Exposure and Lighting For Digital Photographers Only

Chapter 8. DEALING WITH DIGITAL FILM

You could shoot images like those shown in figures 8-1 and 8-2 with either traditional film or digital photography — the results are essentially the same. It's unlikely that you could tell the difference between the film and digital images if they are both printed the same way, on the same paper, at the same size, and so on.

(In fact, one of these images was shot digitally and the other was shot on film and then scanned to create the image file used to layout this page. Can you tell which is which?)

It may be hard to tell the difference between film and digital when you look at the printed results, but there are significant differences in the way you work with film and digital photography mediums. Some of the differences are immediately evident, such as recording the image on a digital image sensor instead of film, and viewing and printing it with a computer instead of developing and printing it in a photo lab. No doubt, you're familiar with the obvious differences between film and digital, so this chapter skips the big stuff and focuses on some of the details of the digital photography medium that may not be apparent at first glance, but are important to understand if you want to master the medium and exercise creative control over your photographs.

Figure 8-1. 

Figure 8-2. 

Image Preview & Analysis

Perhaps the biggest single difference between film ...