Part 4 - Farewell to filters?
We mentioned last month that we're doing our best to put film manufacturers, E6 labs, and the local physio (we carry less weight and no its not the slimfast plan!) out of business. Now its time for the filter manufacturers.
We have always thought about filters as a necessary evil with tranny film. They are fiddley and a real pain to use. Every couple of months, one of them ends up dropped in a lake or gets scratched to death, but sometimes you can't do without them, particularly for controlling the contrast or the colour balance. (if they ever get to drain Crummock Water the Lee filters all belong to us!)
The greater exposure latitude that digital gives us pretty much means we can do away with our grad ND filters. For us, that's a total of six filters for different strengths and graduations.
The CCD on the Fuji S2 Pro can handle about 7 stops of exposure in the original picture. If that's not enough, another way of producing a 'perfectly' exposed images digitally is by taking two frames. By bracketing exposures at plus or minus 1.5 stops, you can combine the two images to get perfectly exposed highlights and perfectly exposed shadows. As long as the frames are well aligned (use the continuous wind facility or preferably a tripod) the combination is incredibly fast in Photoshop. Here's how we do it - get both images on the screen, copy the dark frame and paste it into a new layer on the light frame, create a layer mask on the pasted layer, copy the light frame layer into the clipboard, hold down the "alt" key and click on the white rectangle in the pasted layer palette, using CTRL V, paste the contents of the clipboard into the white mask -, go to filter/blur/gaussian blur and set the radius to 40 pixels then click on the light frame layer and its done - magic! (thanks to Michael Reichmann at www.luminous-landscape.com for this technique). Also, with the Fuji RAW conversion software, you can get extra latitude by double converting the RAW image at different exposure values and then recombining them later in Photoshop using the same technique.
Colour correction filters such as warm-ups and tints are also pretty useless with the Fuji S2 Pro as the auto white balance simply dials them back out again. Its much more effective to apply this kind of colour correction in Photoshop later. That another whole bag of filters consigned to ebay!
So, have we done it and ditched filters completely - no need now for those fiddley rings, holders and coloured rectangles? Not quite...The polariser is a filter which still holds it own in digital work. We didn't use one much when we shot film, and we don't foresee that changing, but just occasionally you can really transform a scene by fitting one. It can enhance or reduce the reflections from a rock-pool or it can turn an ordinary sky into something quite spectacular. Graduated coloured filters can also still be useful occasionally, not because the effect can't be reproduced digitally but because it saves time to have the picture right in the first place rather than manipulate it later.
Filters still have a place in your digital outfit, but luckily a lot smaller one. The same basic rule applies just like film, be selective in using them. The best pictures still need the right camera technique - digital just makes it a bit easier.