[wim]

First, Wim, it was not my intention to attack you. Sorry for the "apparently tonemapping is something you know only by rumors?" and for not regarding what you wrote in that post, I just remembered you saying in another thread 5...6 f-stops are enough dynamic range for you. Obviously I got that wrong, if so - my bad.

 

Btw. film had more than 10 f-stops DR, depending on development and exposure. You don't need to believe me, it's just what I read at Bruce Barnbaum's "The Art of pohotgraphy - An Approach to personal expression". I like his work a lot. He talks about 18 zones, not only 10, but on the other hand he doesn't use a densitometer - so, one can ask how big his logD really was. No matter what, his results are convincing. And even if we're limited today with paper, screens or beamers: Not long ago a screen with full Adobe RGB was nearly impossible to make. Now we're already talking about 8k screens with lots of color depth. I learnt that sometimes the best moments to look at a picture happen a while later.

 

Thank you, JoJu, for the clarification and for saying sorry.

 

FYI, there is a difference in the number of zones, and actual DR. What we do with tone mapping, and teh Zone System, is effectively mapping the DR of one medium to a DR on teh other,which genrally are different. This means changing the gamma, either in a linear way, which in teh Zone System is done mostly by exposure and development of tfilm, and with tone mapping by using an automated option, or partially, like with dodging and burning, or manually tone mapping.

 

As to the 18 zones Barnbaum is talking about, I think that what he meant is that he had 18 zones avaialble with which he could play in thsi regard. 18 stops is about the range of a very brightly lit landscape, from the brightest spots to the darkest shadows. Lookign at what you cna do with film, I guess 18 zones is about right from a tone mapping POV, but you'd have to compress these zones by gamma adjustment before processing the negatives already. This likely means overexposing by approximately 3 f-stops for B&W film and underdeveloping quite a bit. I wouldn't think the results would be extremely pretty, rather low in contrast, based on my own experience, but it can be done I guess.

 

I still have the printed Kodak film profiles and grey wedges somewhere back from the days when I did this type of stuff with film, but I haven't looked at it in years now - no more need .

 

The 5-6 stops of DR I was talking about, is the DR of prints on paper. This is why printers have profiles, in order to make photographs look better, generally speaking. Effectively they also do tone mapping, based on the DR it receives, in combination with the colours it actually can print. From that POV life has become a lot easier . Of course, goor photoprinters allow you to upload printer profiles, but then, most decent image processing software allows you to create printer and paper profiles as well.

 

Technology does advance indeed. I find it a lot easier to make my prints look like they did back in my darkroom days, although I find that because of all the additional fine tuning one can more easily do, I spend about as much time processing my own photographs as i used to do back then .

 

Kind regards, Wim