Pushed Fujifilm 400H
Real Film, Film Emulation Presets, Etc.
We can’t discuss classic cameras without mentioning the one thing required to use them - film. I’ve had the luxury of using color negative, slide film, and black and white in just about every brand, type, and format made in large quantities since the late ’70s.
As I transitioned to a digital workflow I continued to use a ton of film. The vast majority of black and white I’ve used was I developed and printed myself, I still do. On the color side, I’ve always relied on someone else to do all that work. Part of the great thing about color film is that it’s easy, especially color negative film. Shoot it, and somewhere between an hour to a few days later you get fantastic pictures back from the lab. If you choose the right lab the results are fantastic, it’s like outsourcing all of the color correction and post production of your RAW files to an expert. Looking at it that way, film is dirt cheap if you put a monetary value to time spent in Lightroom, Capture One, or whatever software you use.
Since the ’90s color, negative film was always a hybrid analog-digital process. After development, most labs scanned the film for digital corrections and printed from that scan. It’s funny given that when you send a digital file from your brand new state-of-the-art camera to a mass-market lab to get a print it’s the same process used since the ’90s. The digital file projected onto an analog photo paper and run through color paper developer, a C-print.
I shoot a tiny amount of color film compared to the copious amounts pre-2005. On average I’d guess one roll a month. There have been countless occasions where I’d use film and digital cameras on projects where I needed to match up the results. I still do here and there but not nearly as often.
Matching digital RAW files to color negative film results from a good lab can be frustratingly difficult. It’s not so bad when the scenes are different across a bunch of different lighting conditions but can be mind-numbingly complicated when shot side by side. Given how long I’ve been at this I’ve developed my own way of doing it, then evolved that 1,000 times. I’ve sought out shortcuts. Through sheer curiosity I’ve acquired just about every film emulation filter, preset, and secret profile ever conceived. How did that go? About as expected...
Without casting shade on all the purveyors of these products or anyone in particular let’s take a look a just one solution. In the piece I wrote about the Olympus OM2s I included a couple of random examples I’d made recently with that camera. The example at the top happens to be Fujifilm 400H pushed one stop. It’s also massively overexposed to the tune of 3 stops or so. The numbers work out as 400H exposed as if it were ISO 50 then processed as if I shot it at ISO 800 Why? I just wanted to see what massively overexposed 400H looked like with a one stop push (over development). Yep, Fuji 400H goes pink in the highlights when you expose the hell out of it.
Let’s take a look at something a bit less abused shot at ISO 400 and pushed one stop on the same roll. I made a shot made on a Canon 5DsR and 50mm 1.2L at the same time. Both versions of the digital were tweaked to match the 400H processed by the lab.
So… what do we have here? One of the digital renditions is using Mastin Labs Fuji Pushed pack 400H+1 and the prescribed workflow to “match the results”. Apply the preset, adjust the exposure slider, fork with the white balance for color correction, then apply one of the “tone profiles” modeled on the way the Fuji Frontier scanner works for adding or reducing contrast and highlights/shadows. The other one is default OOC RAW processing in Capture One with less than ten seconds of exposure, highlights, contrast, white balance, then one tweak to the greens to make them bluer.
I used the new Capture One speed edit controls. If I spent another few seconds messing with the blues as I did the greens it would be closer. Neither of them matches but I’d get closer with less time spent on just doing it myself than the $100 preset pack.
Maybe this is worst case right, let’s change it up to something with fewer hues. Maybe the Mastin workflow will work if it’s not trying to deal with greens, pinks, blues, neutrals, and all that.
Here we have 400H+1 from the Mastin film pack and another default Capture One conversion but this time I spent less than five seconds as I didn’t bother skewing any specific colors. The default conversion has a few speed-edit tweaks, white balance, contrast, exposure, and saturation. Hmm, I’m not sure this is working out in the self-proclaimed king of accuracy, true to film, ultimate film emulation’s favor. I spent far longer diddling with the Mastin workflow and the preset. What do you think? What the hell…
Snake oil? Complete rip-off? A scam? Not by intent and sure Mastin as well as every other seller of film emulation presets in one way or another kinda-sorta attempts to provide a set of looks that mimic a very broad set of tendencies of particular films. These guys cannot even make the same “emulations” look remotely similar on the same file between Capture One and ACR/Lightroom. What chance is there that these emulations can match film?
I’ve tried to come up with recipes for a very long time. If I take some set of control pictures, I run the scanner and post-processing on the film, I shoot the film I can definitely “match” the results within reason and come up with a recipe and a few pre-baked tweaks that do something similar to what I did with scanning the film. Are they going to hold up across varied shooting conditions, lighting mixtures, exposure differences? Nope as I am never ever going shoot film side by side in all those conditions and then scan it with the intent to match digital so that my “presets” work.
That last sentence might be confusing because you may not look at it the way that actual film processing and scanning works. I just called out the giant elephant in the room. When you are scanning the negative it’s not to some standard that’s the same every roll or even every frame on a roll. The tweaks made during the scanning process are completely different all the time. Sure a quality lab doing 10 rolls of film from the same photographer, a knowledge of that photographer’s preferences, the same people, and similar scenery on all 10 rolls will definitely make tweaks to provide consistency across those negatives.
When a commercial lab scans on a Fuji Frontier or similar scanner there’s some level of stuff that’s automatically applied to the negative. For illustration’s sake just think of it as an auto levels/auto color balance. From there the scanner operator will tweak the density (dark/light) with “K” (black levels). After that, the operator will probably tweak the CMY (cyan, magenta, and yellow) for additional color balance. At that point, they’ll use one of a couple of options to mess with contrast in the highlights and shadows.
How can you preset that? You can’t. Do certain films have certain broad tendencies? Sure but those broad tendencies aren’t really the dominating factors in look, the scanning is far, far, far more influential. This is very similar to the thought process of buying the same camera as another photographer and expecting the same output. Not even close, one person's RAW processing vs. another using the same camera is worlds apart. That RAW processing is far more influential to the look than the camera.
Think of film emulation presets more as some amount of various color negative tendencies smashed together with a particular film shooter's tastes in scanning. A lot like any photographer’s presets of any type. I’m not picking on Mastin at all. I do think those presets as well as a bunch of others tend to exaggerate those tendencies for the sake of making each film look as different as possible.
I’m generally agnostic regarding post processing software. I favor and advise that people use what works for them to get the look they want. Use what’s easiest, makes the most sense to you, and you are good at using. Sure use presets if they help you to get a look you like. Don’t imagine presets will match results you get with film sent to a lab unless you have a lot of control on both ends with the intent of consistent results out of the gate.
Coda
I do think it’s amazing a camera from 1984 with a lens from the ’70s can produce broadly similar results to a Canon 5DsR and 50mm 1.2L under the same shooting envelope and output intent. Yes, I blew the focus completely on the OM2s picture of the shirt, I probably took a breath between focusing and hitting the shutter button. This close at f/1.4 a breath is all it takes.