Photos:
Film or Digital?

You’ve decided to use photographs in your marketing or advertising campaign. You want the very highest quality. Should you commission digital or film photography?

You’ll hear conflicting advice. Some people argue that digital photography cannot match the color depth and continuous tone of film. Others say you’ll get better results by starting off with digital, since printing will require the image to be digitized anyway. And these are both valid points.

Bill Horsman, a commercial photographer for 20 years, works in both media. "You’ll clearly see the difference if your end product is a photographic print," he says.

Jay Penni, a commercial photographer since the late 1970’s, works only in digital today. "Digital is definitely here. The quality is good and it saves you time. You know what you’re getting right away, and you have a lot of control as well."

Grains and Pixels

Digital and film photography capture images in very different ways. Film is coated with a great number of silver halide crystals; each of these grains is typically less than a micron across. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.) The grains are so many and so small that film is effectively an analog medium: a change within an image — say from light to dark green — can be smooth and continuous.

The light coming into a digital camera is analog, but the camera converts it to digital form: a series of 1’s and 0’s in computer code. It does this by sampling the light signal. A change in a digital image is essentially a series of steps. It is fundamentally not continuous, and always subject to some "sampling error."

Penni points out that, while film is still technically much finer grained than digital, today’s professional digital cameras are so good that the human eye is incapable of discerning the difference: the sampling steps are too small.

But there are cost considerations as well. Horsman does a lot of architectural photography using a large-format view camera, to correct for perspective. He could put a digital back on the camera, "but it’s hugely expensive and you’re tethered to a computer." It’s more cost-effective for him to work in film and have selected prints digitized with a high-end scanner.

"What is this for?"

That’s the key question for Penni, whose clients used to come in insisting on "large format view camera" images, and now come in insisting on "30 megabyte files." However, the first step is to specify the end use. Certainly view-camera or 30-meg images would be the highest quality. But is that the quality you need?

A black and white ad in the daily newspaper, a circular, a website and an annual report all have different requirements for photographs. "If you need a 7 meg file," says Penni, "shooting a 30 meg file and shrinking it down is going to be nowhere as good as shooting a 7 meg file. More isn’t always better."

In addition, both photographers point out a disadvantage of digital cameras: to date, the light-sensing microchips have been smaller than 35 mm film, effectively doubling the focal length of lenses. For wide-angle shots, film is still the way to go.

Speed, Convenience, Control

In terms of speed and convenience, there’s no contest. At a digital photo shoot, you see what you got right away, allowing quick adjustments and eliminating overshooting. If the model didn’t blink or twitch on that last shot, s/he can go home.

This can provide strong economic leverage. Penni shoots photos for catalogs for the Christmas Tree Shops, a company that sells buyout stocks. What’s in the stores varies from month to month. Christmas Tree doesn’t want to put an item on the store shelves until it’s in the catalog, but the catalog used to take two months to produce, while the buyout stock sat in the warehouse. Digital photography reduced the catalog turn to a month — a huge savings in inventory carrying costs for the client.

Photographers and graphic designers depend on Photoshop, the industry standard software for controlling photographic images. With digital photography, an image can be pulled up in Photoshop and retouched right in the studio. "I’m spending more and more time in front of the computer, doing all of the processing right there," says Horsman.

The Client Signoff

Some clients still like to see contact sheets, slides on a lightbox, prints spread out on a conference room table. This is fine if you’re not in a time crunch and have a good source for top-quality scanning of the images you select.

If, however, you go with digital and are planning on reviewing shots on your computer, work with your photographer or graphic designer to make sure your monitor is set up correctly; otherwise, you won’t be seeing what the professionals thought they sent you. Penni also recommends Photoshop Elements, a $99 version of the industry workhorse with 80% of the functionality. His clients can easily pull up images, and even learn to crop and retouch them.

Both Penni and Horsman agree that, with the rapid advancements in hardware and software, this is the era of digital photography. "In most applications, digital will definitely hold up to film," says Horsman.

"It’s getting closer and closer to traditional photography all the time in terms of camera handling, shooting ability and file quality," says Penni.

Thanks to Bill Horsman and Jay Penni for contributing to this article.

© 2003 Sullivan Creative

Printing ultimately comes down to putting dots of ink on paper. The smaller and closer together these dots are, the higher the "resolution" of the printed piece.

Many people are familiar with one measure of resolution, dots per inch or dpi. High resolution printing is done at 300 dpi. Photographs in newspapers, at 170 dpi, are significantly lower resolution.

Graphic designers use another measure of resolution, linescreen. Linescreen is simply half the dpi number. If you want your photo printed at high resolution, ask for 150 linescreen (300 dpi). Newspaper images are often 85 linescreen.

Image resolution in computers is expressed in pixels. A pixel is a phosphorescent dot on your computer screen. The more pixels, the higher the resolution. The monitors on most personal computers are set at either 640x480 or 800x600 pixels. A 640x480 setting displays 307,200 pixels.

The resolution of digital photographic images is also expressed in pixels. A high-resolution image, at 1600x1200, has 1,920,000 pixels. Saved as an uncompressed TIFF file, this single image would require about 6 megabytes of storage.

Two million pixels may seem like a lot of resolution, but picture the grains of silver halide in photographic film, measuring less than a micron across. A 35 mm slide — it actually measures 24 mm by 36 mm — has room for 864,000,000 grains of silver. Now that’s resolution.

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