Lets Get Technical

[KmH]

Rendering The Print:
The Art of Photography

Throughout this paper, the final rendering of a photograph is described as “the print”— indeed, the term is used in the title “Rendering the Print: The Art of Photography.”
Today, the final rendering of a photograph may very well be an actual print on paper or other physical material. But it could also just as easily be on a web page, on a cell phone, or projected on a wall.

Therefore while reading this paper, please assume the words “the print” to mean any final rendering of a photograph for its selected display medium.

 

[unpopular]

Thanks for sharing Keith. It's very, very rare that we come across quality technical documents any more, and honestly when I read "lets get technical" I had a bit of a snicker - because usually the level of technical information you find on the web is usually pretty sophomoric. I'll be sure to read this over more later.

 

[Tim Tucker]

Very interesting.

If you read the sub-text on page 10 about 'perception', add the following point that's also interesting and of relevance to photography:

The article talks about the eye building up a picture by scanning an image very rapidly. It also discusses the huge amount of data the eye collects to build this picture, and how we have separate systems to measure acutance/brightness and colour. Now this information is not processed instantaneously by the brain, but takes a small finite amount of time. This is important and leads to a mis-conception many fall into by believing that vision is absolute. If you just glance at things you do not always allow the eye and brain time to complete the finished picture. The view is then completed by memory that fills in the gaps based on how you think it should be rather than how it is.
The spate of so called 'maths tests' that spread across Facebook are really tests of visual acuity and rely on the exact effect above, that you'll only glance at things and make assumptions rather than look at things properly. (The flowers etc. on the different lines are not the same. By using similarities in colour and basic shapes you easily fool the casual glance as it sees these similarities and jumps to the conclusion that the figures are the same without looking any further. In fact in your memory, and if you were to reconstruct the test, you see them as exactly the same. Your memory of the image has become quite a considerable distortion of the original because you only glanced at it rather than looked properly.)

I also like the way the article discussed scaling. Often you will hear in defence of some criticism about someones loved creation, "that's what it was like in the original scene."
Well it wasn't because your computer screen or print is not capable of displaying the range of either brightness or colour that was in the original scene. You scale the values in the original scene into the 'space' of your output media, your aim is to convince your audience it is real by understanding how they see and perceive.

So a very real trap you can fall into (by believing that vision is absolute), is that first you do not realise that by just glancing you only really see how you think it should be, rather than how it really is. Because your memory quite simply pastes over the inconsistencies and you can be blind to them. The second part is that by maintaining the illusion of absolute vision you assume others see the same as yourself. Whereas within the principals of perception and human vision there can be a considerable difference between what you think you're presenting and how others see it. The so called 'rules' of photography and art are not rules at all but entirely based on this understanding of how we actually see and percieve.

 

[The_Traveler]

To add to what Tim said:

The conscious brain doesn't process much of what the eye sees. Once the scene is parsed into important and unimportant elements, the unimportant elements are not brought to the conscious brain.
Two easy and obvious examples:

Example 1: You step out into the street of a very busy and foreign city. Your brain is overwhelmed with stimuli and by the end of the day you are mentally exhausted trying after trying to see and decide what to process. Two or three days into that kind of scene and your subconscious brain understands what is important to pass up to your consciousness and you don't 'see' the stuff you've decided not to see.

Example 2: You drive home after a tough and busy outing and realize that, while you've obviously made it safely home, you don't remember the last 20 minutes of driving as your consciousness was somewhere else while your subconscious brain did the actual navigating.

One of the secret of successful images, imo, is to downplay any negative aspects that might intrude into conscious appreciation.

 

[unpopular]

The problem with a photo, as you point out, is that the photo is the object: our brain perceives it as a whole. So if you don't have negative space, or your negative space is being interpreted as subject rather than the contrasting support to the subject you get a "busy" image.

 

[table1349]

Good article. Thanks.