Characteristic curve

Characteristic curve
A graph used to show a film emulsion or developer's restrictions of tonal reproduction, relative speed and fog level performance graph showing the relationship between exposure and density under known developing conditions.

Characteristic curve
Techniques Glossary Characteristic curve
A graph used to show a film emulsion or developer's limits of tonal reproduction, relative speed and fog level.

PLOTTING CHARACTERISTIC CURVES Once the graph is labeled, use a densitometer and read the densities of the sensitometric strip and plot them on the graph to form a curve.

characteristic curve
a photographic term, referring to a graph of relative response on the part of photographic materials to varying amounts of light.

Characteristic curve
A graphic representation of the relationship of the film's exposure to light and the density of the resulting image. Also called the D log E curve, since density is plotted against the logarithm of the exposure.

Characteristic Curve
A characteristic curve is a graph of density vs. log exposure for a particular film/developer combination.

-Film characteristic curve - describes a graphical relationship between the logarithm of the exposure value (horizontal axis) and density (vertical axis) of film. Each brand of film exhibits a different characteristic curve.

Characteristic curve for Fuji Velvia
Human vision can see between 15 and 30 stops of brightness contrast from black to white, depending on the circumstance.

Characteristic curve - performance graph showing the relationship between exposure and density under known developing conditions. It can provide immediate comparative information on factors such as emulsion speed, fog level, and contrast effect.

Look at the characteristic curves in the tech data, page 3: the green curve drops too fast and hits the blue curve at the bottom, meaning whites shift towards green just before they wash out completely to white.

Fig 1 is the characteristic curve (log exposure against density) for a hard contrast paper. Fig 2 refers to a soft contrast paper. As can be seen, the slope of figure 1 is considerably steeper than that of figure 2.

I'm glad my background is in the analogue world. sic. I know where the digital curve comes from. That is the characteristic curves of all photosensitive materials. I did it the hard old way. I certainly don't miss it.

See also: Photograph, Photography, Exposure, Film, Manual