@nosle I agree with you on most counts. Good pasta is especially hard to fake, if not impossible. However, all those things said, there ought to be a way to state what causes those particular colours. There ought to be a means to edit, which produces that general feel of tones; like dominating greens, dark green shadows, and such. I know I’ve seen this look before, though not sure where. It must be possible to reproduce.
I think those colours are looking a bit Kodak Portra NC? Or am I way off base?
Edit: did som googling and bumped into this CROP_ Domingo Milella, Kodak Portra 160 NC 8x10". Drum Sca… | Flickr which suggests Domingo Milella does indeed use Portra NC! Was my favourite film when I was shooting that medium that’s why I recognized it.
Here’s a scanned negative of mine.
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Dammit now I’m looking at my film shots and thinking they look so much better than my digital 
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GREAT FIND @nosle! This is awesome. Now to reverse engineering the heck out of that awesomeness! Anybody know what produces the beauty of this film ?
It’s Kodak. The NC bit is important because it’s the daylight Natural Colour version. Must be a haldclut out there already. Edit : oops thought you wrote who not what…
@nosle I don’t doubt there is a nice clut and that it works amazingly, I just want to know what that clut does. I want to put those settings into RT and learn from them and eventually tweak 
I remember trying ages ago when i moved to digital. Can’t say it was ever successful. Perhaps this one but only because I was helped by the strange light that day. Was shot with a Pentax K100D, a digital camera.
Comparisons with other films. Click the Portra 160NC text below eatch image in the followin link.
Apparantly it has rather low contrast in addition to the colour rendering.
Portra was indeed a fine film achievement…
like rni portra 160-c (?)
like the excelent alienskin expo 7 emul
like replichrome noritsu (not sure to which portra corresponds)
like replichrome frontier (not sure to which portra corresponds)
and 5 cubes
portras.zip (5.3 MB)
Contents of portras’ zip:
- like_visco_do_Portra 160 NC.cube
- like_visco_Portra 400 NC.cube
- KodakPortra400NC_Expo-7_Oleg_Film Print Emulation.cube
- Kodak Portra 160 NC_DXO5_Oleg_Film Print Emulation.cube
- KodakPortra160NC_Expo-7_Oleg_Film Print Emulation.cube
PS
and the quick & dirty tests
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Alright, I’ve done some work and now I’ve got something to show for it. Here’s what I’ve got after some tweaking. I’ll upload now and answer questions when at work tomorrow if anyone is interested.
Images taken in Hamilton (Ontario) harbour, and my friend’s balcony.
Map: https://goo.gl/maps/FxkGFRFjbps
Images, raws, presets, all in the zip file here: THE ZIP FILE [upload complete]
No cluts used (since I don’t like basing an edit on something I don’t fully understand), just RawTherapee.
Might be of interest. Done this way due to discussions about gamma years ago. Also messed with the blue channel due to some of the whites. I did that rather than use a white balance. Another option.
Bit of a problem using RT. If viewed in an app that just uses the system colour management RT’s sRGB profile changes how it looks. Seems to be down to freeing gamma. So loaded it into the GIMP and selected convert which seems to loose any colour profile that might happen to be included.
Only some one that was there can know how it looked though. Grass can be that mix of yellow and green.
BWN_5920A.jpg.out.pp3 (10.4 KB)
Reduced and sharpened in Fotoxx 'cause I wont finally sharpen at anything other than the final size. Happier about viewing all sorts of things that way really. Maybe RT could add a preview option that uses decent quality reduction software.
Just noticed slight banding in the sky. So sorry etc.
John
No Stefan. I copied and renamed the raw by putting an A on the end so that I would obtain a different pp3 file for it than a different attempt.
The shot I posted has my usual short hand in the name G means it’s been in the GIMP, just to drop the profile in this case and the V0x just means I have saved a version from Fotoxx. Just reduced and sharpened a bit in that.
The gamma slider that made the most difference was linearity. More so than gamma value.
What the pp3 should show is, black point, highlight recovery, a curve also one of those on the blue channel, then gamma adjustments. May have messed with brightness. All started from a neutral profile.
BWN_5920A.NEF.pp3 (10.4 KB)
Maybe you need that one.
The castle shot I posted by the way was taken with Canon’s very first Digital Ixus - ie when they had to compete with film as most people were using it by a huge majority. Not enough pixels really for reduction to today’s usual web size.
John
The thing I didn’t like about it was a flat misty look. Reducing gamma is likely to do that. A touch of tonemapping in RT might fix that but I find that it tends to increase brightness markedly which can be a problem. Fotoxx’s one is more controllable. Also adding a duplicate layer in the GIMP in softlight mode can help. In this case 2 at about 60% as per this one
I have had a nasty habit of producing images that look like extremely glossy post cards using that type of layer. Probably not in this case I hope.
John
I think this is the way I would do it. As mentioned before mostly contrast, lightness and chroma in CIE.
BWN_5920B.NEF.pp3 (9.9 KB)
Not sure I would bring the sky down so much. The posts on the building seemed to have a blue tone to me but whites elsewhere looked ok so dragged the blue channel curve down in the region the posts were in.
Messing with gamma is a bit dubious. Years ago there were all sorts of comments about it including ones like it reduces dynamic range. Seems that is true to some extent but it’s needed to account for our log style eye view rather than the linear nature of digital. Play with mid tonal range contrast and that’s effectively the same as playing with gamma. It’s also what the mid slider on levels is doing - probably a lot more effectively.
I’m more used to finishing off in Fotoxx. Just slight contrast and brightness adjustments that could probably be done in RT. Another curve applied and a tiny bit of tone mapping.
John
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What I meant by haldclut is:
- Generate one from the image that you are interested in (src0).
- Apply it to your target image (src1). It won’t look right on the target.
- So you would need to do some tweaks to get it there (src2).
- Now try to get (src1) to look like (src2) via RT, etc.
- Profit! Now you know how to get (src1) to look similar to (src0).
Here is an example up to step (2). (I haven’t looked at -transfer_colors closely; I don’t think it uses the haldclut method.)
gmic src0.jpg src1.jpg --transfer_colors[1] [0] -o. src2.jpg
src0.jpg
src1.jpg
src2.jpg
PS You can probably get better transfers by dividing src0.jpg into subregions.
PPS For the sake of completion, try not to use JPGs like my example has 
. It goes without saying that the closer to the raw or film these src images are the better. And of course where possible do it in a high depth and color managed environment.