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, we are not talking about that quality. What we're 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 can't see in prints and slides (although Ctein thinks we
"sense" it in terms of a subjective sense of richness in gradation).
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.

Colour Creates Contrast

The issue is further confused by colour, since colour 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 colour, 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, colour 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-and-white and colour. I conjecture that Leica designers used to pay most attention to
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relatively low-cycle contrast, meaning in the 5—20 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 that have been
optimised this way look best for black-and-white. But now that so many people are shooting in colour,
giving a little more weighting to resolution at higher frequencies (as, say, Canon and Mamiya seem to
do pretty consistently) and expecting colour 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 can't 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 centre of the negative. The exact centre
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 centre of the image, and as the graph line moves to the right, it corresponds
to areas of the negative further from the centre. So the MTF chart describes a radius of the image circle
cast by the lens. Any other radius from the optical centre is presumed to mirror the one that's charted
(which assumes the lens elements are perfectly centred, but manufacturing defects and quality control
is another article).
You'll note that most MTF charts have two graph lines per frequency, one solid and one dotted. This
just measures object lines ("object" in optic speak corresponds to what we'd 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 shouldn't 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 you'd 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 doesn't 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
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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 Iþve seen. (Iþm not being
prejudiced against Nikon; it just so happens Iþve never seen any MTF charts for Nikkor lenses.)

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 real-world situations. Meaning, there
will not be as much separation between slightly different shades of gray in very dark areas of the
picture. (Transmission of colour 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
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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

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.