Zone System

[Tito87]

I was wondering if it would be possible to use the Zone System in digital photography; a big part of it had to do with the way the film was developed. How does one recreate that using Photoshop? Does anybody know? Grateful for any tips.

[lputman]

It would be shooting multiples of a scene to obtain the necessary tonal values and subsequently merging them together in post. Very much like HDR.

[Jim Bryant]

Here ya go.....tons of info here: using the zone system in digital photography - Google Search

[Tito87]

Thank you guys for your input. If I understood correctly, The dynamic range is smaller in digital photography than in film photography. Instead of exposing for the shadows, one has to expose for the highlights. Hope I got it right. Greatly appreciated.

[ravncat]

There's one other very important thing that's missing from alot of information about using the zone system in digital - The location of mid-grey is often not in the middle of the camera's range. With many of the cameras I use - I find that there's less "space" between the mid tones and the highlights than the midtones and the shadows.

(for example, 5 stops from black to midgrey and 3 from midgrey to white. instead of 4 and 4. There's alot of reasons for this, for the most part it has to do with tone curves and definitions of mid grey etc... )

If you have a grey card - and meter off of it, and put your camera into black and white mode - and do a set of bracketed exposures at about half a stop, you should be able to get a rough picture of how much dynamic range your camera has. Knowing the dynamic range you can capture is important for applying the zone system to digital photography.

All in all, the process applies mostly the same - expose -> develop -> print. Develop merely becomes processing, but because digital is a "positive" process some things are "reversed". - For example, in film, it was expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights - now it's expose for the highlights develop for the shadows.

You'll find the Curves, Levels, Exposure and Shadows/Highlights tools to be what you use in processing move tones about the zones. Raw conversion is essential because it gives you a curves tool with the most data to work from.

[Quo Fan]

I learned the Zone System from a course taught by the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. It has worked very well for me. They have a DVD on using the Zone System in digital photography.

[Tito87]

Thanks a lot.