Bountybala,
Welcome aboard.
I do not mean to "rain on the parade (footy match??)"
, but all that this technique will acheive in digital is under exposure. To try to pull the exposure back up has one major problem. That problem is the way digital captures and stores information.
Consider the histogram. At the far right (highlights) there will be 2048 discreet levels of data recorded, 1 stop down (midway between this point and the centre of the histogram) there will be 1024 levels recorded. At the midpoint of the histogram 512 levels. One stop further down 256 levels, and at the left of the histogram 128 levels.
As you can see there is far more information stored to the right of the histogram. This is the reason for "expose to the right". Working in the LHS of the histogram, there is far less information recorded. It is impossible to pull the fine detail from the left of the histogram because the information simply does not exist. The result is lost detail and noise. The noise is already there in
modest amounts, PP of this nature simply amplifies it.
2 stops is a loong way for a digital sensor which appears to me to have a DR of a little more than 4.5 stops - some say it is 6 or more stops. Consider mid grey, white and black. Under expose grey by 2 stops and grey falls very close to the bottom of the histogram, white somewhere close to the middle, but everything below a point that is just below mid grey is outside of what the sensor is able to capture. It would be rendered black with little to no detail. The other thing is that there will only be 128 levels recorded at mid grey, which happens to be where most skin tones are at.
This "film technique" effectively reduces the sensors DR and detail recorded in a time where we are all trying to get more (flashes, multiple exposures....)
As I understand it (I have never been a film shooter, although I am heading that way for some applications), some film is as limited as digital, others have much latitude for push/pull processing (2 or more stops), and for those films the image information is there but the density of the information is low. Hence the processing technique to increase the density. However, there is a limit to how far this technique can be taken before "noise" is introduced.
Having said that, your photos came up quite nicely, although a little dark, but you were shooting at night, so the images would be fairly true to what you would have seen, and I suspect that the reduction in size for web has gone some way towards cleaning up any visible noise and detail problems.
Cheers
Matt
, the worst kind of situation one can get when using 1600 ISO. Is there any noise visible when you look at the photo at 100 or 66%?
