What are some characteristics that an image is analogue?

[stradibarrius]

This NOT a question about which is better but how analogue and digital images look different. For "ME" analogue is better because "I" enjoy it more...but can you tell by looking if an image is analogue or digital? If so what are some of the traits that help you recognize the difference?

[Bob Carnie]

Honestly , after making prints both ways (analogue and digitally) for quite awhile, if done correctly , I cannot tell them apart.
This would be after thousands of prints made either way.

[markbarendt]

Grain, i.e Tri-x.

Palette, i.e. Velvia, Kodachrome, Portra.

[stradibarrius]

Grain, i.e Tri-x.

Palette, i.e. Velvia, Kodachrome, Portra.

Mark, can you elaborate a bit? Grain in B&W is a give away generally...to me anyway.
Palette????

[bblhed]

You can give a digital photo just about any film trait in Photoshop or other digital post processing software, on a computer screen it is rather hard to tell one from another with just straight color or B&W photos. It gets easier when someone tries to get artistic and fake a print process that requires making their own paper or something like that, then you look for the errors in process to be exactly the same on several photos. I have seen fake Polaroids, fake sprocket holes, fake van dike brown, fake cyanotype, fake tin type, and it goes on.

With prints you can hold, touch and see, you can tell a fake by just looking at the back of the paper.

I have made fakes on the computer a bunch of times mostly because I can not yet tell what something might look like just by looking at a negative, so I will scan the negative and then look at it in several processes before deciding what process to use to make a print. I would never try to pass off one of these fakes as the real thing, but I do like having the ability to make them for testing purposes.

[jnanian]

"under glass" it is nearly impossible to tell,
if the person knew what they were doing.
i have shown friends light jet print from a
numericalized analog file, light jet a straight
dcam, and a darkroom print ( loose prints, not under glass )
this person was a hard core, straight edge analog die-hard
he couldn't tell the difference between any of them.

[markbarendt]

Mark, can you elaborate a bit? Grain in B&W is a give away generally...to me anyway.
Palette????

It's far from perfect but search flickr for a film type like Velvia or Portra or whatever and run a slideshow. After a while you'll start to see the norms.

Old Nat Geo's are good examples of Kodachrome.

[ic-racer]

You can't see a digital 'image.' You can see a monitor, you can see an inkjet print, you can see a sensor. The 'image,' is, of course, a series of high and low voltages and is an abstract entity.

The original question is like asking "what are some characteristics of the sound of a book?"

[BetterSense]

Your question is too complicated because you can have digital prints printed out (in an admittedly digital way) to analog media like c-prints and you can have analog media scanned into a digital form and displayed on a digital display. You just say "images" without specifying what you would actually be looking at. Often when people ask these questions they are talking about the differences between a digital image that originates in a digital camera directly capturing an image from a lens, versus a digital image that originates by capturing a piece of film or something. But those two things are both digital images, and not really a comparison between analog and digital images.

A computer monitor is the lowest common denominator. If you are looking at two digital images on a computer monitor, one of which happens to originate from a scanned artifact, you are still comparing two digital images. Actual color slides and maybe prints can contain colors and dynamic ranges that cannot be displayed on a computer monitor. This is clearly seen if you shoot some well-exposed slides of flowers or other colorful objects. You will see browns and purples and white-to-black ranges that you will never see on a computer monitor.

[hpulley]

Put the prints in a tray of water and come back in an hour... though I suppose there are digital enlargers now which will project a digital image for development on photo paper so perhaps no way to really know. I'd like to say you can tell from the contrast, the shadows, the highlights, the color range, the tonality but I'm sure a slick digital photoshop wizard could fool me.