Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

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On a slightly related tangent, every time I see someone post a "#nofilter" photo on facebook I have to bite my tongue to stop from asking them how their camera managed to separate the RGB channels without a Bayer (or similar, eg Foveon) filter.

I mean, I sort of get what they are saying and I hate the overuse of Instagram filters probably much more than the next guy, but the odd relevance people place towards getting an image "directly out of the camera" is bizarre considering the incredible number of decisions (sometimes correctly, often not) the average digital camera has made for you in getting the measured light into a jpeg.

Personally I much prefer to shoot in RAW and then post-process because cameras, as amazing as they are in some ways, are still incredibly dumb when it comes to context and intent and I'm going to do a better job at getting the white balance, dynamic range, contrast, etc right (for how the shot was intended) than the camera is.

Regarding no filters, I've been shooting on 35mm film for the last year and been really enjoying it, almost never have to color correct, and the photos look so damn good! (especially skin tones)

I just do develop + scan at the drug store, no prints lol.

Doesn't work for everyone though, as waiting a day for photos might not be ideal (but I enjoy the anticipation heh).

Is the store's scan resolution decent? The last time I asked about that sort of service (a few years ago), they only offered scans at some completely awful resolution, e.g. ~1k pixels across...

That's actually massively filtered most of the time. The colour corrections are done at scan time (just as they were at print time with standard photofinishing in times past). If you were developing/printing in a home darkroom in ye olde days, you'd expect a good print on the third sheet of paper (well, the 2.25th sheet, since you'd only use a quarter-sheet for the rougher adjustments) after fiddling with filter packs or the settings on a dichroic enlarger head. (Slide shooters needed to use CC filters at shooting time.)

Digital can give you pretty much the same skin tones as you'd get with a given film (Fuji's out-of-camera JPEGs are very close to the films they're named after); it's just a matter of matching the response curve of the film you want to emulate, and that takes some fiddling that most people don't take the time to do. (Capture One has much better default conversion curves than most raw conversion software, especially where skin tones are concerned. But you can profile your camera and create your own defaults in most software.) Film does have some advantages, especially when pulled to increase its dynamic range, but it's not fundamentally better than digital, just different.

Yes, regarding the scanning, this is true... I will say though that I've tried photographing (digitally) my own negatives to see how similar it was to a drug-store scan, and it was pretty close color-wise.

However, I would have to disagree about skin tones unless you can provide some examples to sway me. I've googled a lot of comparisons and have yet to see one that looked as good. I find that the way digital captures just makes the skin look quite harsh, and reveals flaws. I personally think digital needs to make more changes to the sensor itself to really step up the quality. Foveon is an awesome example, but not fully there yet in my opinion.

It's almost certainly the other way around esp. by your description of 'harsh' skin. Likely something lossy in the film process gives the effect you like (if it is even real... it's easy to imagine all sorts of visual differences that aren't real when you know stuff)

I appreciate #nofilter. Color correction and enhancement is one thing, but not every selfie or food pic needs to be antiqued. Most filter usage seems to be an attempt to cover up crap lighting and careless composition with "irony".

I don't think anybody's intending for their filtered photos to be ironic. It's just aesthetics... old photos are low-fi in a way that's pleasing, while grainy blue-tinged cell phone pics are not. With one tap you can hide the latter with a filter that makes it look like the former. It's a simple thing and it's no big deal.

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