Understanding Lens Contrast

And the Basics of MTF

By Mike Johnston
Many photographers even some experienced and knowledgeable ones
seem permanently confused about contrast, especially when the
word is used to describe lenses. In photography, like the word "speed"
(which can refer to the maximum aperture of a lens, the size of the gap
in a constant-rate shutter, or the sensitivity of an emulsion), the word
"contrast" actually refers to several different things. "Contrast" in photo
paper, for instance, or in a finished image, refers to overall (sometimes
called "global") contrast, meaning how the materials distribute tonal
gradation from black to white or lightest to darkest.
When we talk about lens contrast, were not talking about that quality.
What were talking about is the ability of the lens to differentiate
between smaller and smaller details of more and more nearly similar
tonal value. This is also referred to as "microcontrast." The better
contrast a lens has (and this has nothing to do with the lightdark range
or distribution of tones in the final print or slide) means its ability to
take two small areas of slightly different luminance and distinguish the
boundary of one from the other.
You can have a lens of very low contrast that can be made to transmit
the same overall range of light to dark or white to black as one with
high contrast. It will just show much less micro detail in the scene, and
look relatively muddy and lifeless. Some pictorialist-era pictures
actually have a full range of tones from white to black but show (by
design) exceptionally low degrees of what we would call lens contrast.
Low lens contrast is also created when you put a "softening" filter on a
lens you can still print the picture with an overall contrast from pure
white to maximum black, but the microcontrast will be severely
curtailed.
Savants talk about resolution and contrast being the same thing.
Ultimately, they do go hand-in-hand, because you can't distinguish
contrast without resolution and you can't distinguish resolution without
contrast. But this is for very fine detail, in the range of 30-40 lp/mm or
even greater frequencies ("frequency" in this sense refers to the
spacing of the equal black and white lines used to determine lp/mm
and MTF), which the eye generally cant see in prints and slides
(although Ctein thinks we "sense" it in terms of a subjective sense of
richness in gradation).

Leica 35mm f/2 Summicron R

At coarser levels (or "for larger structures," as optical jargon might put
it), say 5 lp/mm, you can have more of one than the other, and,
indeed, lens designers make choices in these areas. I have one lens, the
Leica 35mm F/2 Summicron-R, which has very high large-structure
contrast, but not terribly good resolution. That is, if you shoot with a
very fine-grained film and look at the detail under a microscope or in
well-made enlargements, you may see finer actual detail in pictures
made with other lenses yet the Leica lens has a very high (and very
pleasing!) sense of subjective "sharpness".
To see a great visual demonstration of this, check out Canon's excellent
primer on optics at the back of their book Lenswork (a must-read for
any photographer interested in, but not trained in, optics). They show
the same picture (of a cat) with a.) poor contrast and poor resolution,
b.) good contrast but poor resolution, c.) good resolution but poor
contrast, and d.) both good resolution and good contrast. This will "key"
your eye in to what is meant by lens contrast better than any verbal
description can. As you can see from those illustrations, it has nothing
to do with overall contrast of the sort we mean when we talk about
paper grades.

Color Creates Contrast

The issue is further confused by color, since color sometimes functions
similarly to contrast. Imagine two areas in an image of similar value,
but one red, and one green. Take a picture of this with black-and-white
film, and you have one undifferentiated gray. Take a picture of it in
color, and the green area easily stands apart from the red area and
vice-versa. Although it has nothing to do with optical or sensitometric
contrast, color contrast helps with definition and hence with a sense of
general image clarity. What this means is that different lenses perform
differently or perhaps I should say "to different tastes" in black-andwhite and color. I conjecture that Leica designers used to pay most
attention to relatively low-cycle contrast, meaning in the 520 lp/mm
range, and then let resolution fall where it may. This is the smartest

approach (in my opinion) for black-and-white film. Lenses which have

been optimized this way look best for black-and-white. But now that so
many people are shooting in color, giving a little more weighting to
resolution at higher frequencies (as, say, Canon and Mamiya seem to do
pretty consistently) and expecting color to "help with contrast" is a
smart approach, too.

What is an MTF Chart?

Basically, how lenses are evaluated is by looking at how well they
transmit evenly spaced lines of black and white; ten, 20, or 30 "line
pairs per millimeter" (lp/mm) means exactly what it says. As these
lines get more and more closely spaced, the "noise" between them blurs
the edges and makes the black lines look dark gray and the white lines
look light gray to the lens (and also to your eye, especially as you get
farther away). As the lines get closer and closer together, pretty soon
the lens cant distinguish them tonally, and the lens "sees" one
undifferentiated gray. This ability on the part of the lens, charted
graphically, is what MTF, or Modulation Transfer Function, is all about.
MTF graphs typically chart a lens's performance at various "image
heights". This just means the distance from the optical axis, which
would correspond to the center of the negative. The exact center
would have a height of zero, and so forth out to the corners. Thus, the
left-hand side of most MTF graphs corresponds to the center of the
image, and as the graph line moves to the right, it corresponds to areas
of the negative further from the center. So the MTF chart describes a
radius of the image circle cast by the lens. Any other radius from the
optical center is presumed to mirror the one that's charted (which
assumes the lens elements are perfectly centered, but manufacturing
defects and quality control is another article).
Youll note that most MTF charts have two graph lines per frequency,
one solid and one dotted. This just measures object lines ("object" in
opticspeak corresponds to what wed call the "subject", what the lens
is pointed at and focused on) that are either parallel to the radius of
the image circle (called "sagittal") and those that are perpendicular to
the radii ("tangential"). Most lenses are unable to do equally well with
both simultaneously.
Technically speaking, MTF measures both contrast and resolution more
or less simultaneously. In a photographer's reading of an MTF chart,
however, generally the position of the topmost lines (typically 10
lp/mm, sometimes 5) will have the highest correlation to visible lens
contrast. The lowest set of lines (30 or 40 lp/mm) will correspond best
to actual resolving power. Personally, I pretty much ignore the lowest
set or sets of lines when reading an MTF chart.

You should note here that different manufacturers provide different

MTF frequency measurements. One company may provide 5 lp/mm
graph lines, which makes their lenses look good. These lines are often
very close to the top boundary of the chart. Other manufacturers may
provide lines for 10 lp/mm as the coarsest structures they measure.
The two shouldnt be compared directly. In fact, MTF charts from two
different sources shouldn't be compared directly, either. There are
enough experimental and procedural variations to make direct
comparisons meaningless.
To get a really good idea of a lens's performance using MTF, you'd need
a "family" of charts. For starters, every lens will perform differently at
different apertures and at different distances. Just charting an F/16
lens for three different object distances say, infinity, close focus, and
perhaps 20 x F, where F = focal length, would mean youd need 21
different charts. Really, you should have charts for at least six (and
ideally, thirty!) randomly-chosen production samples, too, to account
for sample variation. There are a dozen or so other conditions you
should measure at every aperture and taking distance. You can see how
the volume of data would quickly get out of hand for enthusiasts. But
do bear in mind that when manufacturers give you one chart, it only
measures performance at one aperture and one distance. That doesnt
really tell you much, except comparatively, and it may not tell you
want you need to know.
Often, usefully (sort of), they'll provide two charts; one for the lens
stopped down, and one for full aperture. The more closely these two
charts resemble each other, the better and more consistent the
performance of the lens is likely to be across the range of apertures. (I
say "sort of" usefully because open-aperture charts for an F/1.4 lens
and an F/2 lens wouldn't tell you how the same lenses compare when
they're both at F/2, which might be practical information to know.)
Incidentally, as an aside for those of you who may have seen the
articles on "bokeh" (bo-ke, the Japanese word meaning "blur") in the
March/April 1997 issue of PHOTO Techniques, off-axis aberrations are
typically the cause of "bad" or confused-looking blur. The relative
superimposition of the sagittal and tangential lines of an MTF chart are
one predictor of "good" or smooth bokeh. (This article is available as a
PDF file here.)
So what does an "ideal" or very good MTF chart look like? A good pair
(one wide open, one stopped down) would show the solid and dotted
lines for each frequency on the stopped-down chart more or less
superimposed (predicting good bokeh), moving straight across the chart
(predicting good center-to-corner consistency), with the top set of lines
(coarse image structures) as near as possible to the top of the chart
(predicting good lens contrast). Then, the wide-open chart should look
as much like the stopped-down chart as possible (predicting consistent
performance throughout the aperture range). In my experience, the

lenses that most closely approximate this description are highly

corrected short telephotos of moderate aperture. Designers often have
somewhat more money to work with when designing macro lenses, so
macros such as the 100mms from Leica, Zeiss, and Canon, and the
Zuiko 90mm F/2 from Olympus, probably can be said to have the best
MTF charts Ive seen. (Im not being prejudiced against Nikon; it just
so happens Ive never seen any MTF charts for Nikkor lenses.)

Carl Zeiss Apo-Makro-Planar 120mm f/4

Carl Zeiss

Illustrations

This is an example of what an excellent set of MTF measurements

looks like. Note that "U" on these graphs is image height.

A Third Definition
So far I've mentioned overall contrast and lens contrast. The final type
of contrast we have to deal with is something still different from either
of the two definitions above, and this is "local contrast", or tonal
differentiation within certain specified tonal ranges. A film/paper
combination whose characteristic curves interrelate in a certain way
can yield high highlight contrast (i.e., not much tonal discrimination in

the highlights, but a greater sense of "snap" in the gradation you do

see) and low shadow contrast, or good shadow contrast and low
highlight contrast. In lenses, local contrast issues are accounted for
mainly by flare and veiling glare, and are affected mainly by lens
coatings. A lens can have exactly the same level of overall contrast
(i.e., it will transmit the same overall range from light to dark), but it
might have much worse shadow contrast, for instance, in certain realworld situations. Meaning, there will not be as much separation
between slightly different shades of gray in very dark areas of the
picture. (Transmission of color is also very much affected by the
efficiency of the coatings and the relative contribution of flare.)
The big question mark where local contrast is concerned is that almost
all actual picture-taking situations allow flare and veiling glare (the
latter an overall dulling or haze of the image similar to "flashing" an
enlargement with a low dose of non-image-forming light, or fog) to
contribute in varying amounts and varying ways. Despite lots of
scientific research, there still seems to be not much way to quantify it
exactly, or predict its contribution exactly with any given system
("system" meaning camera-lens/film/enlarger-lens/paper) in real-world
situations. Flare is always present to at least some degree, but it is
seldom present in exactly the same way in two different systems
encountering two different situations.
Before lens coatings were invented, lens flare was a major determinant
of image quality. The best lenses were generally the ones that allowed
performance to remain high with the fewest elements, because there
were fewer air-to-glass surfaces to create flare. This explains the
lifespan of the exceptionally long-lived Tessar-type, despite its speed
limitations. Lens coatings are of critical importance to modern lenses;
virtually all zoom lenses and many highly-corrected multi-element
lenses would be useless for general photography without them. Often,
coating is what makes the most difference between an average lens
and a very good one.
Have you ever noticed how many early 35mm photographers tried to
avoid bright sunlight? You might be forgiven for thinking that the
decade of the 1940s was entirely overcast (and not just by the world
political situation). With experience as their teacher, many
photographers in the '30s and '40s learned various clever ways of
avoiding or minimizing high-flare situations. The amateur admonition to
"never point the camera in the direction the sunlight is coming from"
dates from this era. Such was life with "miniature" cameras before the
days of multicoating.

The Importance of Lens Contrast

 Carl Weese Used with permission

Dixie Milling, Easley, South Carolina. Overall contrast is the range of
lightest to darkest tones in the picture. Resolution refers to the lens's
ability to distinguish fine detail. Lens contrast refers to the lens's
ability to discriminate tonally between small adjacent areas in the
print, lending a sense of texture and surface. Local contrast is the
lens's ability to distinguish different tones within a narrow range, for
instance, in the shadow areas at the left. Platinum/palladium print by
Carl Weese.
In my opinion, lens contrast of fairly large image structures is a primary
determinant of subjective optical quality in a camera lens. The old
Leica 7-element 50mm Summicron was optimized for high contrast at 5
lp/mm, for instance, and under favorable picture-taking circumstances
(i.e., avoiding too much flare and too wide an aperture), these lenses
can still yield glorious-looking pictures today.
Also, it's very interesting to note that high apparent lens contrast can
be simulated digitally, and this may eventually prove to be an Achilles
heel for silver-halide photography where viewer appeal of prints is
concerned. "Sharpening" only improves visual microcontrast, of course,
not actual resolution of detail. But resolution of very fine structures
seldom helps pictorial photographs much, and, in my opinion, is an
overrated property where lens quality is concerned.
Mike Johnston

For an additional perspective on the related issue of Sharpness you may

want to next read Michael Reichmann's tutorial on that subject and you
can learn more about color contrast in his Colour Theory tutorial.

Photogeeks each have their own peculiar afflictions or areas of

obsession, and Mike Johnston's happens to be lenses. He is faithless,
however, transferring his loyalties from one lens to another in a most
disconcertingly philandering manner. He is currently enamored of a
particular fast Pentax lens. But wait till the weather changes; his
loyalties and enthusiasm will have shifted.
Johnston has a B.F.A. in Photography from the Corcoran College of Art
and Design in Washington, D.C. He was East Coast Editor of Camera &
Darkroom magazine from 1988 to 1994 and Editor-in-Chief of PHOTO
Techniques magazine from 1994-2000, where his editorial column "The
37th Frame" was a popular feature. His critical and technical writings
have appeared in various publications in the United States and
England, and on the www. His articles and reviews began appearing on
The Luminous Landscape in June 2001, with many more to come.

This piece is part of an on-going series of articles, reviews and essays

written for this site by Mike Johnston.