Color Chart: Fill & Download for Free

This is actually a question I started asking myself back in the 1990s. I didn’t have a digital camera yet, but I was shooting on 35mm film and scanning to digital. On most color negative film, I could see obvious grain scanning at 10 megapixels. So I figured, “about 10 megapixels” was a good goal for a digital camera. On the other hand, my old Kodachrome 25 slides scanned without grain being visible… so that suggested there was more to be had, with the right film. And of course, maybe a better lens than I had with my current system, mostly bought in High School with money from my first business, window washing.Based on modern numbers, articles I’ve read, etc. the general consensus seems to be that very sharp 35mm full-frame film ranges between 12 and 20 megapixels of effective resolution. And while I’ve read that, that was always the macroscopic view. We’re comparing digitized resolution charts to those captured by digital cameras. And that certainly is a great way to figure this out, but it doesn’t tell you why.But I also knew something was up when Canon came out with the Canon EOS 5Ds, a full-frame DSLR with the first 50 megapixel sensor in that format, close to twice the resolution of anything that came before. And Canon published a list of recommended lenses for this camera (Canon Releases Recommended Lenses List for EOS 5DS and EOS 5DS R). Keep in mind, unlike many electronic lens systems today, the Canon EOS system was out in the film era. This was telling me something I had already figured out: no one had ever made a 35mm film comparable to a 50 megapixel camera.Dave Did the MathBack in those days, back in the early 1990s, I “did the math” on this, kind of a back-of-the-napkin guesstimate. You could look up published specifications on film resolution; Fujifilm, as I recall, was pretty good with this, documenting their expected resolution — it does vary a bit depending on the developer used.Based on the highest resolution lens I could find (it was made by Leica, I don’t recall the specific lens) and the highest resolution ordinary film (not “High Contrast Copy” film or anything weird), I put it, in round numbers, at about 30 megapixels as a theoretical limit. And that was the best-case answer… not gear I was going to buy for myself. And I kind of doubt it was ever possible to get there in reality… or if I actually did the convolutions right in my head, or if my number was just too high.Roger Clark Did the MathRoger Clark was a photographer working in scientific imaging at the time he came up with this “film crossover to digital” chart.He’s looking at the images produced by cameras as young as the Canon 1Ds Mark II, which came out in 2004. Cameras today (2019) are dramatically better in noise, and of course, some have more than doubled the 20 megapixel resolution at the top of his chart. He’s got some of the best films ever made, resolution-wise, at around 16 megapixels in practical terms.Dave Does the ScienceBut this got me thinking… we can measure digital resolution pretty easily: count the pixels. But for film, what’s a pixel, exactly? Well, it does turn out there’s a reasonable answer.Let’s start with black and white film… the fundamental picture element is the silver halide crystal that’s been turned into metallic silver via the development process, right? And it seems that the typical silver halide particle starts out at around 0.2μm–2.0μm (Kodak). Pretty small. But there are a couple of issues here.The first thing to understand is that, on our current digital cameras, each pixel can represent between 4,096 and 16,384 different levels of light in our image — that’s what we get from a raw image on any DSLR or mirrorless camera. A silver halide crystal is either turned to metallic silver, or it’s not. It’s on or off. It’s acutally more “digital” in that sense than our camera sensors!Next, those silver particles, that’s your film grain, right? Those particles are what we see as grain? Well, I had sort of equated the two, but not exactly. Just as an existence proof: when we pixel peep film scans, we really wouldn’t easily see individual 0.2μm or even 2.0μm dots. I saw film grain in most of my 10 megapixel scans… for a 35mm frame, let’s call that 4,000 pixels across that 36mm horizontal in the scan, about a 2800dpi scan. You could fit 18,000 2.0μm dots across that 36mm frame, if arranged as pixels. So clearly, that’s not what we directly see as grain or discrete picture elements in a 35mm monochrome negative.Consider that we often think of film too much in terms of digital these days when making comparisons. It’s not the same. The big difference here is that the suspension of silver halide crystals or the developed tiny chunks of silver in film emulsion isn’t a perfectly two-dimensional array like a sensor. It’s an even distribution but random mix of crystals of different sizes…most photographers understand this. But also, it’s a three-dimensional layer of randomly placed crystals, suspended in an emulsion between about 9 μm and 25 μm thick.That’s 3D layering of particles, that’s actually how film works. You have a several layers of random silver halide particles in the space of any “pixel” that you’d have in the digital world. Any particle that gets about four photon hits will turn black when developed, any particle that does not stays clear. If you’ve ever taken a shot in low light with a small sensor (or really dark with your good camera), you may have seen lots of noise, more than the high ISO might suggest. That’s shot noise, based on the random distribution of photons in the photon flux, some sensors getting more, some less. That’s what film is going for here: across about 20–40 particles, even in good light, some will get photon hits, some won’t, and the overall effect is a mix of offs and ons. Much like what you see from an inkjet printer’s “dither cell”— dots are on or off, but there are lots of them, and together they simulate different levels of grey.So what’s grain? It’s clusters of developed silver particles, as seen through the emulsion, that we perceive as a single chunk. The grain is the effect of your seeing multiple, overlapping bits of developed silver at different layers in the in the emulsion as a single entity, grain clumps as Kodak termed it. That’s what we see as the smallest picture element in a black and white photo. They suggest grain clumps range from 10–20 μm or so, depending on the film and just plain random distribution. So that suggests a peak of about 8.6 megapixels. But that’s deceptive, because at higher contrasts, the on vs off crystals are being formed right at the edge of the light/dark boundary. So while they grain clusters can be largish, they are informed by the behavior of the smaller particles.And once we get to color film, the actual picture element is no longer a silver particle. In the color development process, there are multiple color sensitized layers of silver halide in emulsion that are developed, first as a monochrome image… modern color film has up to nine such layers.Once that’s done, dyes are chemically formed in each layer around the silver particles. Color films use thinner individal silver halide emulsions, as the final image will depend less on formed silver. The film has a component called a dye coupler, which is transparent and inert when the film is made. During development, the dye couple reacts with the developed silver and components of the dye itself to form dye clouds. These are the fundamental picture element in color film, typically 6–15μm (Kodak) in size. So that’s the equivalent of 2400 x 1600 (3.8 megapixels) to 6000 x 4000 (24 megapixels) in effective resolution. So that actually tracks my 1990s experience with both typical and exceptionally fine grained color films.I don’t know that Kodachrome 25 was really capable of something approaching 24 megapixels resolution, but I was certain that it had more to offer than 10 megapixels. And it probably did… but it’s also a bit harder to suss gain in transparency films. After all, we want them to be transparent, eh? So in the developing process, translucent dye clouds form around silver particles, then the silver is completely bleached away. Dye clouds do not have distinct edges in the way that silver particles do, particularly when they’re translucent… they fade in density toward the edge of the cloud. So for scanning, there’s the illusion of more resolution than you actually have, because we’re looking through all those overlapping layers and there are not true “pixels” that deliver any hard picture element boundary. But they still can only exhibit the resolution inherent in this smallest feature.Oh, and That Pesky LensYou do actually have to consider the lens, and more specifically, the effective resolution of the lens, if you want a more accurate effective resolution for film versus digital. The visible resolution captured is a convolution of the lens and film/sensor resolution.It’s become popular to model this using the Modulation Transfer Function (MTF). It’s possible to construct an MTF for a lens, for the sensor, for other components in an analog system, and use that to measure effective resolution. That’s not usually done for a whole system, but any good lens review today will at least mention MTF data. Most publish it as well.Most comparisons avoid the need to calculate an MTF function for every component in a system, simply by normalizing everything else in the system. So if you want to compare Canons, you can grab my old EOS RT (heck, you can have it!), load up the film, and then test your comparison Canon (or mirrorless, via adapter) with the same lens. That lets you compare apples directly to other apples, where “apple = image capture device”, or oranges to other oranges, where the lens becomes the orange and you’re testing with a reference camera body.And now we’re back at the original premise: that film vs. digital has been tested based on current gear. And film is usually judged to deliver 10–24 megapixels, doing just such an A/B test setup, with everything else in the system being the same between the two shots. Lots of reviewers use standardized images, resolution charts, etc., allowing comparisons done this way to compare new and archived cameras, where it makes sense.And That Speed ThingWhile it’s not strictly related to resolution, film speed is indirectly related to it. When you’re shooting in low light, you’re going to use a faster film emulsion, and get larger grain clusters. Or you’re going to use a camera and crank up the gain/ISO enough to get the shot.One factor here is quantum efficiency — what is the chance of a photon impacting your film or sensor actually contributing to the photo? For film, it’s usually well below 10%. For the early days of digital, a good CCD could give you a 75% QE, specialized CCDs even higher. For CMOS sensors, the older ones probably only managed 60% QE, but today’s better stacked BSI sensors can achieve over 95% quantum efficiency. If you have ever asked why your DSLR can shoot at ISO3200 or ISO6400 and still give a decent image, where as back in the film days you might have cringed a little at your results from ISO800 film, that’s why.ConclusionI was pretty much convinced that digital had won out over film when I had my APS-C Canon 60D at 18 megapixels. I didn’t change my mind moving to a Canon 6D full frame DSLR at 20 megapixels, nor to a few Micro Four Thirds cameras at 16 and 20 megapixels. I still own three 12 megapixel cameras that are certainly delivering sharper images than much of the Kodacolor I scanned from days gone by.And I’ve been recommending 12 megapixels as a minimum. That’s more than you need for an 8x10 enlargement, it’s certainly more than you need for online postings. It’s enough to allow that same image sensor to capture HD or 4K video. I figured this out quite some time ago, but it’s interesting that both camera and smartphone manufacturers seem to have reached much the same conclusion.For enthusiasts, on a mirrorless, DSLR, or even higher-end 1-inch “compact digital” camera, you have a good argument for more pixels. Sure, a few folks want that 50 megapixel Canon, 45 megapixel Nikon, 42 megapixel Sony, or even 100 megapixel Hasselblad, but these are not mortal men. Most of us are really good with less, but find 20–24 megapixels right now is kind of a sweet spot. You actually can crop a photo a bit and still have something usable, and still at least as good as the best films you would ever buy. If you’re not getting sharp images at that point, it’s probably your lenses. Or your technique! One thing that convinced me about Micro Four Thirds — I could afford better lenses, overall, than I had for my Canon. So I was seeing great shots with either system.But for tiny sensor cameras, the 1/2.3″ in most P&S or the 1/2.6″ in the average smartphone, you trade off image quality for resolution once you’re not in bright sunlight. All of the best camera phones from 2016 and 2017 used 12 megapixel sensors, down in resolution from the top rated 16 megapixel sensors of 2015, but up in overall quality. Olympus made the same decision in their TG5 “rugged” point and shoot camera (I bought one). My other pocket P&S camera, the Fujifilm X-F1, also sports a 12 megapixel sensor… Fujifilm figured this out, apparently, five years before everyone else.And going the other way, regardless of whether its film or digital, getting a larger image means that you have that many more possible picture elements. So today’s medium format digital cameras start at 50-100 megapixel depending on the vendor and level-up to 400 megapixel in some models. And they actually use smaller sensors than the 4cm x 6cm medium format cameras of past ages. Film is still the go-to for 4″ x 5″ or 8″ x 10″ view cameras, a place where digital sensors cannot follow, and that 8x10 on your wall is a frickin’ contact print! If I’m claming 20 megapixels worth of modern imaging in a 35mm shot, that’s 56 megapixels in that 4cm x 6cm shot, 300 megapixels in the 4x5 shot, and 1,200 megapixels in the 8x10 shot. I might need a larger hard drive with that camera…Read MoreClumps and Chumps - Luminous Landscapehttp://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/emg/library/pdf/vitale/2007-04-vitale-filmgrain_resolution.pdf

I spent some time in ethnographic research on this topic in 2003–2004 and what I discovered then is still pretty relevant now : civilization has been writing in long form messages for a long time. (Note to self: good job newbie, you just re-discovered the wheel). The long form of written communication along with tools and agriculture make up the pillars of our modern civilization; Email is simple an extension of long form writting, a typewriter with a send button.Unlike the much older form of oral communication (a subset of which we may now refer to as conversation), the process of putting down ideas and words into paragraphs, expressions, descriptions, narratives, or essays before we submit them to either an audience (or ourselves), is actually a form of thought. One could say email is our brain. That is to say we may or may not have a clue what we’re thinking until we start exercise those instincts, discover and solidify them putting pen to paper space. If pen and paper has not been as important to the cognition or creative capacities of our minds as actual brain cells, then some neurocientific-anthropologist please come along and freely slap me around in the comments section.At times we loath the process of sitting down to write, but safe to say this exercise remains critical to our mutual well-being and sanity both socially and personally. One day in some far distance future, when we as cyborgs of the singularity are implanted with assistive neuro-technology so we can project a virtual paper space inside our minds without any additional biological thought power, then maybe we can say email will be dead. Till then, writing email will remain the digital analogue of our formal thought capacities. We may find ourselves at times with fewer reasons to engage in this sort of thought (even less with a word processor) but the exercise itself remains one of the formal institutions of society.Of course, the typical Email application itself is much more than a word processor with a send button, it has a few more famous niceties like the inbox, which quickly became our defacto digital to-do list. That brought the new task of inbox management, and a host of contrivances from our physical world, such as the contact list, filters, and generic email commands like delete, forward, BCC, reply all. Finally, Email apps have a means of notification, which I would argue have already largely been displaced in most contexts by new means (except for the cool VIP feature in Apple’s iCloud ecosystem of email)When will the email inbox get replaced as our digital to-do list?I believe the only true problem with email remaining today is our current practice around subscribing to things, which causes our inboxes to overflow and increases the burden of deletion management (i love to bring that up in UX circles, the primary use-case of email is actually deletion). Alas, rather than dying in some vengeful way, the email inbox will suffer a slow, relatively painless diffusion into new categories. Not because we homosapiens are so firmly set in our animal ways and cannot adapt in the face of superior technology or uber cool interaction paradigms, but because there are no such superior technologies and interaction paradigms which have can come about. This is partly because of the problem of critical mass and acceptance of the SMTP protocol (Simple Mail Transport Protocol). We can’t seem to replace SMTP because it is so widely used, and anything that anyone could improve upon it would render it no longer simple, nor widely used, and likely will not be backwards compatible. If half the internet adopted some new fangled utopian protocol, this would create a massive rift.The inbox with its notifications, subjects, and conversation threading have begun dying since 2004, at the explosion of Instant Messaging, but again perhaps the more apt metaphor is diffusion. Here, I’ve identified the primary needs for communication in a free-speech society along two axis, Volume and Format:Volume:1: many1: public1:11:selfFormat:Long-form writtenLong-form spokenAsynchronous / unmanaged / “Instant” style - ad hoc conversationalSynchronous / managed / “Inbox” style - with subjects and threadsThird-party moderatedExpressive / Artistic / TheaterNonverbal forms (sharing the artifacts of work, and culture)Authentication and privacy (as the defacto tool for identity and privacy management)Now, here is a rough list of the landscape where new technologies have diversified and diffused our reliance on email as a single container for messages, and, as well the email inbox as the single source for everything on your digital to-do list :Social Media a.k.a. The Custom Feed with the it’s own subscription model (friends and likes) displaces the inbox for news, life updates, viral memes, jokes, and cultural artifacts.Asynchronous 1:1 messaging like SnapChat, WeChat, WhatsApp (short form conversation)Flickr / Instagram / Pinterest (niche sharing for artifacts of culture)Dropbox and peer-to-peer (sharing the artifacts of work)The unification of Push Notifications on mobile devices (system feedback; with recipient-user preferences to mitigate intrusiveness)Emoji and Stickers (the sharing of emotions)Blogs and Wikis (public sharing long form 1:many)Micro updates (public sharing short form 1:many)The authentication funnel with mobile tokenization and 1pass (provides less reliance on email, for owning the keys to access all of your other social platforms)Group Chat - like IRC, or Slack (Realtime 1:many messaging)I believe we are half-way there to “eliminating email”, with the reliance on social networks instead of inboxes, and mobile push notifications instead of application level notifications. But that final 10% is going to take some kind of that aforementioned singularity. One of the biggest uses of email remains solicitation, customer relations and retention - in recent demographic studies I was privy to at my former employers, email is still proving to be a signifiant performer for net revenue and customer / brand relations.I apologize for not bringing lots of colorful charts, cool infographics, and links to gird my assertions, but I fear most of anything I would consider to be true data out there is internal and under copyright. What I provide here then is my raw and uncut instincts (and baggage) on the topic, hopefully to spur further insights, examples, and discussion on the ways that email is in the process of becoming diffused into array of social apps.

Pablo Picasso, the key figure of Cubism, wrote in 1935:When we invented Cubism we had no intention whatever of inventing Cubism. We wanted simply to express what was in us. Not one of us drew up a plan of campaign, and our friends, the poets, followed our efforts attentively, but they never dictated to us.and in 1923:Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music, and whatnot, have been related to Cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories.Picasso is making the case that he was just a painter, painting. And there's something to be said for that. But we don't have to believe him. I believe that one can't make art as puzzling and innovative as the Cubists did and avoid attempts to relate that work to philosophical ideas and cultural changes.Let's start with changes in art and its relationship to modern culture, and then move out from there:Throughout the 100 years preceding Picasso, Western art had become less and less tied to tradition. One can chart parallels with literature, music, and other art forms for the way in which modernists came to prize innovation.The Romantics took what had been a practice tied very much to tradition and experimented with novel subject matter and artistic techniques. Artists who had previously been taught to revere naturalistic depictions and antique subjects began to paint works that approached abstraction and experimented with color and form.J.M.W. Turner, Storm - Steam Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, c. 1842Eugene Delacroix, The Good Samaritan, 1849Beginning in the 1860s, the Impressionists pushed abstraction further, making paintings that pushed the limits of recognizable forms while still representing actual places. They were inspired by, among other things, the patterns and compositions of Japanese prints - as Japan had been opened to Western trade in the mid-19th century, leading to cross-cultural exchange. Impressionism also emphasized modern subjects and a overtly handmade quality, differentiating their work from photography and other mechanically produced images.Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872The generation that preceded Picasso and other Cubists is known as the Post-Impressionists. These artists took the abstract qualities of the Impressionists and developed wildly individualistic and experimental styles.Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom in Arles, 1888Georges Seurat, The Circus, 1891Certainly the most important Post-impressionist painter for Picasso and the other Cubists was Paul Cezanne. Cezanne, like Picasso would later, took traditional subjects - Portraits, figure studies, still lives, landscapes - and developed a unique way of envisioning the world. The objects and figures in Cezanne's paintings aren't represented in a traditional way and placed into a cohesive, perspective-based space. Rather, they are constructed out of shapes and planes that remain solid in their modeling but with passages of ambiguity.Paul Cezanne, The Cardplayers, c. 1894-5Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Bottle and Basket of Apples, c. 1890-94Take a look at Cezanne's still life above. It's well composed, in that the objects relate to one another graphically in some interesting ways to create a dynamic balance. It also doesn't make much sense if you think about in terms of traditional perspective - the table in particular makes little sense as a whole, solid object. Cezanne renders a reading of space into something that is contingent, paralleling how our own brains assemble a scene out of many pieces of objects strewn about our visual field.Now, consider how Picasso's paintings changed from 1906-1914 or so, during which he, together with Georges Braque and a few other artists, formulated Cubism as a style.Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1907Pablo Picasso, Portait of Daniel Kahnweiler, 1910This is a portrait of Daniel Kahnweiler, an art dealer and one of the first really insightful writers on Cubism. Compare that to a photograph of Kahnweiler, from around the same time.And here, from 1912, is a collage by Picasso, titled Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass.So - what led to these innovations led to the development of Cubism outside other Western art?African artPicasso was fascinated by African art. Here's a portrait of Picasso in his studio in 1908, surrounded by African art.He relates that he had a revelation about its power at the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris. For artists like Picasso who were looking for ways to create art outside the conventional Western traditions, the ways in which African artists created human forms through abstract planes and shapes served as a fascinating example. This is similar to how the Impressionists were inspired by Japanese prints, and equally radical. It's also a fascinating byproduct of European imperialism.Technological changesSome amazing technology was invented around the turn of the century, changing Western society, and instilling the idea of rapid, transformative change as a new norm. While we can't say there's a direct correlation, it makes sense to say that these technological changes inspired modernist artists to change their work. Here's a few technological developments that we might link to Cubism in the way in which they collapsed limitations of time and space.For instance, X-Rays were discovered in 1895.X-Ray, 1896Is it hard to imagine that the ability to see through objects might have inspired Cubism?Human flight was invented by 1903.In fact, Pablo Picasso and George Braque, who collaborated carefully together, are said to have jokingly given themselves the nicknames, Orville and Wilbur, after the Wright Brothers.Cinema was developed by the 1890s.George Melies, Trip to the Moon, 1902Picasso was a fan of the movies, and scholars have suggested that there may be references to filmmaking techniques in Cubist collage and painting.See: "When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies"Science - Relativity, and the fourth dimensionAlbert Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1905. Now, I don't think it's reasonable to think that the Cubists were interested in physics per se, but one can establish a correlation between the move from perspectival construction in art and away from strict Newtonian physics in science. Interestingly, Einstein himself was asked about the connection between Cubism and his theories, and stated that he found no connection.Beginning in the 19th century, mathematicians were also exploring ideas about space that went beyond the conception of space put forth in Euclid’s geometry. That is, beyond three dimensions.Jean Metzinger, Guillaume Apollinaire, 1911As early as 1913, poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about Cubism and its relationship to the emerging Non-Euclidean geometry:The new artists have been violently attacked for their preoccupation with geometry. Yet geometrical figures are the essence of drawing. Geometry, the science of space, its dimensions and relations, has always determined the norms and rules of painting.Until now, the three dimensions of Euclid's geometry were sufficient to the restiveness felt by great artists yearning for the infinite.The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term: the fourth dimension.Regarded from the plastic point of view, the fourth dimension appears to spring from the three known dimensions: it represents the immensity of space eternalizing itself in all directions at any given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of the infinite; the fourth dimension endows objects with plasticity. It gives the object its right proportion on the whole, whereas in Greek art, for instance, a somewhat mechanical rhythm constantly destroys the proportions.(Guillaume Appollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 1913)Picasso became acquainted with the ideas of Henri Poincaré, mathematician who developed ideas of how to understand and visualize the fourth dimension.See:Henri Poincaré: the unlikely link between Einstein and PicassoOther interpretationsOne of the smartest early interpretations of Cubism was written by Daniel Kahnweiler (See Picasso's portrait of him above!). His book, The Rise of Cubism is reproduced here:Rise of cubism : Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive