Site Supporter Join Date: Mar 2013 Location: Hamilton, Texas | playing with DxO FilmPack 4
I just DLed this program a couple of days ago, and I've been using it mainly as a plug-in with Aperture. The concept here is to emulate the look of many different films and apply those to your digital photos. I don't think it's possible to process a digital photo and perfectly reproduce the image that a film camera would have taken. There are too many factors in play that are different. However, the software can combine color adjustments, contrast adjustment, and artificial film grain to approximate the look of film.
Although I learned on film, back in those days I was blissfully unaware that one kind of color film was different from another. As long as I could get a roll of Kodak Whatever 100 at the local drugstore, I was happy. So... This is not exactly a nostalgia trip; it's almost all new to me.
One modern-day film I've used recently and come to like very much is Kodak Ektar 100, which I had developed and scanned by The Darkroom. The scans came back with bold colors, greens skewing slightly towards blue, blues skewing slightly towards green, and reds pretty much exploding. (Biggest downside: sunburnt-looking red faces!) As soon as I had FilmPack 4 installed, Ektar 100 was the first emulation I applied. My first impression was disappointment. It didn't look like my scans. As I looked closer I began to notice that the color distortion was actually a lot like the film, but the contrast was much less. I began to wonder if The Darkroom guys hadn't actually punched up the contrast in their scanning software when they did my negatives. So... I ran some photos through FilmPack, then added +0.05 to +0.10 contrast in Aperture, and suddenly my results were looking much more like those scans. Very promising! (You can add contrast in FilmPack itself, but it seems more convenient for me to do in Aperture.)
I'd been fond of the look I got from the "Reversal Film" filter in my K-01, so finding a similar slide film emulation was next on the agenda. The most notable thing about most slide films is that they crank up the contrast A LOT. It makes for bold colors and punchy images, but you pay the price when shadowy areas turn into black holes where not much detail can be picked out. This isn't the software's fault, as it's faithfully reproducing a limitation of real slide film. The "Generic Kodachrome 64" filter is pretty good, but "Fujifilm Provia 100F" may be even better. It punches up the contrast some, but not enough to lose all the shadows, and it punches up the colors some, but not enough to look freakish or cartoony, and it keeps the tone mostly neutral. It seems nicely balanced.
Then, just for fun... I found Agfa Ultra Color 100. This is a color negative film that was discontinued in 2005, but it almost looks more like a slide film to me. It does exaggerated contrast, wildly wacked-out colors, and plainly visible film grain. (However, in the comments I've read from people who actually shot Ultra Color 100, they described it as being fine-grained. I wonder what's up with that?) This is good for those situations where you want to put some angry fruit salad in the viewer's face, and you don't care if it looks freakish and cartoony.
As a side note... You can choose the film grain apart from the rest of the filter. So you could combine Ektar 100 color-and-contrast with Agfa Ultra Color 100 film grain, or vice versa. The film grain doesn't look exactly like real film grain, as it's really more like luminance noise, but it's a passable substitute as long as you don't magnify the image and look too close.
I haven't looked into B&W yet, as that's not really what I'm into, but it does have a good selection of B&W films. There are also a few oddities like Lomography Redscale in the "Expert Edition". I'm not sure it does a good job of emulating Redscale film, but I've never shot any myself, so I can't say for sure. There are also just a couple of cross-processing film options, but that sort of thing is clearly not the focus in this package. It also comes with some features to add aged textures, color cast or fading, frames, vignetting, blur, light leaks, etc. However, I'm sure there are other programs that do it better. (This isn't something that interests me much anyhow, to be honest. I prefer to make new photos that look new.)
I'm impressed by the software's user interface. I was able to figure it out almost entirely without reading any instructions. There were just a couple of aspects (like "snapshots") that I wasn't sure about, and it wasn't hard to find the answers on those.
I believe this is going to get me back to shooting RAW. I'd been relying on JPEG for a while and taking advantage of the different filter modes on different cameras, but I think this will be better. I can forget about all that when I'm shooting, and also not be as concerned about which camera I have in hand. It also means I can make better WB and exposure adjustments before feeding the image into FilmPack.
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