Film & Darkroom
I enjoyed developing my own film and prints back in the day. But I’ve adopted the digital darkroom fully since I transitioned to digital cameras. Film is definitely a slower, more thought-out process. Film choice and proper exposure are critical to the success of the image. Plus the limitations of a film roll, with only 12, 20, or 36 exposures, requires more discipline and planning.
Darkroom processing is a meticulous and often repetitive optical & chemical science. Trying to bring out the full tonal range (Zone System) of the photograph requires the right photo paper, enlarger exposure with dodging and burning, and chemical processing – an often frustrating and tedious process. But a successful silver print is incomparable and artistically satisfying.
Chemicals and photo paper were pricey then and even more now. During my transition from film to digital, I tinkered with ink-jet printing large photographs using wide-carriage HP & Canon printers & paper. Although the results were good, you can’t really compare the end product to a luminous silver print.
Digital Photography
These days, generating images digitally has too many advantages to ignore. The main one is the immediacy of sharing images taken with phone or digital cameras near real-time. The ability to process & manipulate a digital image interactively is infinitely more flexible. The digital process has, in my opinion, the ability to transform whatever the camera can capture into what you saw or envision and more. Purists, which I am not, would not edit out power-lines or other elements that are distracting or intrusive. I prefer to use the digital darkroom’s many features to enhance the photograph & eliminate distractions. For example, if there is a large brightly-lit rock in the foreground. Reducing its brightness so your eye doesn’t get pulled from the main subject is something I’d do. There are also technical advantages to digital image processing such as optical lens or noise corrections, white balance and expanded dynamic range. So although I miss watching a silver print image appear in the developer. That desire is not strong enough to pull me away from trying to master digital imagery.
Digital Darkrooms
Which brand of digital camera you choose is mostly subjective or influenced by a photographic need. Although the technical specs of one camera can leap frog another. They all can eventually generate a superior digital image. You can say the same about photography software. There are a lot of great digital darkroom software programs available. I like to experiment with different programs on the same images to see what they can do to speed up the process.
My current favorite programs are Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop. But the learning curve to master these two powerhouse programs is steep. Adobe Lightroom gets better and better with every iteration especially at AI masking. The current version of Lightroom, version 12, can automatically detect individual people and separately mask different parts of their face & body. Sky & object masking are also useful but become essential when used in combination. The Sky mask can be combined (‘intersected’) with the Linear Gradient mask so adjustments look more natural. An Object Mask can select a foreground item and improve separation from the background.
Combined with Photoshop, this pair can do pretty much anything you need in a digital darkroom. I usually do not support subscription software but $10/mo for Adobe’s Photography Package (Lightroom & Photoshop) is worth it to me. Especially with each update adding new extremely useful AI editing features.
DXO Photolab 6 does much of what Lightroom does but with a superior optical & noise reduction engine. It works especially well with micro43 images. It also has AI features that streamline the auto-masking of image elements. Plus there are image enhancement presets that can generate great results quickly. This is my newest software so I am still learning much of what it can do. I’ve used the trial versions of Photolab 5, 6, and DXO Raw. When Black Friday came, I bought Photolab 6 Elite. Unlike Adobe’s photography ‘plan’, the Photolab 6 purchase is not a subscription. But it also means when version 7 comes out, there will be an upgrade fee. I think the superior optical lens correction and noise reduction, especially for micro43, are worth the price. It works well as a plugin & compliments Adobe software. If you prefer to edit in Adobe, you can purchase the DXO Raw2 plugin at a lower price point for the optical & noise correction.
Topaz PhotoAI is an interesting program since it is more of an integrator of Topaz Labs DenoiseAI, SharpenAI, and GigapixelAI products. If you already own these programs, you’ll have to decide if the ease of PhotoAI at combining their features under one interface is worth the cost. TopazLabs is working on new features & enhancements that go beyond what the three programs can do separately. So I’m looking forward to what’s to come. PhotoAI was also a Black Friday 2022 upgrade deal since I already own DenoiseAI & SharpenAI. I never bought GigapixelAI since Lightroom & Photoshop already have resolution enhancement. But it comes with the Topaz PhotoAI suite so I’ll compare its output to Lightroom’s.
Luminar Neo is my least used digital darkroom software but arguably offers the most AI automation & features (Dec 2022 version). I bought Luminar 3 for general website digital image processing. Then upgraded to version 4 then to Neo because of its affordability. It can be purchased as a standalone product or as an $8.25/mo subscription (paid annually). Like Topaz PhotoAI, Luminar Neo is a work-in-progress and is improving with every update. It has a HDR plugin that I tried with very good automatic results.
HDR Testing
Getting HDR images that don’t look unnatural is a current project. I took sunset photos at Zion National Park and Grand Canyon North Rim using exposure bracketing. The Nikon Z7II has enough dynamic range that I probably do not need to merge three ±2 stop exposures. But I wanted to try and compare the single image results to HDR results – less noise?
Lightroom’s built-in HDR auto-merge resulted in the artificial HDR look so I wasn’t happy with the results. I watched a YouTube tutorial demonstrating layering in Photoshop and blending masked layers. The results can be exported as a 32-bit tiff so very promising but a lot of work.
I tried using Luminar Neo’s HDR plugin and also Aurora HDR (from Luminar 3/4) with very good automatic results.
So far, using Lightroom’s wonderful masking capabilities on a single underexposed image has produced results as good as the different HDR techniques. The excellent dynamic range of the Nikon Z7 II raw image can generate a comparable result from a single exposure.