Book review on Post Processing
Post Exposure Advanced Techniques for the Photographic Printer by Ctein 2nd Edition Focal Press 2000 172pp
It doesn’t matter how you get there, if you don’t know where you’re going. The Flying Karamazov Brothers
That sentence, which he puts on the flyleaf, sums up the book. At first blush it looks to be obsolete, it’s a book about working film, in an age about pushing pixels. Don’t be fooled, the basics are the basics. Ansel Adams and Minor White are no less relevant today, than they were when they started codifying the ideas of the Zone System. The ideas in Post Exposure are those very basics. Straight up, I like this book. There is damn little in the way of critical comment I can think of to make, so this is going to be more an explanation of what it provides by way of useful information.
What makes for a sharp picture? There are lots of “rules” people think they understand, about the resolution of a lens, in line pairs per mm (lp/mm), and megapixels (which aren’t all they are taken to be, but that’s a whole ‘nother post), and printer resolution, and the effects of diffraction. Each of those things matters, but they also cascade. If your paper has a spread factor of “x” and the lens has a resolution of “y” and the f-stop you used introduces an effect of “z”, then the 36,000 dpi printer won’t be any better than those effects combine to degrade the image. It was true for age of film, and it’s true for the age of pixels.
If you keep that in mind (that the things being discussed can be mapped to digital) this book will make you a better photographer. It will make it easier to see where you are going, and that will make it easier to get there. Ctein is a very technical photographer (he makes dye transfer prints. I’ve seen some of his work... fresh lava flows in Hawaii, amazing images of wet black on wet black, with amazing shades of degree... it’s like HDR, except that it actually does expand the range, rather than compress it; though if you want to do HDR, there is material in here to help you). That technical mindset is laid out here. The things he explains how to do for film, translate to photo-editing software.
Want to understand curves, it’s in there. Want to work in color channels, it’s in there. Interested in getting Black and White images which aren’t flat? It’s in there. Looking to make an image look like a specific black and white film (such as my beloved Tech-pan, of lamented memory)? The explanations of step diagrams, and paper responses and how to map one to the other, so you can take an image, and put it on a paper which suits the end result you want... apply to digital too.
Some things are still the same. Papers have different properties. The things which cause them are different (ink spread, vs. grains of silver halide), but the effects are basically the same. The secret? Testing.
Is your light meter calibrated? Unless you test it, you don’t know. Is your monitor accurate? If you don’t calibrate it, you don’t know. Is your less aberrant? If you don’t test it, you don’t know. This book tells you how to test those things. You don’t need to make step diagrams, but you can take the idea of looking at how step diagrams map curves, and build the curves you are working to emulate (that’s, what the plug-ins which “recreate” various films do. They try to map curves which translate to the way given film stocks toe and shoulder look. This is only moderately effective, because of calibration issues, and the problem of papers responses to ink. You will have to experiment to make the final adjustments. Guess what, this book helps.
It’s not a simple book, and one can’t just skim it. It’s not a basic book. If you need a primer on photography, this isn’t the book for you; yet. You don’t need math. You don’t need to understand the Zone System (though I found some of the things being discussed really relevant to zone, and to translating Zone to Color, which has always been a trifle hard for me). What you need is a basic understanding of where you want to go.
If you have that, this book will help you get there
