Taking photos of swords...is B&W best?

[CurtisR]

Hello All,

 

I've been noticing that in my reference books, most of the pics of the nihonto and many times even the fittings are done in black & white (or is it called grayscale now? ) ,,,my question is simple - when I photograph blades and their detail, should I go with B&W vs. color? Of course w/ photoshop I can turn color to B&W but not the other way 'round.

I'm guessing the contrast is better in B&W, but color also shows age, etc. more effectively IMHO.

 

thoughts are appreciated!

 

Curtis R.

[Marius]

Darcy takes them in colour.

[Ken-Hawaii]

Curtis, if you're shooting digital photos, shoot them in full color (RAW format, if possible), & then you can easily remove everything except 8-bit (or higher) gray-scale. Here's a good write-up on the pros & cons: http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/why_use_raw.html. If I'm looking for the greatest depth of detail, I shoot in RAW, & then save to TIFF or PSD (lossless) format, skipping lossy JPGs completely at that stage. Once I've manipulated the image to my satisfaction, I can easily export to the final 8-bit JPG image format when I know I'm not making any further changes.

 

Ken

[Alex A]

Most books are black only because it makes publishing a lot cheaper. I have one book, the Encyclopedia of Japanese swords, some great shots in detail. Some black and white and some that appear full colour, but i suspect either a colour filter or a colour tone added, an example below (camera as not caught the detail and the colour in the book ), kind of brings them to life a bit, clever neat trick.

[Gabriel L]

Alex (edit: & Ken) hit the nail on the head. B&W (or more correctly grayscale) printing is only used because it's far, far less expensive than color, and blades are not especially colorful objects. However, they do have some color (for example, the hadori polish is often bluer than the jigane or the hamon), so if you can convey that — e.g., you are using a website — you absolutely should. Most critically, showing the nakago in color is infinitely preferable to greyscale! And obviously fittings should be in color.

 

True black & white — i.e., pure black text printed on the page — can usually be extremely high resolution, over 600 dpi. This uses a single ink (spot color) and is perfect for rendering extreme detail, e.g. the fine curves and serifs of a roman typeface at 9.5–10.5 points (or even 7.5–9 for captions). But to create gradations, a book printer usually has to halftone the color, basically laying down a grid of dots of certain density. Thus typical printed grayscale images convey shade by sacrificing the detail of your rendering medium.

 

When you turn to color photo printing, the typical method is four-color process (CMYK or Cyan Magenta Yellow Black). In this method each channel is halftoned and registered (aligned) to the other channels. So if your registration is good and your printer is up to spec, color printing is theoretically much more detailed than grayscale—you are using four channels to convey information rather than just one.

 

However, color printing an image which has little to no color in it can actually sacrifice detail. If your additional channels are not adding any new information, but are all just mixing to grey anyway, poor registration can soften the final result. On the other hand, using four times as many channels can "average out" the halftone pattern, restoring detail. On the other other hand, laying color halftones over color halftones creates artificial color noise, which you can see in Alex's image, and which can give a false impression of the hada quality. So it all ends up being kind of a wash with respect to communicating detail, except it isn't a wash because it's so much more expensive.

 

Now, it also should be noted that pure grayscale printing is NOT higher contrast than color, at least not using halftones as is typical for most books. You can achieve richer contrasts and more solid greys by mixing color channels. Pure black ink, for example, is usually not as dark as black with a little cyan printed over it. But applied to big flat areas—e.g., the black background of many nihontō images—the uneven color mixing will sometimes contribute to a muddy look and not really enhance the photo meaningfully. So again, it's problematic from a printing perspective.

 

So you will typically see books print nihontō in grayscale. But online, or with a high enough per-book printing budget, there is no good reason to throw out the color. Again, onscreen it's using just the luminance channel, vs the three RGB channels; if there's even a hint of color variation, the color photo will convey that, whereas the B&W photo will just be losing info, never gaining any. Typical 8-bit consumer monitors can only convey 256 levels of grey, but 16.8 million colors.

 

Artistically, some people may prefer to drop all blade photos to grayscale because their photo lighting setup is not reference-quality enough to properly capture the color variation in the blade anyway. Any color they are capturing is just an artifact of their environment and/or lights, because they aren't shooting in a black box with white-balanced lamps and a proper RAW workflow. So you switch to grayscale to eliminate the distracting color artifacts. But that's a band-aid, not something to strive for.

 

Finally, I should note that artificial halftoning is not the only way to produce variation, for greyscale luminance or for color photos. True photo printing (not inkjet) uses chemical processes which essentially result in highly randomized tiny grains or crystals of each channel forming, eventually coupled to dyes. This is much more solid, continuous, detailed, and attractive than halftoning—assuming your grain size is small (low ISO film)—and does not have the registration issue of process color. But true photo printing is prohibitively expensive and not used in book printing.

 

This only begins to cover everything… but the very short answer is keep your digital files in RAW, produce color jpegs for sharing on the web, if you ever make a book you'll find out very quickly whether you want to pay $$$$ for color (but classical-style nihontō photos don't benefit very much from it, except for the nakago).

[b.hennick]

WOW! Thanks for that post. It explains a lot and raises questions for me as well. I think that a re-read is in order.

[Alex A]

Nice write up Gabriel, just looking over the book now, looks like the ultimate printers nightmare. Blade shots vary from a blueish tone to a green tone (suspect they should all be the same), printer may have got an ass kicking over that job . Still, as far as nihonto book printing quality goes, its way above most that i know, looks like they put some thought, effort and expense into the print side. Apologies for straying Curtis, you got me thinking about photo quality in these books, something thats been on my mind.

[CurtisR]

Excellent information - thank you all! I usually shoot in RAW and then convert to TIFF for clean-up, then to JPEG if I have to. I try to shoot at the lowest ISO possible with good light, which is easier than most of the wildlife I've photographed. I keep my monitor balanced to the output temp. of the processing program also, although I don't do much printing. May have to start though!

 

I'll be posting some images in the "for sale" section soon, so feel free to critique them as well as the offerings :D . Like Jean, I'll be giving this one a re-read also...

 

 

again, many thanks!

 

Curtis R.