Film simulation/ emulation with digital RAW photography retouching, part two.
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Film simulation/ emulation with digital RAW photography retouching. – For part one.
So back in June I was talking of being pretty close to being able to emulate negative film with digital with little consistency. Few months on now in September, many more lifetimes in front of the computer and I can now say I have formulated a work flow that feels pretty amazing and works practically all the time. Not only does it make images look amazing, it has got to be the quickest work flow I have ever used. Simple is always best, ironically simplicity normally seems to require a lot of work to achieve. Hard work always pays off in the end though, right.
The samples here are from a Canon G9, no longer in my possession. Unfortunately most of the photos from the camera were shot in .jpg, a decision I am now going to regret. At the time, support for that camera in Raw software was limited likewise was my Raw conversion skills (Not that I thought that of course). I actually thought the .jpeg’s looked pretty decent and as the camera was only used for “snapshots”, smaller files and easier workflow won over RAW. Not even a geek like me can believe I did this, I have always used RAW from day one, never comprehended the thought of using jpeg’s in camera. Silly, silly.
Then came the big experiments with film, subsequently me being blown away at how much better it looked than digital. Me being anal and of being pretty much 100% digital my entire lifetime could not believe what I was seeing. So there I was sat with a hard drive full and many, many years of digital photos that to me seemed totally redundant now. How could I be happy with what I had with digital when I was presented with the fact that 100 year old(yea, yea I know modern films have advanced but still) film technology was/ is far superior in all aspects other than turn around time to digital.
I was mad, I was upset. All of those photos and knowing that if I’d have used film they would have been so much better for me. It made me think, if digital was not around for me I probably would never have really got into photography. It had also become this evil child that has consumed me for its’ misrepresentation of my world. Overnight I suddenly become anti digital, film, film, film baby.
So I stopped being a digital geek and become a film geek. With me it feels like I have to go to extremes, not to make compromises…especially with photography. Why would I use digital when film was treating me so much better.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), me being me, I can’t get beat. I have to learn, I have to know, I have to win, I have to figure something out. I need to know. I can’t give up. Can’t concede. So for going on about a year I have persevered, tried to understand everything there is to know about how the eye works, how film responds to light, how digital responds. How this all relates to how a picture works. How to translate this knowledge over into a digital work flow.
I could not concede that all of my years of digital photography were going to sit rotting.
So a year on I can pretty much say I have figured it out. I have worked on quite some digital images now with my work flow and it is going well. So again, overnight, digital photography has become my friend. Welcome back buddy, it’s been a long time you cheeky little sausage.
Really the difference between film and digital is pretty simple. Digital is linear, film is logarithmic. Human eyesight is also logarithmic. I like what my eyes see, so of course it goes I prefer the look of film. Linear is straight, it goes up in steps, it is addition. Logarithmic is curvy, everything is done in multiplication. The eye compresses highlights and expands shadows, being more sensitive to dark tones. Film does the same. Digital just records the world systematically, scientifically straight to the bone, it just does not care. Digital tends to have dark shadows and clipped highlights, so both ends of the scale are basically crap apart from the middle bit. Digital tends to look “gummy”, it holds plenty of details across the range but the detail gets lost in a sea of muddy tones. Skin looks grey with digital. Film gently opens up the shadows, midtones are bright and alive, highlights gracefully trail off into infinity. Tones and colours are separated into natural life likeness. If you have never used film before, imagine this. Scan in a well exposed picture, adjust midtone levels so the picture has a really dark gamma. Then look to your surprise that even the midday sun has some colour/ detail and tone in it. With digital the highlights will clip at every and all chance it gets. I never get bored of scrolling through the levels of a negative film scan and seeing all of those tones gently caressing my eyes. It is magical. It is like imagining how it would be if I could adjust my eyesight like that. One day I am sure camera manufacturers will improve dynamic range of digital, but no doubt it will go way over the top into that stupid plasticky HDR look.
For an example of how un-eye like a digital photo is, take a picture, look at the picture on the screen and compare it to what you see. Most of the time it will not look anything like how we actually see.
Digital has a horribly soft, crunchy look to it. Sharpening removes the softness, but enhances the crunchies. Film scans in slightly soft with a natural soft level of sharpness, again looks eye real. Digital has tons of detail and zero noise at low iso, until you have to make it look good then zero noise can suddenly become a crunchy noisy mess. (Negative) Film has fine grain at any speed, but that looks better than crunchy noise any time.
Everything about negative is more graceful. If underexposed you do get backed up, detail less shadows but it looks nice still. Give me detail less shadows over no highlights any time. With digital you can expose for the highlights, but if there is too much dynamic range in the scene you will tend to end up with your subject underexposed. This requires brightening, which leads to crunchy noise. You can expose for the shadows, no way, clipped highlights never looks good. Or you can expose down the middle, lose some highlights and some shadows. Who likes to compromise?, never ideal. With negative film, just get the exposure roughly right and you will have highlights for days and most probably all the shadow detail one will ever need. Unless of course you see the world through Noddy(cartoon) vision, then HDR probably looks good to you.
Here is another way I would describe the difference between film and digital. Negative film looks alive, it looks healthy, it looks like someone is shining a light through it from behind the image. Digital looks dead, unhealthy, flat with a browney/ orangey/ gray mud smeared over it. It looks like someone is shining a very dull light on top of a piece of cardboard.
So to my example, taken on a point and shoot Canon G9 with a crappy tiny little sensor. If digital was not bad enough, with small sensors all of the digital crapness is multiplied. Just have a look through the internet and seeing all of the white clipped skies in digital makes me sad. Obviously not many people really care about dynamic range do they, ha-ha. All of these pictures look so disgusting to me. It is when looking at old snapshots, shot on film, they look classic, they look like something worth having, it looks real. Fast forward to our snapshots, and everything looks so damn throwaway, nothing is sacred, nothing is special. Looking back on these digital pictures in years time, surely will still be nostalgic. “Just look how crap the technology was love, I don’t remember the sky being white and me having clipped highlights for cheeks”. I find it fascinating that we all have this digital technology but everything looks worse than it has ever been.
Technology makes life easier, never better.
(Right click, open in new tab to compare)
So the picture on the left is a straight .jpeg out of the Canon G9. One saving grace is that I exposed for the sky, so at least we have a sky, haha. The rest of the scene of course is underexposed, dull, typical. On the right is one of the few Raw files I have, put it to my tricks, now here we have an image that to my eye looks pretty much how my eye would have seen this scene, bingo. Highlights are soft and actually there!, midtones have natural contrast and are alive and bright, shadows are open with detail. And this was not even a complete edit, a rough interpretation of my eyesight that could do with some more tweaks.
I am not sure if this looks like negative film as such, but all of the characteristics that I love about it are here and doing well in my digital image. Absolute result. After a year of total despair over this, imagine my joy, excitement, relief etc. of achieving this. Maybe no one else in the world is as anal(ytical) as me and will not understand. Haha.
This might look like a simple case of increasing the brightness, but it so isn’t. It is a simple process, just not stupidly simple.
(Right click, open in new tab to compare)
And here is a Canon 5D file. The original has all the dirty, murky dull cardboard tones I talked about. My conversion, yup, looks alive and perky indeed. Haha. I still can’t believe my eyes. That I am actually getting these tones and colours from a digital file. This one is even getting close to what I get out of medium format film, incredible. Again it is not a case of just turning up the brightness and changing the colours. Put the original in photoshop and see what mess happens.
The fact I could unashamedly put these digital images next to film scans is a testament to my hard work paying off and finally achieving the goal.
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