imaging will be better than silver film when, if and to the
> extent that we learn to characterize the signal in an image, which will not
> only allow compression but also improvement by removing the noise.
As you point out, artifacts such as chromatic fringes, "depth of field",
and other optical "distortions" are all characteristics produced by optical
systems involving lenses. Unless in your electronic imaging you intend to
remove all optical lenses from the system, these artifacts will still be
present in an electronicly recorded image as they would be on an image
recorded on film.. The only way I can think of removing lenses from an
electronic imaging system is ray tracing or some other synthetic means of
image creation. Even our own eyes involve lenses and are subject to such
"distortions".
> For my ears the main advantage of compact audio disks has very little to do
> with the number of bits on a disk. It has to do with the fact that coughs in
> the recording session and scratches in the disk do not look to the digital
> processor anything like music, so they are not played as sounds.
CD players don't know what music is supposed to look like - they'll play
whatever bits are recorded on the CD whether those bits are music, talking
or coughs (so long as the bit checksums match up).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Swatko ! swa...@airbag.dec.com
Digital Equipment Corporation ! swa...@airbag.enet.dec.com
Corporate User Publications Engineering ! swatko%air...@decwrl.dec.com
Nashua, New Hampshire ! ...!decwrl!airbag.enet!swatko
===========================================================================
Thomas Permutt
It is indeed a subjective statement, and the first three words explicitly
label it as such. My point is precisely that the subjective impression
audio CD's make on me is not entirely determined by all this math, and
I think the same is likely to be true for some kinds of electronic
imaging eventually.
I talk to myself quite enough already, thank you. Sorry if I was wrong
about coughs.
"Error detection and correction" consists of a circuit reading certain
bits off a disk, deciding they are wrong because they are inconsistent
with other bits, and producing sound in accordance with what they should
have been instead of what they are. Well, I claim that certain
light intensities at the film plane are similarly wrong: they can
reliably be supposed to result from optical aberrations, and they should
be corrected. I am not claiming to have an algorithm to do this: it is
much more complicated than audio disks. I am saying when and if this gets
done, it is likely to be in a digital medium; and at the point where
at least some people see the resulting pictures as subjectively better than
silver ones, your calculations may still show that they have fewer bits in
them.
I seem to have given the impression that I think resolution is not important
because I only look at little pictures. This is not what I meant at all.
What I am saying is that resolution is a very good way of judging present-
day apparatus. But someday, just as I might like a low-fidelity but
noiseless disk, you might like a low-resolution but extremely sharp
picture.
Greg Finn
>Yes, we rate lenses on there ability to take red and blue and green and
>orange photons from the same source and push them along different paths
>to the same place on the film. Another way to achieve the same effect
>would be to take photons that pass through the red and blue and green
>and orange areas in a color fringe on a negative produced by a bad lens
>and make them go to the same place on a print. This requires being able to
>distinguish a chromatic fringe from a rainbow. My claim is that in the
>future about which we are speculating, a computer that can do this might
>cost less or work better than a good lens.
You are suggesting that a PC plus a very-high resolution color
scanner will be cheaper than a good lens? This sounds more reasonable
for a volume lab to install. Note that the scanner has to have a lens
itself that is capable of at least as good resolution as the film can
capture, otherwise information is lost when scanning.
>So suppose instead of simply superimposing all the instantaneous images that
>went into your camera in the fraction of a second that you left the shutter
>open, you had a camera that could say, "This one, from the first millisecond,
>looks a lot like this one from the last millisecond, but shifted. Let's see
>what it looks like if I register them before superimposing." Now vibration
>doesn't produce a blur anymore, right?
By the way, there is no such thing as an instantaneous solid
state picture. CCD array sensors take time to absorb an image just
like film. For example, some lens/CCD cameras are rated at ISO 100.
There are other issues. If there is any subject movement
(not camera movement), then your anti-shake algorithm could
UNfaithfully reproduce your original image. If you zig but a portion
of the image zags, what do you want, a sharper mountain or muddy leaf
edges on wind whipped trees in the foreground?
Mitchell Wyle
the issue somewhat by telling us:
>In analogue audio, the majority of the end users were using poor
>quality equipment to play music (that is, inexpensive record/tape
>decks) therefore CD had a very high perceived advantage despite it's
>higher cost. It is arguable that analogue equipment provides better
>quality reproduction to those who are prepared to indulge in it but for
>Joe Public CDs sound "better". Since Joe Public and his mates buy most
>of the music, the record companies are only pressing CDs. The rest of
>us are left with... well, we don't really know yet, but it costs more
>and is harder to get hold of.
There is a fundamental difference between recording your own music and
playing back studio music. Likewise there is a big difference between
buying framed landscape posters at K-mart, and taking your own pictures.
Thomas Permutt
>As you point out, artifacts such as chromatic fringes, "depth of field",
>and other optical "distortions" are all characteristics produced by optical
>systems involving lenses. Unless in your electronic imaging you intend to
>remove all optical lenses from the system, these artifacts will still be
>present in an electronicly recorded image as they would be on an image
>recorded on film.. The only way I can think of removing lenses from an
They will be present in the electronic "negative," yes. An at least partly
electronic medium (for all I know, it could involve scanning silver negatives)
would seem to offer the best chance of correcting these imperfections between
the camera and the "print."
Matt Nelson
Alow me to sum up the issue as I see it...
O.K. Chemical films can presently store more information than any reasonable
digital image-getter can. However, digital *may* be possible if one has a
wristwatch-sized supercomputer doing various shades of image/abberation
recognition capable of replacing the actual information with some sort of
'tokenized' equivalent of the original image. Fine. Such data compression/
reduction techniques may alow you to have your little computer-camera.
But wat if you *want* those abberations, or if you *want* that blur for
that action shot, or if you *want* that sun/iris flare for a neato scenic
shot, or if you *want* to use some weird lighting effects? Then you are
s.o.l. By having the camera identify/correct (tokenize) and remove all
of the possible artifacts of using a real-world camera (which is the only
way that such a camera is possible), you will also eliminate almost all
of your creative power.
Just my $0.02
-matt
William Warburton
> There is a fundamental difference between recording your own music and
> playing back studio music. Likewise there is a big difference between
> buying framed landscape posters at K-mart, and taking your own pictures.
referring to my comparison between the death of the analogue music
industry and the potential implications of digital photography on emulsion
based photography.
I agree entirely but feel that this is largely irrelevent since the thrust
of my argument was that the future of photography was more likely to be
determined by the mass market and the marketing strategies of the suppliers
than by any technical limitations perceived by a minority market.
I feel that this is relevant to the future of photography, particularly
from the perspective of enthusiasts. I am well aware of the differences
between the two media and am unsure of how closely the two developments
may be compared: it is for this reason that I phrased my posting as a set
of observations rather than as a dire prediction of doom.
I indicated in my posting that I felt that it was up to the reader to
interpret the observations- if you think them irrelevant then that's ok
by me (in fact, I hope you are right !).
I apologise to anyone else who thinks I was confusing the issue, but was
too polite to say so.
Incidentally, does anyone know of any attempt to integrate digital
storage technology with existing equipment? It seems to me that it ought
to be possible to fit a sensor array of some sort into the back of a
conventional camera, perhaps connected to a remote processing/storage
unit. This would increase the flexibility of the camera and, perhaps,
reduce the complexity of the digital system.
Thanks,
W.
Greg Finn
> Incidentally, does anyone know of any attempt to integrate digital
>storage technology with existing equipment? It seems to me that it ought
>to be possible to fit a sensor array of some sort into the back of a
>conventional camera, perhaps connected to a remote processing/storage
>unit. ...
Yes. Kodak data back for a Nikon F3. It uses their new 1000
x 1300 pixel CCD chip. Coaxial cable from back to back-pack that
contains disk drives and batteries. Cost is rumoured to be > $20,000.
Carl Madson
I also have some info from a small company that has been making (for the last
couple of years+) a finder/'head' for an F3 that holds a small video camera,
and hoses into a display system (I can't remember if they also had a storage
system, but it would be simple to get a VCR or frame grabber). One of their
applications was for medical operations, where a doctor could verify the 'view'
of the camera on a video monitor, and use a foot switch to capture crucial
moments of the operation on film. The system was well under the $20K Kodak
price, as I recall.
Dan Allen suggested putting together something like the Kodak system some time
ago, getting the benefits of digital imaging via a simple camera-back replace-
ment. You use a coax run to a computer, so you don't have the freedom of a
all-in-one handheld, but for many (studio) uses it would be a neat, lower-
priced alternative, and you wouldn't suffer the compromises inherent in trying
to store 50 images somewhere within your camera (and thus having to resort to
the inadequate resolution of present still video cameras). It would have limi-
ted markets, though, and it's still tough to get a single CCD with high res.
in anywhere near the size of a 36x24mm frame. (You'd probably end up using a
smaller image size and your 'normal' lens would be effectively longer.)
--Carl Madson, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Mike Swatko
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
In article <1991Jan8.1...@eng.umd.edu>, tper...@eng.umd.edu
(Thomas Permutt) writes:
> They will be present in the electronic "negative," yes. An at least partly
> electronic medium (for all I know, it could involve scanning silver
negatives)
> would seem to offer the best chance of correcting these imperfections between
> the camera and the "print."
Assuming that someone can actually create this intellegent system that
is able to operate on images to remove all optical aberrations, refocus out
of focus areas, undo "doughnut" highlights, unblur the results of camera
jiggle, etc. What has this gained you? You get a very sharp, clear image
with infinite depth of field. In general, would it be worth all the expense
of creating this special hardware and software for sharp pictures with
infinite DOF? Maybe for special purposes or for correcting a real "once in
a lifetime" image, but I see it's actual value as it applied to general
photography to be very limited. Photos that are all tack sharp with
infinite DOF would get pretty boring pretty fast.
One of the great things about photography is its ability to produce very
exacting images of things we see at relatively low cost. Such a hardware/
software system is likely to be very expensive and not be comercially
feasible for quite a long time. I know that research in these areas has
already been able to produce some good results, but by the time something
like this becomes a consumer item, it's likely that we'll be interfacing
with computers in plain english (or pick your own) language on a daily basis.
stephen Samuel
>
>>would be to take photons that pass through the red and blue and green
>>and orange areas in a color fringe on a negative produced by a bad lens
>>and make them go to the same place on a print. This requires being able to
THere is a group in Toronto who are supposed to be doing work on stuff like
this right now.
Apparently they can do things like refocus an image and un-blurr a (smoothly)
moving object. It helps, of course, if they are told things like the focal
length of the camera and how far the focus is out, but I'm sure that somebody
with a good eye could learn to guess things like that, after a while.
--
Stephen samuel !alberta!obed!steve st...@obed.biochem.ualberta.ca
Don't be nice -- be compassionate. Compassion is what nice tries to emulate.
ONG ENG TENG
>
> I also have some info from a small company that has been making (for the last
> couple of years+) a finder/'head' for an F3 that holds a small video camera,
> and hoses into a display system (I can't remember if they also had a storage
> system, but it would be simple to get a VCR or frame grabber). One of their
> applications was for medical operations, where a doctor could verify the 'view'
> of the camera on a video monitor, and use a foot switch to capture crucial
> moments of the operation on film. The system was well under the $20K Kodak
> price, as I recall.
[deleted]
I own a small digital camera, the EDC-1000 from Electrim Corp, cost $400
including interface card for PC, cable, camera body, a c-mount 8mm
lens, and software. I called and was also able to get the library
routines for accessing the camera directly free. The resolution is
196x165x256 gray tones non-interlaced, 196x330x256 interlaced. It produced
a convincing running image on a VGA screen, looking like a b&w video
camera. You can control the exposure time via the computer while
aperture and focusing is set manually on the lens. Besides being like
a video camera, it can print image onto a laser printer via the proper
word publisher (WP 5.1, yahhh!) and look at a photograph. The actual size
of the camera body is only 2" x 2" by 1.5".
I got a c-to-Nikon mount convertor and now uses my Nikon lenses on the
EDC-1000. However, because the actual surface of the CCD is only
1.64mm x 1.64mm, imagine my 105mm lens actually becomes something like
a 800mm lens. The only pain there is is the focusing. However, I know
there used to be some Vivitar autofocus lens that can be mounted
on non-autofocus camera. That should make it more versatile.
Also, with a set of red/green/blue filters, color still picture can be
made (although I have not tried).
In fact, it is my discovering of this camera that convinced me that
electronic imaging is the way to go. The main point is CHEAP! At
$400, most of the readers reading this article could probably
afford it!
Zoltan Levay
> There is currently a flurry of activity along these lines at the Space
> Telescope Science Institute in an effort to do as much restoration as
> possible to the out-of-focus images from the Hubble telescope.
> (Hello Zolt, any comments on this?)
Hi Dyer! Not to be too picky, but the images from the HST strictly are
not just out of focus. The primary mirror suffers from spherical
aberration. The result is that the images do in fact have a sharp
component, but much of the light is spread out far from its intended
position resulting in halos around bright images. The sharp core means
that the fundamental resolving power of the optical system is as good
as it was designed to be. The aberration takes away light from the
center of bright images and spreads it out, so the limiting brightness
of the observations is not as faint as it should be.
Check out a "portrait" lens (I think they still even make them). They
have spherical aberration intentionally introduced to soften an
otherwise sharply focused image.
> Unfortunantly, for
> many optical systems, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the PSF
> varies from place to place across the image and sometimes depends on
> other factors such as time, aperture, length of exposure, etc.
Let's not forget the wavelength of the light, temperature and other
physical properties of the instrument, etc.!
> I would expect that the deblurring
> algorithm would have to have intimate knowledge of the particular
> optical system that produced the out-of-focus image.
...resulting in a theoretical PSF, a method sometimes used for
astronomical images if a suitable PSF star is unavailable.
--
Zolt
donl mathis
> Distribution: world
> Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
>
> In article <1991Jan8.1...@eng.umd.edu>, tper...@eng.umd.edu
> (Thomas Permutt) writes:
> > They will be present in the electronic "negative," yes. An at least partly
> > electronic medium (for all I know, it could involve scanning silver
> negatives)
> > would seem to offer the best chance of correcting these imperfections between
> > the camera and the "print."
>
> with infinite depth of field. In general, would it be worth all the expense
> of creating this special hardware and software for sharp pictures with
> infinite DOF? Maybe for special purposes or for correcting a real "once in
> a lifetime" image, but I see it's actual value as it applied to general
> photography to be very limited. Photos that are all tack sharp with
> infinite DOF would get pretty boring pretty fast.
By "once in a lifetime", i assume you mean, oh, something like a
tidepool at Point Lobos, or little graveyard next a church in the
southwest with the last bit of sunset glinting off the crosses, or a
tangled redbud tree in the forest, or perhaps the monolithic face of a
large granite structure? Hm, yes. Once in a lifetime, yes. Boring,
well, that's a matter of opinion!
I give photographs extra points for being so "good" (by my definition)
that there is nothing in it to remind me that it's a photograph while i
view it. That includes grain, fuzzy spots, obviously wrong color (if
we must have color), and/or obviously wrong tonalities. I realize that
creative use of a limited depth of field is an essential part of small
format photography, particularly when the camera is (or must be) hand
held with the aperture wide open. The decision about what to do with
the soft spots is, and i agree, *should* be, left up to the
photographer. However! The depth of field problem in large format
work is quite different. There, the photographer is often striving for
sharpness over the entire field, and when this cannot be obtained after
clever use of all available resources, the photograph goes into the
circular file. Now, if the ones that make it through the sharpness
test are boring, it's because the photographer made them that way. Of
course, if the photographer is so inclined, these same controls can be
applied to move the sharpness in the opposite direction. But that, in
my opinion, should be saved for a special "once in a lifetime" image,
where the photographer is simply trying to attract attention by being
wierd because he was neglected as a child. :)
If removing fuzziness is all it takes to turn an interesting photograph
into a boring one, i might be inclined to think (in a very general way)
that fuzziness was being used more as a crutch than a tool. In other
words, limiting depth of field should be a functional part of the
small-format photographer's repertoire, and possibly even find its way
into the photographs *most* of the time. But if the photographer is
not carefully considering whether or not this is the "right" thing to
do, he or she may be missing out on some interesting possibilities.
Outdoor Photographer has an article this month on using fuzziness to
improve photographs. I thought it was mildly interesting, and in one
of the several examples, i even agreed that the fuzzy one was better!
In most cases, though, at least from that small sampling, i would have
started back at the sharp image, and found other ways to improve it,
rather than just throwing everything else out of focus and calling it a
done deal. "Work harder, think more, make better photographs!"
More in line with this thread as it has evolved so far, though, i don't
remember anyone mentioning large format when talking about the
resolution numbers. You realize, of course, that when you do those "at
8 bits for each color, that would take 27 Mumblebytes of storage"
calculations, that for a 4x5 photographer, it goes up by another factor
of 13 or so, and for an 8x10 photographer, it's by 53. Some of us
aren't willing to give up those pixels, and even though i make my
living in pixels, they can't do *everything* best.
--
- donl mathis at Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
There is One.
Dyer Lytle CCS
Algorithms for removing instrument functions are will known in astronomical
image processing and certainly some of these techniques can be applied to
many other types of images. However, some of the best deblurring programs
are some of the most expensive as far as computing time.
There is currently a flurry of activity along these lines at the Space
Telescope Science Institute in an effort to do as much restoration as
possible to the out-of-focus images from the Hubble telescope.
(Hello Zolt, any comments on this?)
Many astronomical photographs contain images of stars (surprise!) and an
isolated star can be considered a point of light. By analyzing the light
distribution of this point of light in the unfocused image the "point
spread function" or PSF for the image can be determined. If the blur
isn't too bad, and if the PSF is well behaved, deconvolution methods
can be applied to restore the image to sharp focus. Unfortunantly, for
many optical systems, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the PSF
varies from place to place across the image and sometimes depends on
other factors such as time, aperture, length of exposure, etc.
Since most day-to-day photographs that you and I take do not contain
points of light I would imagine the deblurring problem is more difficult
than with astronomical photos. I would expect that the deblurring
algorithm would have to have intimate knowledge of the particular
optical system that produced the out-of-focus image.
Removing motion blur may actually be a simpler problem if the rest of
the picture is in focus since the problem is defined better, we know
whats going on physically. Of course if you have motion blur in an
image that is also out of focus the two problems might compound one
another.
--
Dyer Lytle, National Optical Astronomy Observatories, Tucson, AZ, 602-323-4136
UUCP: {arizona,decvax,ncar}!noao!lytle or uunet!noao.edu!lytle
Internet: ly...@noao.edu SPAN/HEPNET: 5356::LYTLE or DRACO::LYTLE
Chris Best
that action shot, or if you *want* that sun/iris flare for a neato scenic
shot, or if you *want* to use some weird lighting effects? Then you are
----------
Nobody said you'd be FORCED to use the correction capabilities, just that
they'd be AVAILABLE. You seem to have no problem imagining all these neato
things as possible (probable?), but you can't imagine an on/off switch?
I'm with you, by the way - I like to use a camera to CREATE images, not to
simply RECORD them. Images that don't exist until I say so.
Thomas Permutt
(quoting somebody)
I promise you, any new system will have wonderful new kinds of weirdness
that can be manipulated for creative effect.
mne...@vmsa.oac.uci.edu
>In article <2789FFA...@orion.oac.uci.edu> Matt Nelson <nelson@Matt Nelso> writes:
>>
>[stuff deleted]
>>
>>But wat if you *want* those abberations, or if you *want* that blur for
>>that action shot, or if you *want* that sun/iris flare for a neato scenic
>>shot, or if you *want* to use some weird lighting effects? Then you are
>>s.o.l. By having the camera identify/correct (tokenize) and remove all
>>of the possible artifacts of using a real-world camera (which is the only
>>way that such a camera is possible), you will also eliminate almost all
>>of your creative power.
>
>I think that perhaps you miss the point that DSP (digital signal
>processing) gives you the *choice* of whether you put in subtle
>chromatic abberations (or leave them in, if scanned from a film) or
>not, etc etc.
I have not missed the point. I understand that if you have an off-line
system for scanning/manipulating/storing/printing, you can have it do
whatever you want. The point was that, at this time, the only way you could
have a handheld digital camera with emulsion-like resolution would be to
*reduce* the amount of information you have to store for each shot. Digital
storage media just havent progressed far enough to be able to file away
all of the info in a super-duper-way-high-resolution digital image (at least
in a gadget you can carry around with you). Presumable the data reduction
would take the form of image (or abberation) recognition systems which could
replace lines/circles etc with a brief object description (as well as other
similiar schemes). If you do this sort of information reduction, you flush
some of your creative possibilities.
-matt
> Hamish
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Hamish Reid Sybase Inc, 6475 Christie Ave, Emeryville CA 94608 USA
>+1 415 596-3917 ham...@sybase.com ...!{mtxinu,sun}!sybase!hamish