USING ANSEL ADAMS ANALOGUE ZONE SYSTEM IN A DIGITAL WORLD BY NOEL BALDEWIJNS It is common practice among photographers to use Ansel Adams' zone system to deliver a balanced photo. Adams created the system to perfectly control the contrast in his black and white photos. His base rule was: “Expose for the shadows; develop for the highlights.” To create the system, he first generated the middle grey zone 5 and continued from there. Clear texture was available from zone 2 to zone 8, and his dynamic range is from zone 1 to zone 9. To wrap up creating the scale-based system, he made a print of each zone, 11 pieces, from zone 0 (black) to zone 10 (white), which would have looked like this:
Figure 1: Posterized gradient
Creating a zone system to enhance your digital images In the digital photography age, the zone system is still in use, but on our screen, it looks different from what Adams saw in his dark room. We use gradual lighting to create a dark to light gradient today.
If you need a full scale of zone masks today there all kind of actions on the market, you can buy one, or you can easily create your own set like I did. When you create it yourself, you have the freedom to create the LM you really need. Tony Kuyper, the first to create a digital LM, explains in his blog how to do so. In terms of my methodology, I start by creating a new document in Photoshop and draw a gradient, like this:
Figure 2: zone masks one a linear gradient
I then divide it in the AA zones, the top left numbers indicate the brightness and bottom left numbers are the RGB indication
Page 20
June 2021 Volume 6 Number 4
