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 p.67 #3 · Zeiss Loxia Images Thread | |
nehemiahphoto wrote:
All that work shows! Would you mind to expand on your process? I really do love the contrast and tonality in these!
Thank you! When I switched to digital from film, I looked at the film emulations available and none of them looked anything like film. I've spent the last few years trying to build film profiles that give digital images the colors and tones of film.
Grain can't easily be emulated, so the film profiles end up as a hybrid look of digital and film (some profiles add noise and call it grain, but grain is signal, not noise, and added noise looks awful and nothing like grain at all).
I've rebuilt the profiles many times, getting closer each time to matching test shots made with both digital and film. Black and white is a bit easier to profile than color, and those profiles appear to match really closely now. I'm currently rebuilding some color profiles (Portra 400 and E100 slide) which are showing promise and may be final versions as they are already matching very closely.
To build these profiles, I use color charts with over 2000 swatches that uniformly cover the color gamut. I shoot them on digital and film in sunlight for full spectrum light and use pixel shift on digital to get full color depth. I then take many side-by-side digital and film pictures, because colors in the real world have spectral properties that can't be adequately contained in a printed color chart.
From this I build a 3D LUT. A LUT (Look-Up Table) is a simple text table of color numbers that remaps an input color to an output color. It allows for non-linear color transformations. A lot of currently available profiles just move sliders around, and that will never get a result that looks like film. A 3D LUT is a LUT that also remaps based on brightness, not just hue. So I can define how color behaves in the shadows differently from how it behaves in the highlights, etc.
This work is to make profiles for my own use, but I will also sell the profiles to try to recover some of the costs in developing them (it's been an expensive journey). My brand is called "Not Film".
I have started with building profiles for films still being produced because they are easy to access, but I also have a fridge full of various discontinued films I loved over the years and still have some rolls of (this is my real goal behind building profiles, to resurrect the look of those films). The next profiles I'm building, for instance, are Reala, Pro 400h, and Acros 100 (original formula). My favorite films are Portra 160VC, Fuji Pro 800Z, Fuji Pro 160C, etc., and I have all of these waiting to be profiled.
Currently the profiles work in Photoshop. Using them is simple: a file containing the profiles is opened, and a profile can be dragged and dropped onto the image being worked on. Each profile is a set of layers: a LUT layer, and then a curves layer and a levels layer that you can use to adjust the contrast. The LUT layer matches the image to a flat, low contrast film scan, and the curves and levels are suggested adjustments, but one could apply whatever settings they normally would to a flat film scan to get any look they want.
I will likely also make a Lightroom version, but the issue is it will be lower quality. Lightroom is not truly professional and it cuts corners to get better speed. Photoshop supports LUTs of any size and my final LUTs will likely be a size of 128, which is already compressed but without a visible difference. Lightroom only supports a size of 32. That's a massive compression, and the difference is visible. In tests it looks ok, but not as good as Photoshop side-by-side.
Currently I have Tri-X 400, Delta 100, T-Max 100, and HP5+ finished. I will soon add Acros 100 to that list. They were all dev'd in DDX and my emulation will be flat scans as scanned with a Nikon Coolscan 9000.
I had originally looked at emulating Fuji Frontier or Noritsu, but the Coolscan 9000 has better color fidelity for color films, so that's what I'm using.
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