Just a quick question - is there an equivalent idea in development for Blender to create test strips like used in B&W photography dark rooms to find the best settings for specific areas of interest in an image?
In the dark room, it’s common to block or unblock areas of interest of an image incrementally to see what timings produce the best results. In Blender, could be there be a way someday to pick an area, say skin tones or tree shadows for two examples, and enter into a dialogue what rendering aspect you’d like to experiment with at what intervals…
I know there’s a TON of settings, but Samples, Filter Glossy, and Exposure come to mind as well as some Compositor settings like Contrast or Gamma or Saturation. This way, in one render, animations or large scenes could be optimized to favor an object or area of importance after just one experimental render instead of five (if five strips were used).
Farther into photography, we were taught to shoot for the highlights (to avoid blowing them out on film) and develop for the shadows (to burn them in a little). That made those test strips invaluable in the shadow areas where we hoped to have burned some details into otherwise transparent film.
As an aside, being able to manipulate light TWICE on film is also what makes it remain superior to digital photography - as much as I love my DSLR!
Ehhh, I believe you would have been taught to expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights. The more exposed areas of film(and paper) develop first and it’s those you can manipulate by altering the development.
As you say, the exposed areas of film do react first - those are the highlights. So we do shoot for the highlights. Then, when developing the film, we adjust the timing and chemicals to preserve that portion of the film but tease out details in the transparent portions which will be shadows once we get to the enlarger. So then, we do develop for the shadows.
The film density, then final, was unchangeable. But the paper needed a constant; so fresh developer bath was always for 2:00 minutes. This meant that over exposing the paper would indeed muddy the shadows since they are the transparent parts of the film. And that is why the Time Variable of test strips typically ran on the shadows and dark areas to make sure we weren’t losing any detail. The highlights, or more dense parts of the film were already accounted for by meter settings at the time of the photograph.
And this useful technique in photography leads to me to ask if anything like Test Strips might exist in Blender because we all love it so much!
If you’re rendering with cycles, then you can save your render as hdr/exr/16b/32b/whatever, and then you can play with exposures after render. Burning film not included!
No, you don’t. You expose for the scene shadows. You control the negative(or print) density with development.
You can define the emulsion density as anything you want to call it. I’m not going to spend any more time on this, I’ll just refer you to this publication:-
Adams, Ansel. 1981. The Negative. The New Ansel Adams Photography Series/Book 2. ed. Robert Baker. Boston: New York Graphic Society. ISBN 0-8212-1131-5. Reprinted, Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1995. ISBN 0-8212-2186-8.
…and this quote from it on p74, (chapter 4) of the 1981 edition; “This is only a re-statement of the old maxim in photography, ‘expose for the shadows and develop for the high values’.”
You’re welcome to take up any further disagreement with the author, or his editor.
Damn inversions! That’s probably why I kept missing the Grand Prize!
@Secrop That’ll have to be good enough for the time being. I knew the exr renders had power but I didn’t know they provided for that kind of double-checking after a render. That’s great info. Thanks!
