A film 'look' in the near future?

[a.noctilux]

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10 minutes ago, edstock said:

I will put Kodachrome 25 or Fuji 50 against any pixel count image. Sad K 25 has been long gone, but Fuji comes close. I have shot very little C-41 processed film, so I won’t try to comment.

Velvia 50 ?

That Velvia 50 ( still available at a cost at about 20€ a roll without processing, like here ) is the closest even not same indeed ... to Kodachrome 25.

here more €

Luxury item that I used after demise of Kodachrome.

Edited June 11, 2021 by a.noctilux

[Ko.Fe.]

On 5/25/2021 at 6:24 AM, colint544 said:

The film versus digital debate has been done to death. But I'm curious if we'll reach a point where digital files will be indistinguishable from, say, the look of Kodak Portra.

In the past three years, I've kind of fallen for the look of Portra 400. I'm attaching exhibit A - the picture that really made me sit up and pay attention. I shot it around three years ago. It was on my Leica M2, 28 Summicron ASPH, and Portra 400. When I scanned it, I could not believe how nice the colours and tones were. I was an instant Portra convert.

I still cannot get that look from native digital files. A friend of mine has just bought a Fuji 100V, and there are endless 'recipes' - plug-in film simulations for Lightroom. Some are pretty good, but still they're not the same as film. 

And yet, over on Instagram, I've come across this guy. I'm impressed. He shoots digitally, but I think he's getting pretty close to that Portra look. I asked him how he did it, and he said it's just with the sliders on Lightroom. People are clever. I reckon we can't be far from a time when it happens. 

What does anyone else think?

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Film is analog. Digital is not. You can't emulate. Just look at old Hollywood color movies. 

But. Honestly, I just give no crap is it film or digital, if color. Digital is just this good. And for very long time, actually.  Porta, else, doesn't matter. Outrages film price, mostly crappy, hipsta run labs. And huge waste of time to get decent scan. Every time I look at results and see zero reason in color film now. 

Some gurus are heavily editing scans. It looks cool. But then it is not film. It just heavily processed digital files.  

[sukumatwende]

If you want the film look use film. The closer you try to emulate it with digital this and that and plug-ins du jour  the more fake it will look.

[a.noctilux]

14 minutes ago, sukumatwende said:

If you want the film look use film. The closer you try to emulate it with digital this and that and plug-ins du jour  the more fake it will look.

Good advice already writen by some of us ...😉

 

For example :

Post #6
 Essentially chasing the 'film look' is a chimera - the only way to get all of it (the tones, the harmony, the lovely grain, the subtle 'accidents') is (yep) shooting film.
Edited May 25 by plasticman

 

Post #7
 ...
I  still maintain that if you want the authentic film look, the best thing to do is shoot film until something eventually convinces me otherwise.

 

Post #12

...
 If I want a film look, I'll use film.

 

etc.

👍

highlights by myself

...

and many more posts, so this must be know by now

[rossawilson1]

I recently picked up a Leica SL2-S, I usually shoot an M6 with Portra and after using the SL2-S I was pretty impressed with the rendering and though it was pretty film like. So I did an experiment, I took several shots on film and digital of the same scene and tried to match the digital to the film. I was just using Lightroom but I had some success I genuinely was like "does this mean I don't need film?".

It wasn't 100% there but really close, and still there was this ephemeral quality the digital didn't have but I thought I might be able to live without that. Anyway I started using this preset across the board but soon as the shots went from outdoors and natural settings the preset stopped working and fell apart. When the scene changed dramatically the preset no longer worked and it just looked odd.

There's something chemical happening in film that is really complex. Of course everyone likes to say digital can simulate anything, well yes, 'technically' it can, but that phrase says nothing about the work you'd have to put into get a good simulation, possibly hours and adjusting it for each photograph. Just not worth it. Digital is not complex in the way film is, it's this or that, and then a human has to come in and alter things to get the look. With chemicals there are countless interactions producing countless variations and results each time under different lighting. 

At the end of the day what matters it what medium works for you as an artist. If digital works it has a lot of practical advantages, but for me shooting film has a lot of psychological advantages, more importantly Portra is a canvas that I like to work with, artists are hugely influenced by their medium so it's important to put that first when the situation allows. 

[Jon Warwick]

12 hours ago, rossawilson1 said:

So I did an experiment, I took several shots on film and digital of the same scene and tried to match the digital to the film. I was just using Lightroom but I had some success I genuinely was like "does this mean I don't need film?". 

i think that's a great approach, and is something that I myself have done because, quite frankly, I generally prefer the aesthetics of a film image, but equally prefer many aspects of using a digital camera (histograms, compositional feedback, digital storage, etc etc) ......so for most of my digital images, I do try to emulate a filmic look. Digital cameras can certainly record reality very accurately, but I'm not sure that accurate is always the most pleasing look for a photo. Ultimately my end output is always a print, so it's not how it looks on screen that matters to me but how my alterations will look when printed, and things like grain can look wildly different on screen versus when it's printed. These experiments of matching digital to film have been very informative for me in terms of thinking what makes up a filmic look, including how much grain (and size and roughness) is actually needed in Photoshop to mimic 35mm/6x7/5x4 film for a given print size; also i find film colours (eg, Provia as one that I often used for ages) can be really quite different to many digital DNGs out of camera....for example, I feel like I'm often taking down Yellow saturation (and quite often saturation in general) of the DNG to get it closer to my drum-scanned film; I also find it is incredibly easy to overcook sharpening in digital to the extent the image has too much acuity which film simply doesn't have; contrast is clearly another consideration (admittedly, my drum-scans of film are done quite "open" to get a long tonal range ....but even so, I think digital images can sometimes have too much native contrast vs film especially with modern digital lenses, which can crush the mid-tones and I find the blacks in DNGs are often too dark vs how my drum-scanned film would have outputted it, so I tend to need to lift the Blacks and Shadows for my taste).  It's a big list of drivers that can influence the image, and probably can't be boxed into presets, but these are some aspects that get a digital image to be closer to how I perceive film looks .... to my eyes at least!!

Edited July 8, 2021 by Jon Warwick

[Jon Warwick]

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Here is an example of one experiment to learn how I could try to match digital to film .....they're not identical images, just meant to give a sense of "look" ...

Version 1 = M240. It's a small crop at 100% from what would be a 30" wide print.

I desaturated a lot of yellow (and then desaturated universally more too) in the below ..... 

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Edited July 9, 2021 by Jon Warwick

[Jon Warwick]

Version 2 = 5x4 Provia 100 that was drum-scanned. I didn't change any color sliders here.

It's a small crop at 100% from what would be a 60" wide print

..... given the combo of much larger print size here + 110mm lens on the 5x4, which would equate to around 28mm on a 35mm equivalent (the M240 image was done with a 50mm), the scale of the subject is conveniently roughly similar in both images

 

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Edited July 9, 2021 by Jon Warwick

[Guest Nowhereman]

On 7/8/2021 at 7:22 AM, Steven said:

Presets never work as an all around option. Depending on the clouds, they might work or not in the same scene...

That's true for VSCO/RNI and the others. But there are new profiles  by Cobalt-Image.com, which look like a game changer to me. Cobalt-Image has base DNG profiles, to be used in Lightroom or Cobalt One, which are more accurate than Adobe Standard or Adobe Color or the embedded camera profile (Leica M10 in my case). They are as good or possible better than custom profiles that one can can make or have made. Once you buy the base DNG camera profile, you can buy film emulations packs that, in my view, are much better than any of the VSCO-type presets, as I wrote in this post from a thread I started on this subject.

There is also a long thread on the Fred Miranda forum with a lot of examples and comparisons, as well as answers to question by the developer ("Ullyssesita"). It's worth going through if you are interested in this; otherwise here are some posts from the thread with Velvia 50/Provia/Fuji Pro 400 emulations, a range of Velvia 50/Fuji Pro 400 emulations and a comparison of Adobe Standard and a Kodachrome emulation.

There is also a information on a pack of current Kodak films (around page 16 of the Fred Miranda thread) and several packs of camera emulations, including a CCD camera emulation pack that includes M9 DNG and JPG emulations. Some photographers are interested in using the Cobalt-Image camera emulations for achieving essentially the same look from two different cameras: say, you have a Sony and a Fujifilm camera and want to have the Fujifilm colors from both cameras — as well as the various JPG film simulations that the Fujifilm digital cameras are famous for. 
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[Ko.Fe.]

On 7/10/2021 at 8:09 AM, Nowhereman said:

That's true for VSCO/RNI and the others. But there are new profiles  by Cobalt-Image.com, which look like a game changer to me. Cobalt-Image has base DNG profiles, to be used in Lightroom or Cobalt One, which are more accurate than Adobe Standard or Adobe Color or the embedded camera profile (Leica M10 in my case). They are as good or possible better than custom profiles that one can can make or have made. Once you buy the base DNG camera profile, you can buy film emulations packs that, in my view, are much better than any of the VSCO-type presets, as I wrote in this post from a thread I started on this subject.

There is also a long thread on the Fred Miranda forum with a lot of examples and comparisons, as well as answers to question by the developer ("Ullyssesita"). It's worth going through if you are interested in this; otherwise here are some posts from the thread with Velvia 50/Provia/Fuji Pro 400 emulations, a range of Velvia 50/Fuji Pro 400 emulations and a comparison of Adobe Standard and a Kodachrome emulation.

There is also a information on a pack of current Kodak films (around page 16 of the Fred Miranda thread) and several packs of camera emulations, including a CCD camera emulation pack that includes M9 DNG and JPG emulations. Some photographers are interested in using the Cobalt-Image camera emulations for achieving essentially the same look from two different cameras: say, you have a Sony and a Fujifilm camera and want to have the Fujifilm colors from both cameras — as well as the various JPG film simulations that the Fujifilm digital cameras are famous for. 
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Just another set of presets. IMO.

If I need fake film look I like free old version of DXO.

[Guest Nowhereman]

^ You're entitled to your view, but the Cobalt-Image packages contain profiles, not presets. Also, as stated in post #244, they have camera emulations as well as film emulation packages.
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[ramarren]

I have heard people talking of "looks like film", "looks like Tri-X", etc, and seen all the film simulation stuff in Fuji cameras for years.

I have to say: I've *never* looked at any of my photos with a goal of obtaining a particular film's look and feel, even the photos made with my film cameras. When my medium was 100% film, I chose what film I wanted to work with based on its colors and response curve (always slide film) and just worked with it to get what my eye wanted ... That's much the same as what I do today with instant print cameras since I only ever use B&W negative film otherwise today. What a given B&W film produces is mostly determined by its color sensitivity response curves, which I map with a Color Checker and my usual developing sludge (*all* my film gets the same soup) and the minor nuances of grain and acutance are things I push on to achieve what my eye wants, which isn't necessarily what the film's look and feel are supposed to be. 

When I am shooting with digital capture, I usually have in mind what I'm looking for as output and it's never a matter of "I want it to look like 1970s Tri-X in D76" or some such malarkey as that. I want expressive tonal scale that fits the subject, color tones if I want a polychrome rendering that suits my ideas, and I'll add or subtract grain to make it look the way my eye wants, even if I don't remember what film and developer looked like that once upon a time. 

So this notion of striving for a "film look" seems to me to be mostly talking in circles about things that do not matter. Strive to make photographs that express what you see/feel about the subject, with whatever capture medium you use. Who cares what film it might have once looked like? It's unimportant. Does the photo connect with your emotions and thoughts that motivated you to make it...? That's what's important. 

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Leica M4-2 + Pentax SMC-L 43mm Special + Instant Magny 35; Fujifilm Instax SQ :: rendered and then reprocessed through ShakeIt Photo app to achieve the instant print surround.

Of course, with suitable ingenuity, you can achieve any film look you want.  

G

Edited July 12, 2021 by ramarren

[Guest Nowhereman]

19 minutes ago, ramarren said:

...this notion of striving for a "film look" seems to me to be mostly talking in circles about things that do not matter. Strive to make photographs that express what you see/feel about the subject, with whatever capture medium you use. Who cares what film it might have once looked like?...

I agree with you in the sense that I've always considered all the VSCO/RNI-type of film presets, with all their variety (e.g. "Portra 400 pushed 1 stops" etc.) as essentially mnemonics for the type of look, or the direction of a look — to differentiate that preset from another preset. And whenever I've used such presets it has been to explore the direction in which I want to go with my processing of a particular image — sometimes, I've used the preset as the basis for further adjustments; at other times, I've gone back and started from scratch in Lightroom. However, I view the Cobalt-Image profiles that I wrote about in post #244 as much better than anything else I've seen, though the purpose has always been, as far as I'm concerned, to end up with a look that I want and not a look about which I would say, "Hey look this is just like underexposed Kodachrome in bright light".
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[ramarren]

1 hour ago, Nowhereman said:

I agree with you in the sense that I've always considered all the VSCO/RNI-type of film presets, with all their variety (e.g. "Portra 400 pushed 1 stops" etc.) as essentially mnemonics for the type of look, or the direction of a look — to differentiate that preset from another preset. And whenever I've used such presets it has been to explore the direction in which I want to go with my processing of a particular image — sometimes, I've used the preset as the basis for further adjustments; at other times, I've gone back and started from scratch in Lightroom. However, I view the Cobalt-Image profiles that I wrote about in post #244 as much better than anything else I've seen, though the purpose has always been, as far as I'm concerned, to end up with a look that I want and not a look about which I would say, "Hey look this is just like underexposed Kodachrome in bright light".
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I might take a look at the Cobalt-Image stuff for the heck of it. ...

I have almost never used any processing profiles other than the ones I created myself, and particularly for B&W work ... I have my own set of rather pathological presets that I apply to "... see what might happen when..."   They do weird things that I completely understand the technical reasons for, and sometimes how they change how a capture looks compared to what I thought they'd do is surprising and leads to those "Ah hah!" moments.

... Using other people's presets is like working in the dark, to me. If I don't understand what the preset is supposed to be doing, and how, it's hard to figure where to go with the rendering.

G

[Phil_P]

2 hours ago, Nowhereman said:

However, I view the Cobalt-Image profiles that I wrote about in post #244 as much better than anything else I’ve seen…..

Thanks for bringing this up, looks interesting so just got the base and two Kodak packs to try. From first look particularly like the way it isn’t full of multiple variants to wade through but a few concise options as a starting point to work from.

[Guest Nowhereman]

@Phil_P - You may want to post some of the results and your impressions in the Cobalt-Image thread, which I suspect many of us would like to see. I've bought the basic DNG profiles for the M10 and am interested in the two Kodak films emulation packages, but have been waiting until I finish something I'm working on since I don't want to be sidetracked into trying the emulations...
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Edited July 12, 2021 by Nowhereman