This is one of those topics that keeps coming back around time and time again. The link between contrast and resolution. So I thought I would take a few minutes to create some simple illustrations to demonstrate the point.

This first image represents a nice high contrast picture. The white background and dark lines have high contrast and as a result you can “see” resolution a long way to the right of the image as indicated by the arrow.

Now look at what happens as you slowly reduce the contrast in the image. As the contrast reduces the amount of resolution that you can see reduces. Keep reducing the contrast and the resolution continues to decrease.

Eventually if you keep reducing the contrast enough you end up with no resolution as you can no longer differentiate between light and dark.

Now look at what happens when you reduce the resolution by blurring the image, the equivalent of using a less “sharp” lower resolution lens for example. What happens to the black lines? Well the become less dark and start to look grey, the contrast is reducing.

Hopefully these simple images show that contrast and resolution are intrinsically linked. You can’t have one without the other. So when choosing lenses in particular you need to look at not just resolution but also contrast. Contrast in a lens is affected by many things including flare where brighter parts of the scene bleed into darker parts. Flare also comes from light sources that may not be in your shot but the light is still entering the lens, bouncing around inside and reducing contrast as a result. These things often don’t show up if you use just a simple resolution chart. A good lens hood or matte box with flags can be a big help reduce stray light and flare, so in fact a matte box could actually make your pictures sharper. They are not just for pimping up your rig, they really can improve the quality of your images.

The measurement for resolution and contrast is called the MTF or modulation transfer function. This is normally used  to measure lens performance and the ability of a lens to pass the light from a scene or test chart to the film or sensor. It takes into account both resolution and contrast so tells you a lot about the lens or imaging systems performance and is normally presented as a graph of contrast levels over a scale of ever increasing resolution.