Kenko’s Black Mist filters have been on the lips of many professional photographers in recent years so it was about time we checked them out and had a look at what all the fuss is about.
As the name implies Kenko’s Black Mist filter has black diffusing material melted into its glass to make scenes appear softer by suppressing highlight and shadow contrast for a more cinematic style. Kenko offers the Black Mist filter as the No.1 which offers the ‘full-fat’ mist effect, a Black Mist No.05 which offers half the mist effect, a Black Mist Protector which is a general filter to protect your lens with just one-quarter of the mist effect found in the original No.1 version. Kenko also makes a White Mist No.1 and a bunch of other soft-effect filters such as the Duto and Prosofton Clear options, so the brand certainly has you covered if adding mist and flare to your photos and videos is your thing.
In this review, we put it to the test to find out if it deserves your hard-earned cash.
Specifications
Filter type: Soft effect
Mount: Screw-in
Thread diameter range (mm): 49, 52, 55, 58, 62, 67, 72, 77, 82
Filter material: Optical glass
Frame material: Aluminium
Thickness: 6 mm
Build & Handling
If my guitar collection is anything to go by then having a stamp on a product that proudly says ‘Made In Japan’ is certainly a very good thing and separates it from many of the ‘cheap and cheerful’ budget filters mass-produced in China.
A closer inspection of the filter confirmed that the filter is indeed a top-quality product, with an anodized aluminum frame and featuring Kenko’s AR glass with a water-repellent coating. It also comes well packaged in a hard plastic UV cut case for storage and Kenko suggest keeping it in the case out of direct sunlight and away from high temperatures when not in use.
The height of the filter is 6mm, though 2mm of this is taken up by the male threaded area that screws onto the front filter of your lens, so the filter only protrudes 4mm when in use. While it isn’t one of Kenko’s slimline style filters, we didn’t see any significant vignetteing in our images even when shooting at 16mm on our full-frame Canon EOS 6D Mark II test camera. The filter also has a front filter thread of its own allowing multiple filters to be stacked, however, we suspect that in doing so you would start to see more noticeable vignetting, especially at wider focal lengths, so we wouldn't recommend adding extra filters on top such as a neutral density, ND grad or polariser (unless you're zoomed in).
Performance
It may seem odd to test the image quality of a filter that has been designed to soften its images. While the Black Mist No.1 is designed to soften details and reduce contrast, we don’t, however, want to see any other optical defects creeping in such as vignetting where the corners appear notably darker, or chromatic aberration (also called fringing) where lines of high contrast show an unpleasing green or purple color cast. Luckily in our testing, the filters performed brilliantly and we didn’t note any adversary optical defects, so it scored top marks for image quality!
When it comes to modern digital photography many filters that photographers used to rely upon have since been replaced with editing effects in post-processing software such as Photoshop. This is with the exception of a few key filters, like a Circular Polarising filter (CPL) which physically blocks polarised light to cut through reflections on water and glass, as well as boosting blues in the sky, or Neutral Density (ND) filters which block out light a bit like sunglasses for your lens and enable you to shoot much longer exposures with dramatic movement in the skies or other moving parts of your scene such as rushing water. Both of these effects are still hard to achieve back at your computer even with the latest Photoshop Firefly AI.
When using Kenko’s Black Mist No1 filter we found the available natural light had a massive impact on our results. When shooting on an overcast day with low contrast the filter had minimal effect, adding just a smidge of haze to scenes and this could have been easily reproduced in editing by rolling off on the Clarity slider in Photoshop. However, that all changed when shooting in contrast-heavy direct sunlight.
Shooting towards a bright sunrise in the golden hour and the highlights were transformed into incredible diffusion which worked great for cinematic stills photography and atmospheric video all-the-same. See our test shots from a sunrise in Bluebell Woods to see the difference for yourself between no filter, Black Mist No.1, Black Mist No.05 (half strength), and also White Mist No.1.
Verdict
We were very impressed by Kenko’s Black Mist No.1 filter. If soft focus, hazy shots with a dreamy and atmospheric feel are what you’re after then this filter does exactly what it says on the box and it's less expensive than the equivalent filters from its competition at K&F and Tiffen, making this one a no brainer.
One inherent downside of any screw-in type filter is that you may need to purchase duplicates of the same filter to suit the different filter threads of all your lenses, or simply purchase the largest 82mm version with the needed step-up filters to work with your other lenses. That said, Kenko’s Black Mist filters are very competitively priced so it won’t dent your wallet too much if you did decide to purchase a few variations to suit different lenses and it's just as useful for atmospheric stills as it is for ethereal videos so rightly earns its place in any budding photographers or videographers alike.
