If i were to draw from that wordy wall of text. I could derive from it, that i want my pictures to be vibrant, a good amount of contrast, balanced while all having a bit of grain and warmth(or coldness depending on the mood needed) to invoke as close of a feeling i will ever get with editing digital photos to what i love about film
Grain- not sure of a specific tool
You can try Color Toning - RawPedia but there are quite a few ways to achieve warmth or coolsness.
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I think nobody mentioned here so far the RT Film Simulation Collection:
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Film_Simulation
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Then shoot film.
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The main reason i don’t shoot film is the cost of the film stock and processing. I am on the low income side of things and film is prohibitively expensive at the moment. Plus i am a beginner photographer with maybe 2 months of experience under my belt, so film is rather wasted on me at the moment until i get better
That’s absolutely true. If you really like film, you can consider shooting b&w and develop that yourself. That’s easy, cheap and fun and some developers like Rodinal cost near to nothing.
If you want to stay digital, you know there’s a downloadable package called the RawTherapee Film Simulation Collection ? That simulates the look of quite some films (but not Kodak Gold…).
W-e-l-l… I am not sure that you are going to like this reply, but…
Since there are more than 469,000 words more than you indicated,
(ref. Merriam-Webster) please try to articulate better what you are after.
This forum consists of a multitude of users. Some are artistically inclined,
some are tech freaks, some are a little of this-and-that. The common
denominator, however, is that most questions/wishes will get a proper
reply, showing a good solution to Problem X™.
But only if you are able to convey what it is that you are after.
“Looking like Kodak Gold” most certainly is not a valid clue. That alone
will not give you a guaranteed success.
A short anecdote to illustrate what I mean: a few decades ago,
Donald Jackson (scribe to the Queen) was My #1 Guru.
So naturally I checked what kind of materials he used.
If only I used the same materials as he did, then my illuminations
and calligraphy would become as good as his.
Unfortunately not! Silly thought.
Whoever admires a Turner because he used WInsor & Newton’s
watercolours? Or a Cennini because he preferred eggs from country
hens instead of city hens for his egg yolk tempera?
So please try to articulate what it really is that you are after.
If you cannot manage in the 470,000 English words that are available,
then at least post a link to something that you would like to achieve.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
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Please post a raw image and jpg with the look you are trying to achieve and maybe we can help you get there with RawTherapee.
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The dev builds have a grain tool. See this thread for more info and a sample Add Noise in Rawtherapee
Kodak Gold is a film of terrible quality, almost everything that was shot on this film looks just horrible - so… I don’t know…
A film simulation might sorta look like a certain type of film but it still may not catch all the subtleties of the real thing. There’s more to it than film grain or garish or muted colors. Digital sensors do not respond to light exactly the same way as [analog] film stocks do so there are subtle differences in tonality and smoothness. Nikon developed a unique sensor for the D700 that had more of a film-like quality than anything else on the market that is still fondly remembered by many (me included).
There’s a parallel in the audio world. If you want to hear a long rant about how digital technology has ruined audio, talk to an audiophile. It doesn’t take golden ears to hear the difference in smoothness and distortions between analog and solid state/digital on a good set of speakers. Of course, when you get to the stratospheric levels of the super high end the differences diminish, but those of us in the real world can’t play in that sandbox.
This is the same shot taken with a Canon EOS R and a Zorki 4k rangefinder using HP5 film, for the Canon shot I use the HP5 film simulation and tweaked the curve to match the tone of the film, it’s not 100% there but I think one could get very close. The grain on the other hand can’t really be replicated with the current tools, the noise module in the local adjustment is way too fine and doesn’t really look like the real thing.
The digital file is also sharper but that a combination of lens, bad scan and noise. I think in term of color & tone you can pretty much replicate the film look with curves (although it’s very hard without a reference) but it would be nice to have a fully featured grain module (like e.g. TrueGrain Grain Library).
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Sorry Anna, I overlooked that.
My printing process looks like this:
- Convert from raw and denoise during this process.
- Interpolate to desired printing size (and resolution the Lambda printer wants)
- Add grain using Exposure to mask artifacts from upsizing and add organic look.
Exposure has a nifty feature that let’s you get the right grain size relative to the printing too.
I have not tried TrueGrain. And at this point I have no looked in to FOSS alternatives. G’MIC should have synthetic grain emulation. But I haven’t tried it. The problem is often color film grain. Lightroom still only has monochrome film grain, which looks as wrong as it could with color images.
Look alike my redirect from any *.patdavid.net haven’t been ported over to the new system yet to redirect to the naked domain patdavid.net.
I’ll see about fixing this soon.
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@LilianSharklord as mentioned here try these HaldClut film Sims. Once installed you can create your own user profiles and blend together these film Sims with other settings.
I’m personally coming over to rawtherapee from Lightroom where I had some nice film Sims. I can get similar results using these film sims in rawtherapee.
I’d also suggest looking at different cameras also. I shot with Canon for a long time after moving over from Canon film bodies.
I could never reproduce the same feeling I would get from film no matter what plug-in or presets I could used. I got hold of a fuji x-pro1 and have found it to output an image that provides me a closer feeling to what I used to shoot with on film. I also now a later version of that body and it has less of a filmic look. To me Canon images were always too clinical.
The majority of what I shoot now is jpeg output from those cameras coupled with recipes from fujixweekly.com. The ability to reprocess raw images in camera is a lot of fun. I use rawtherapee when I want additional control over special images… and shotwell to manage them. And now I’m far happier than when I had a Mac with all the editing software.
There’s also lenses… modern lenses are quite clinical. Investigate third party lenses like ttartisan for a different look.
Trying to emulate ‘the film look’ led me to playing around with curves for individual color channels several years ago. That was in GIMP, 2.8.something IIRC. That same basic tool exists in RT. Do a Google Search for those keywords and you’re bound to come up with what you’re looking for. Also, pixls.us’ very own Pat David came up with a useful article explaining this process, and his emulations now reside in G’MIC. However, learning how to roll your own is well worth the effort. You can apply these fundamentals to photos in the future when you want to create an effect without necessarily trying to make it look like film.
And if you want to add some faux grain, I used to have a .png file of film grain that I could use as a layer in GIMP. It worked pretty well, but it could be a lot of work just for minimal effect.
All that to say, spend some time learning and you can get your images to what you’re looking for.
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+1 for the Fuji suggestion
I also moved from Canon to Fuji, precisely for the reasons you mentioned here. Even though I enjoy the FOSS editing process in RT/GIMP, I love the Fuji film sim rendering just as well. I often shoot RAW + jpeg to take advantage of multiple possibilities for a single snap.