Emulating Velvia 50, Acros 100, etc.

[Rodfjell]

Here's my idea: Take a photo of a color chart with Velvia 50, Acros 100, or whatever other film you like, develop, scan and drag it into an editing program where you can use the eyedropper tool to record the hue/saturation/luminance of each standard color (red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, magenta) and grayscale.

Do this for different lighting scenarios (daylight, dusk, night, studio, etc.).

Make Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets of them.

You now have a database for emulating your favorite films with a digital camera.

Am I correct in this is how I would do it?

At the very least I want to record for the ages how these films see color before they dissapear forever. At most it could become a permenant part of my photo-process if/when consumer digital achieves the same resolution of LF.

Thoughts?

[Pere Casals]

What you say it will imitate velvia to a certain point, but it may not make a perfect imitation.

You need the notion of spectral response. Some colors may be confused in velvia and separated by a DLRs and the counter.

Light reaching an spot on the film/sensor has an spectrum, SPD or spectral power distribution, for each wavelength you have a power, this is the full color information.

Once you expose the film or the sensor you have lost spectral information, then you only have 3 color values but not the SPD. The way you translate the SPD to 3 values determines the capture footprint, from then you can adjust those 3 values, but a perfect match may not be possible.

Some two spectral distributions (light from an scene spot) may be confused as the same RGB sensor value but different velvia color, or the counter: it also happen that two scene "colors" in the scene may be not separated by velvia while separated by the sensor.

Make a test, take a portrait of a girl with portra and with velvia 50. Edit what you want, the Velvia 50 shot won't never be nice. Portra spectral sensitivity separates very well skin tones and with velvia the girl will look like she had been inside a microwave oven, you may balance color to have a perfect pink, by you won't have tonal nuances in the cheek.

Then it comes the monitor. Some colors that can be present in Velvia cannot be displayed by a monitor, because color "triangles" are different, also static contrast of a monitor cannot reach by far what an slide has.

A BW tonal imitation (beyond Acros is discontined) from digital may be easier, having 3 color channels to build a single gray channel allows for a great degree of control.

[Drew Wiley]

What gives a certain film or paper its signature look often consists of its idiosyncrasies and how well a given printmaker understands these. I doubt putzing around in PS or applying some veneer program is going to get anywhere near the real deal without quite a bit of fuss. It isn't that simple. You almost have to dissect and re-signature the dye curves. A lot of work just to get imitation ice milk. Go to the top thread about the Photo Conservation exhibit in Chicago right now. One remark the head conservator made on that interview is how a real print, even poorly stored in some attic shoebox, is more likely to survive than any digital file, simply because it can be instantly seen by succeeding generations simply by eye, without any intervening machine. But the movie industry does have the financial motive to go through a lot of expense and trouble to remaster certain things. They've already done a lot of the heavy lifting. That's where I'd go to research the topic.

[Rodfjell]

Thanks for you input, Pere.

Eventually I'll conduct my tests and post the results, but idk when that will be.

The biggest limitation I think will be the dynamic range difference. The winners of the annual international landscape photographer awards were recently announced... Looking at digitized slides all day and then looking at these winning photographs, they all looked flat and over-processed with their painterly lighting effects. Nowhere nearly as visually impactful as a slide.

[Rodfjell]

Thanks Drew. I agree that it won't be a simple task, and emulating a film with a preset won't be the end-point but rather the starting point for digital post-processing. It'll be the same as how a negative is just a means to an end, the end being the print. So ultimately I just want a successor to a film-based process that retains the qualities of the films I like.

[Ted Baker]

What your describing, is a complex task. Similar in complexity, to making your own film, your own camera, lens or something of that nature.

There are already some 'reasonable' emulations, some highly technical.

Hope that's not too discouraging.

[Pere Casals]

Eventually I'll conduct my tests and post the results, but idk when that will be.

Let me recommend an easy way that will deliver very good results.

Prepare your material, not color charts, but side by side real photographs taken with both velvia and a dslr.

Then use 3D LUT Creator (or equivalent soft) to make a 3D LUT from two images, one from each medium, from the same scene. This would include both illumination and subject spectral footprints.

3D LUT Creator demo can be downloaded, to see if it works for you before purchasing, but Demo won't save images or 3D LUTs for photoshop.

The biggest limitation I think will be the dynamic range difference.

A DSLR has a wide dynamic range, but it's the monitor that has a limited range. But many scenes/slides may not have a large dynamic range, so there you don't have a limitation.

The winners of the annual international landscape photographer awards were recently announced... Looking at digitized slides all day and then looking at these winning photographs, they all looked flat and over-processed with their painterly lighting effects. Nowhere nearly as visually impactful as a slide.

Velvia is Velvia !

You don't shot Velvia, you show Velvia a nice landscape. Then Velvia is grateful and it records that beauty for you. It works like this: No pixels or bits, just beauty.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

I believe it is a Fuji digital camera that allows you to choose different film looks.

I think it goes beyond the color pallette, etc. There is a certain look/feel to a film picture that digital cannot get. To me, digital is antiseptic, devoid of imperfections in its output, etc, whereas; film is imperfect, full of oddities, and quirkeness, even sheet to sheet in same lot of film. All this adds up to give the film its look. It truly is a definition of fuzziness as quantum mechanics teaches. I can never know the precise location of an electron nor the precise speed at the same time. If I know precisely one or the other, I lose all information about the other, hence to know something of both presents a fuzzy picture of the electron when it is imaged.

So it is with film. I do not precisely know each photon count nor is each photons location precisely known, due to the statistically random position of the silver halide crystals. On top of that, when you develop the film, there are a million different ways of doing so and each is again, a statistical random happening. These little subtleties and others all add up to give film a unique and enchanting look.

Digital removes all that. Reduces it to zeros and ones. only 25% of the red and blue are real and only 50% of the green are real. Granted the demosaicing routines do wonders to fill in the blanks, but it is still a precisely known quantity. In digital, we know exactly how many photons not only make up the picture, but make up each color/shade of gray and we know precisely where that photon is (sensor has precisely laid out pixels) and the software further creates a very linear and precise map to make up the picture. Other than some quantum effects of the wave/particle nature of light and some of the effects in the electronics (which are too small for us to notice or even feel/see at the macro level) there is no randomness, no statistical distribution of photons, colors, etc in a digital image. It is what it is. Dry, stale, sterile, esoteric, etc when compared to film.

That is not to say that digital is bad, I own 2 5DMKIIIs, one is a full spectrum soon to be converted to b/w only for b/w IR and b/w only.

[Per Madsen]

I believe it is a Fuji digital camera that allows you to choose different film looks.

Fuji X and GFX starring from X-Pro2 and further on.

The X-Pro1 have a few, but not the Acros emulation which are quite good.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

Fuji X and GFX starring from X-Pro2 and further on.

The X-Pro1 have a few, but not the Acros emulation which are quite good.

Acros would have been good!