Ansel Adams' Grayscale - the perfect B&W image

[theantiquetiger]

I never heard of this until today. It is basically saying that a perfect B&W image should have all of the following 11 shades of B&W

Zone System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_System)

edit: It doesn't say it (all 11 should be present) in the link I provided. It is just something I read on the internet today (it must be true)

[mbrager]

Interesting detailed article. I like the advice given: expose for the highlights; process for the shadows. That makes sense in terms of understanding the zone system, especially for printing. Thanks for posting this.

[Marko]

I haven't read the article but in Adams's day (film)according to his zone system it was the opposite; expose for shadows - develop for highlights. If you did not capture shadow detail at time of the exposure, you could never bring it back. I studied this in depth years ago...and made high quality prints because of it.

Today, with digital, it's the opposite of Adams; expose for highlights because once the lightest highlights are gone, they are gone forever. (clipping)