Cineon Log Space

Cineon Log Space

A fi lm negative gets its name because areas exposed to
light ultimately become dark and opaque, and areas
unexposed are made transparent during developing. Light
makes dark. Hence, negative.

Dark is a relative term here. A white piece of paper makes
a nice dark splotch on the negative, but a lightbulb darkens
the fi lm even more, and a photograph of the sun
causes the negative to turn out darker still. By not completely
exposing to even bright lights, the negative is able
to capture the differences between bright highlights and
really bright highlights. Film, the original image capture
medium, has always been high dynamic range.
If you were to graph the increase in fi lm “density” as
increasing amounts of light expose it, you’d get something.