ColorEfex Kodachrome Simulation

[Guest Nowhereman]

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Stuck where I am and not able to get back to Paris and Bangkok, I haven't taken many photos in the last year but recently have been reprocessing old ones in Lightroom. As an experiment, I processed the first image below with Color Efex 4, using the Kodachrome 64 preset. I had to pull back on yellow quite a bit, and the resulting image looks more like Ektar 100 to me. I haven't used any of the ColorExfex film presets before. Has any tried them?

Also, wanting a B&W version, I got the best results with the Mastin Lanb Tri-X preset (see below). Of course, for B&W there are a lot choices in processing it, but I found the tonal rendition of the Mastin Lab Tri-X preset the easiest way to get the simplified composition that I wanted. 

M9-P | Summicron 35v4 | ISO 640 | f/5.6 | 1/30 sec | Wiang Pa Pai, Chiang Rai Province | Thailand

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[250swb]

The presets simply take the colours and contrast you have and apply a typical characteristic curve, saturation and grain for the chosen film on top. So maybe start with an image that is boring with low contrast and saturation.

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[Guest Nowhereman]

2 hours ago, 250swb said:

So maybe start with an image that is boring with low contrast and saturation.

One needn't limit oneself to trying to find "boring images" to use with any particular profile or preset. One can shoot however one wants (underexposing for highlight protection for the M10, for example) and then make some standard adjustments before input into a preset. There used to be a website by some good photographers in Hong Kong that showed how to "flatten" images into low contrast and saturation in order to have a consistent input for a specific SilverEfex Tri-X preset that had been adjusted into a "user preset" — so that with consistent input one could have constant output as the basis for further image-specific burning and dodging. This was the way many photographers shot with film: to create a low contrast negative with maximum tonal information, which could then be printed in a standard, or consistent, way in the darkroom.

Indeed, I started this thread hoping to see if anyone here has developed a workflow of this kind. Ironically, VSCO Film presets, with their hundreds of presets with tiny variations, tended to push users into paralysis by an excess of choice. It is presumably this aspect of the VSCO business model that lead them to stop selling the VSCO Film presets.
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[250swb]

55 minutes ago, Nowhereman said:

One needn't limit oneself to trying to find "boring images" to use with any particular profile or preset. One can shoot however one wants (underexposing for highlight protection for the M10, for example) and then make some standard adjustments before input into a preset. There used to be a website by some good photographers in Hong Kong that showed how to "flatten" images into low contrast and saturation in order to have a consistent input for a specific SilverEfex Tri-X preset that had been adjusted into a "user preset" — so that with consistent input one could have constant output as the basis for further image-specific burning and dodging. This was the way many photographers shot with film: to create a low contrast negative with maximum tonal information, which could then be printed in a standard, or consistent, way in the darkroom.

Indeed, I started this thread hoping to see if anyone here has developed a workflow of this kind. Ironically, VSCO Film presets, with their hundreds of presets with tiny variations, tended to push users into paralysis by an excess of choice. It is presumably this aspect of the VSCO business model that lead them to stop selling the VSCO Film presets.
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That is what I said, start with an image that is flat and boring, not a compositionally boring image or a bad image but one that you've made flat and boring so the preset works.

As for film users aiming for a flat negatives I think you are confused. Yes the negative can be exposed and developed to give all levels of contrast, but if you start with a flat no-contrast image you pretty soon run out of paper grades.  An ideal image for the darkroom is still one that aims to print directly on mid grade papers and it can them be printed lower or higher contrast from there. I think you've actually read something about scanning negatives where indeed you aim for a low contrast scan.  This is because the DR of the scanner (all scanners) is low compared with the film (or a digital camera). So to compensate a low contrast scan is made to capture all the tones possible then the image is reverted back to normal contrast in post processing.

[Guest Nowhereman]

Below is color a color photo that like but, previously,  have only processed in B&W. This color version is also based on the ColorEfex Kodachrome 64 simulation, followed by the B&W version that I've posted previously. Actually, while I usually shoot with the intent of either B&W or color, depending on the project I'm shooting for, I like the flexibility of having a choice of using either or both. I recently saw a LUF post by someone who said that he bought a Monochrom so that he wouldn't have to decide on the color or B&W mode. While I understand that approach, I prefer to start with color, not only to have the choice, but also to have the flexibility of using "software filters", which I find useful when processing to get B&W.

@evikne - As I recall, you often use presets: do you have any thoughts on using presets? 

M10 | DR Summicron 50 | ISO 200 | f/4.0 | 1/350 sec | Wiang Pa Pai, Chiang Rai Province | Thailand

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Edited May 7, 2021 by Nowhereman

[evikne]

50 minutes ago, Nowhereman said:

@evikne - As I recall, you often use presets: do you have any thoughts on using presets? 

Yes, I often use presets. I have tried many different, including VSCO, but now I use mostly RNI. In LR I have made an import preset which is as neutral as possible. Then I add an RNI profile on top of that. The LR profile browser is great to preview the result before I choose one that fits my image. Maybe I do some minor adjustments after that, but usually I do nothing but fine-tune cropping and exposure.

[SrMi]

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+1 for RNI profiles. Their advantage is also that they are profile based, i.e., they leave the LrC sliders untouched and allow to adjust the strength of the profile.

[Guest Nowhereman]

I've been thinking about the use of presets, and here are some of these thoughts, more longwinded than I would have liked, that I posted in response to questions in the Leica thread in the Fred Miranda forum. 

Background
I should say, first, that anyone who wants a real film look should shoot film.

However, as a nomad who (before Covid) moved annually between the Washington, DC area (five months), Bangkok/Chiang Mai (five months) and Paris (two months), I cannot do my own processing. In 2010, I found in Paris a mint, beautiful, black Hasselblad SWC that I bought on impulse, resolving to have a Thai friend, who ran Bangkok’s best darkroom lab, develop the film that I would scan myself and, eventually, have him make final darkroom prints of the best shots. But when I got back to Bangkok, I found that he had been killed in a car crash. I went looking for someone else who had the reputation of doing skilled and careful film development — turned out that he had taken off for Laos, following a young woman he had fallen in love with. As I wasn’t about to use the largest commercial lab in Bangkok, which had ruined a few 35mm films I had shot over the previous couple of years, I sold the SWC in Bangkok for what I had paid for it in Paris.

Then, in late-2016, I bought a mint M3 at a good) price — I have an old M6 as well — from an eBay shop in Japan, and started using a “hand-lab” in Chiang Mai, that was also an excellent coffee shop, run by two young women who had learned to love film at the local university and who introduced me to their ex-professor, who ran a lab with a Kodak film processor in Bangkok that he religiously kept ultra-clean. A year later the Bangkok lab closed down because the owner, in his early 50s, died from sleep apnea. Last year, the Chiang Mai also closed down after one of the owners had gone off, in 2018, to be an au pair in Sweden, and the other owner decided to close down after she lost her lease and, after having some medical tests, was advised by her doctor that she was in a pre-cancerous condition: she had been doing all that hand development by herself, without any assistant. So, after all this, I doubt that I’ll get back to shooting film.

Nomenclature
My feeling is to speak about profiles and presets, using the terms from Lightroom. “Filters” I take as marketing-speak, presumably from Instagram. The website of The Archetype Process (TAP), formerly known as C1ick Match, makes a point of the fact that they are providing profiles, which provide a broader range of color and tonalities for the sliders in Lightroom than do presets, and state that the users can make their own presets from the basic profiles. Nik Software states that the Nik Collection has eight plugins (SilverEfex, ColorEfex, etc.) with 200 presets, which they refer to, confusingly, as “filter presets” — with a nod to the hip crowd, I suppose. RNI states that they provide presets and profiles and that the users can use either the preset or click on the same named profile, which provides zeroed-out sliders with a wider range of adjustments than when clicking on the presets.

Use of presets (or profiles)
While most of what is available uses the names of various types of films, I don’t look at presets as real film simulation: rather I see these names as a general indication of the direction of color and/or tonality — so that, for example, Fuji presets are likely to have certain types of green and Kodak presets certain types of blue; Portra presets, a certain type of skin tone. Just a shorthand for a certain aspect of the preset. You can read this article in Hamish Gills blog on this subject. Incidentally, there are not many useful web articles on presets, as much of what has been posted are puff pieces for a certain brand.

I tend to use presets in an exploratory manner, to see the direction in which I may want to go with a particular image, particularly for images that are difficult to process. I start in Lightroom and apply the automatic adjustment and then set the basic sliders to how I want the image generally to look like. If that looks promising, I continue in Lightroom and finish the processing. But if this doesn’t take me where I want to be, I start looking at the results of presets and, if I still don’t end up with what I want, I go on to Nik plugins. There is no pattern of where I end up: sometimes I go back and find I end up better with Lightroom, without any of the presets; when I use the Nik plugins, I always add final touches in Lightroom, mainly because the display in Lightroom is better and it’s more evident what final touches are necessary.

There is also the question of what sort of input to use before applying a preset or a Nik plugin. There was a photoblog run by some good photographers in Hong Kong that recommending flattening and lower the saturation of images in Lightroom to create a standard, low-contrast input for SilverEfex — they then had a recipe for creating high-contrast images using the SilverEfex Tri-X 400 simulation. I haven’t reached a conclusion on this: sometimes a low-contrast, bland image works well with SilverEfex. However, in making the color image of the lamyai tree above, I used the final DNG color image as an input into ColroEfex. I haven’t found a useful analysis of this online; and it would be time-consuming to analyze this.

As for which packages to use, for B&W I find Nik SilverEfex often useful: I tend to use either the Tri-X or Neopan 1600 simulation to be good starting point (depending on the tonal renditions of the colors), but always pull back on the excessive grain of the Neopan 1600 simulation which, at the default setting, adds much larger grain than that of Neopan 1600 film. For color, I try the Nik plugins ColorEfex or AnalogEfex and, rarely, Viveza.

I tried RNI, but have not found it particularly useful, despite the fact that it has profiles for each preset that, apparently, run off the Adobe Camera profile of the camera you use. Sometimes, I use a few VSCO presets (mainly Porta 800 and E100G or Ektar 100). The VSCO presets have specific profile files for individual cameras, such as the M10, but I don’t really know whether they are better in this respect than the RNI presets/profiles. 

TAP (f.k.a C1ick Match) profiles are relatively expensive and have profiles based on Noritsu and Frontier scanners, which have different color rendering; but have no linking to the camera you are using. While some of the TAP profiles are interesting, they all have excessive reds and oranges when used on M10 files: they may have been tuned for Canon and Nikon files. I’ve asked a couple of times on the TAP FaceBook group about the issue of linking to camera profiles, but the developer has not responded to these questions. In my view this is a major deficiency of TAP, particularly considering the price of the packages.

The Mastin Lab profiles are apparently tuned for Canon and Nikon and are not linked to any camera profiles. Their HP5 and Tri-X presets produce a lot of tonal separation and are sometimes useful in simplifying a composition, as in the B&W picture of the image with the dog above.

Using SOOC JPGs
On using straight out of camera JPGs, I’ve only tried JPGs from the M9 and M10 and don’t find them useful. However, I also have a Ricoh GR III and really like the Positive Film and Hi-Contrast JPG modes — particularly, in that you you can adjust a huge number of parameters, some of them (like contrast) in five steps; then, you can save these settings as a custom mode. Using such customized Positive Film and Hi-Contrast modes, I have found I get results that I had difficulties in replicating, or couldn't do so at all, by post-processing the DNG files. Also, you can set one default JPG setting, such as your customized Hi-Contrast B&W; and, then, you can process the DNG in-camera with, say, your customized Positive Film setting and have two JPG versions and the DNG to bring into Lightroom. I wish Leica had this kind of JPG facility.

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Below is another image, taken in the never-never land of tropical sunset, using the ColorEfex Kodachrome simulation, with adjustments. But what sort of never-land, tropical or Kodachrome? This raises the issue of color memory: mine is poor particularly for a scene shot a couple of years ago.

M10 | Summaron-M 1:5.6/28 | ISO 200 | f/5.6 | 1/90 sec | Wiang Pa Pao, Chiang Province, Thailand

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Frog Leaping photobook Edited May 9, 2021 by Nowhereman

[Guest Nowhereman]

I was trying, without success, to process an interesting B&W version of the last shot above — to keep in line with the paired color and B&W versions that I posted above — but then I saw @Kamyar's portfolio, which led me to try the version below, using the SilverEfex preset for Kodak BW400CN.

M10 | Summaron-M 1:5.6/28 | ISO 200 | f/5.6 | 1/90 sec | Wiang Pa Pao, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand

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Frog Leaping photobook Edited May 9, 2021 by Nowhereman

[Kamyar]

33 minutes ago, Nowhereman said:

I was trying, without success, to process an interesting B&W version of the last shot above — to keep in line with the paired color and B&W versions that I posted above — but then I saw @Kamyar's portfolio, which led me to try the version below, using the SilverEfex preset for Kodak BW400CN.

M10 | Summaron-M 1:5.6/28 | ISO 200 | f/5.6 | 1/90 sec | Wiang Pa Pao, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand

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Hey buddy. Thanks for looking my portfolio. It's my honor . Actually this photo is impressive. I like this. 🥂
 

[Guest Nowhereman]

Continuing to process some old shots that I haven't processed before, the images below are of a stand of teak trees, of a total of a few hundred, that were planted too close together. Perhaps these images are not that engaging but, in early morning fog, I was interested in the color of the highlights as well the highlight fall-off — the color version is based on the VSCO Ektar 100 preset and the B&W version on the SiverEfex Kodak BC400CN preset.

M10 | Summaron-M 1:5.6/28 | ISO 200 | f/5.6 | 1/60 sec | Wiang Pa Pao

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[Guest Nowhereman]

Here is (probably) the last of this series: the color image based on the ColorEfex Kodachrome 64 preset and the B&W on the SilverEfex Neopan 1600 preset.

M10 | DR Summicron 50 | ISO 200 | f/5.6 | 1/350 sec | Wiang Pa Pao, Chiang Rai, Thailand

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[Adam Bonn]

FWIW I've a little bit played with the ColorEfex presets but I found them quite hard work in that the starting point was quite far from where I wanted to be... I also resented the need for the .Tiff file creation.

I also have the VSCO presets, which (as you say) offer far too much choice and whereas I don't feel qualified to comment whether or not they truly mimic the film stocks that they claim I did find some of them had some merit.

Credit to VSCO, IMHO they are surprisingly good at getting one of their presets to perform relatively consistently across camera/model platforms (perhaps they missed a trick in not making a product whereby you can get your existing camera to render like a different one, say a Nikon to a Canon or an M9 or whatever!! 😅)

One area where I find VSCO really useful is their use of custom DCP files in LR (and presumably ACR)

For my opinion if one wants a pleasing look more than one wants a specific film simulation, then one might find that just the profile (ie just the .DCP part) but without all of the tone curves, split toning and HSL, and grain adjustments makes a nice base to start from.

Re Kodachrome presets, it seems everyone and their dog offers one (except somewhat surprisingly VSCO), and none really look the same..

TL:DR

For me - if a purchased preset creates more effort than it automates then it doesn't work and that was my issue with ColorEfex. OMMV

That said your ColorEfex examples above have more charm than anything I ever got out of it!

[SrMi]

Please note that VSCO Presets for desktop have been discontinued.

[Guest Nowhereman]

There is a thread on the Fred Miranda forum on color profiles and film emulations that may be much more accurate than any of the others, the website for which is here: Cobalt-Image. Does anyone have any experience with these profiles?
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