Medium Format Shoot Out
Medium Format Shoot-Out
Image Mechanics was approached to handle the transition of a major international campaign from 4×5 film to digital. The final output is 8′ tall standies at a resolution of 150 dpi. The photographer had done some previous testing with the Phase back and experienced high contrast color fringing using his preferred Hasselblad H series 150mm lens. With the support of Leaf, Calumet, and Hasselblad, we tested the Aptus 75 (33 megapixels), the Phase P45 (39 megapixels) and the Hasselblad H3D-39 (39 megapixels) - all using the same model, lenses and lighting. All images were processed in the camera manufacturer software as well as in CS3 ACR.
The Test:
We shot the Leaf Aptus 75 tethered using our usual workflow - Leaf 8.4.6 for capture with CS3 Bridge pointed to the capture folder. We only use the Leaf software to get the image from the camera to the computer, everything else, including processing is done in Bridge.
The P45 had to be shot to card in order to process the images in CS3 since Phase puts a proprietary wrapper around tethered images that Photoshop can’t currently read.
The Hasselblad is integrated with the H3 body so it was shot tethered using the H3 instead of the H1. The Hasselblad images had to be converted to DNG in the Flexcolor software in order to process them using CS3 ACR.
Outcome/Processing:
Greg handled the processing and the following is his observations about each back.
P45:
The Phase back was the hardest of the three backs to process. The way the Phase dealt with skin tones really threw us for a loop. It produces a very heightened sense of magenta in the lips and eyelids that would require heavy post processing to remove, i.e. if you tried to correct for it in raw, everything else would go green. However, the Phase back, on everything other than skin, had the most accurate color response. It would be my first choice if I was shooting cars or products, but my last on people.
Leaf 75:
While the Leaf produced some not so accurate colors in the clothes and lost to the Phase in this regard, it produced far superior skin tones and presented us with a nice transparency-like image. It’s software is also extremely easy to use with our Bridge based workflow. What we lost in color rendition we more than gained back in speed of workflow and skin tone feel.
H3D:
This back had the best overall image, in terms of color rendition, skin tone, and feel. It took the excellent color rendition of the Phase and blended it with the Leaf to achieve a miracle child of imaging. However… the FlexColor software is painfully slow, hard to use, and essentially removed this back from the running. If the back shot straight into DNG it would have been a contender, but the software is far behind any current offerings and would fail in a fast paced production environment (like most shoots.)
So, who is the overall winner? Well, if it had better software, then the H3D could have won. The Phase is a very easy system to use, but makes people look like they are alien spawn. The Leaf lacks a little in the realm of color accuracy, but what it loses there, it makes up for in ease of use with our Bridge Workflow and is the best overall choice on the playing field today.
—Greg DeStefeno
Being Los Angeles-based means that we shoot a lot of celebrity portraiture. Every time we run a test like this, Leaf comes closest to meeting our requirements - shooting speed, skin tone rendition, workflow and processing speed. Don’t discount shooting speed. The Dalsa chipset in the Leaf Aptus divides the chip into two halves and processes them almost simultaneously. This process is akin to using two hard drives in a RAID set up to increase read/write speeds. A difference of 1.2 seconds and 1.8 seconds (for the kodak chip in the Phase and Hasselblad) is a lifetime when shooting people. If the camera can’t fire because the digital back isn’t ready, you will miss shots. Photographers who shoot in the fast paced world of celebrities know to put a separate strobe pack on each flash head and not to max out the power setting. Using this method you can achieve a one second or better recycle time. If the digital back can’t keep up, you will find yourself missing shots while waiting on it. It is music to my ears to hear the ready beep from the power packs followed immediately by the one from the Leaf back.
Workflow that can handle thousands of images and get us home at night is the next thing we look for in a digital back. Most of us have thousands of hours invested in learning Photoshop. Processing digital files in Adobe Camera Raw is pretty intuitive for anyone who is familiar with the tools and has worked with Photoshop. Being a software expert for every camera manufacturer’s idea of capture software is a full time job on it’s own. I want to work with one primary program that can handle all of my digital processing needs. Adobe Camera Raw that ships with CS3 and Lightroom will process Canon, Nikon, Leaf, Phase, Hasselblad and most camera formats out there today and from the past.
Leaf files have worked transparently with ACR pretty much from the beginning. Phase files shot to card have worked with CS2 camera raw but not tethered Phase files. That has changed with the new ACR that ships with CS3 and Lightroom. This is great news for us because we can now keep our streamlined workflow for both systems.
Hasselblad has made some strides forward by allowing their files to be converted into DNG (Adobe’s Digital Negative format) which can then be opened in ACR. I heard rumors that at one time they were thinking about direct DNG capture but that has yet to materialize.
As capture specialists, we use and recommend the best tools for the job. Unlike a lot of people who feel they have invested heavily into a particular system and will go to their grave defending that system, we have no emotional attachment to any of our equipment. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have preferences, it just means that we have tested everything thoroughly and discovered the strengths and weaknesses for each system and how to use them to our advantage. It is all about achieving the best digital file for each job.
BTW, the original reason for the test was that the photographer experienced color fringing using a Phase back with a 150mm H1 lens. This lens does show above average high contrast color fringing as does the 50-110mm zoom (not tested here - just anecdotal from other jobs). These are still great lenses, I just wouldn’t choose them for high key white especially with a blonde subject.
If you are interested in playing with testing these digital files on your own, drop me a line and I will send you a link for the raw images. Due to a high spam volume that bugs the crap out of me, we shut off comments. Comments are still welcome but will have to come from emails and I will post any that I agree with are thoughtful and intelligent.
Michael Britt
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