Filmulator was my attempt to solve this same problem.
Perfection is not the goal, just the ease of achieving decent results.
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Pretty much on point I could care less about technical perfection as long as I can achieve the particular vision for the image without fighting to get there. Film sims are awesome but that is not my goal to emulate a film but more to I guess create my own film style based off what I love and what works for what I want to convey. Software just does not seem to be built around this concept.
You should try filmulator.
Filmulator doesn’t imitate the color of a film, it’s fairly neutral color-wise.
It also supports CR3 at the moment, at least in the Linux build… not the R5 or R6 though if that’s what you have.
No I have a 90D sadly I have to use Windows due to my PC hardware. My audio doesn’t work under Linux yet only the nvidia dvi audio does so it seems and I have no device that does dvi audio.
If there is a up to date Windows build I will give it a go even if I need to dng till cr3 gets in that build.
Maybe my use can help in the development even though I cant code complicated stuff I can give feedback.
Actually, now that I remember correctly, the Windows build does support CR3, but you cannot download lens correction profiles or else it will no longer launch.
Yes, but doing high pass in post tends to create halos.
Rawtherapee and darktable both allow you to edit in linear without an embedded tone curve. It is one of the features that makes them superior to much proprietary software. Of course you will likely want to add a tone curve in at some point so the image looks right our screens, but at least those two programs give you the flexibility of choosing your own curve, and adjusting it as desired.
I find filmic in darktable very powerful. Highly recommend taking some time to learn it.
Odd indeed I tend to shoot macro now a days corrections tend to not matter as much the lenses don’t really distort badly. But I am sure you will get the bug worked out. I will give the software a try. Not looking to match film color. Color can be handled in a tif with affinity, photoshop, or whatever.
I am more looking to take better control over the film curve to get more film like contrast curves.
I found that a high pass with a radius around 0.3-0.5 in linear light blend mode does not halo and clears the AA filter. Sometimes you need to lower opacity a bit due to crunch but works well.
DT and RT are good software but I tend to have weird issues with dng particularly around white balance. Not a issue in RT/dt. Has something to do with Adobe as CR3 in LR/ACR has the same issue it is correctable quickly in either case. I did submit files to RT for next release. The color profile should already be in dev but a bug is halting the addition of the white frame data.
Hi!
I don’t think we will ever get to the point where digital photos can perfectly reproduce all the aspects of analogue photos. But we can get close, and digital cameras have abilities that make photography fun as well.
At the moment I’m enjoying photography and postprocessing so much. With a vintage 50 mm lens, Filmic RGB in DarkTable plus RawTherapee’s vintage film LUTs I get results I’m happy with.
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This is not just film, it’s first and foremost a gorgeous light with just the right amount of atmospheric hazing.
Something like LUTs (for a preset approach) or color balance (for a fluid approach) will help you achieve that look, but you may have to learn what makes that aesthetic first, and this might be painful anyway. See Steve Yedlin, ASC - Director Of Photography to learn stuff.
As @patdavid said, as a digital photographer, you now need to be a lab tech and a retoucher on top of framing the shots and setting your camera in its sweet spot for the given conditions. It’s not less work than before, on the contrary.
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So I played around a bit with RT. I had to convert to DNG + use a Adobe DCP profile. The problem with this is that Adobe CR3 handling is not the best it adds a weird to handle slight yellow color cast to the images. This same cast is experienced in DxO Photolab as well but not in Canon DPP4 or Capture One. So the Adobe colors are a bit messy for CR3.
Using the White Balance tool I was able to remove that in RT by using the Picker + tweaking the blue red equalizer. From here I just tried in this case to get the Kodak Ektar feel to the image which was challenging using RGB curves. Also created a custom tone curve to try and mimic the contrast flow of the example shots I looked at. No where near perfect but that is not what I was shooting for I was more trying to figure out how things behave.
@anon41087856 yes I understand these are awesome shots and that to get a film style I am looking for I need to study much. Still feels like I am fighting the tools as one adjustment completely messes up other adjustments etc. Very hard to find a balance and this is probably more because film was not linear and obviously the DR of the film was very different plus chemical processes are very different.
Here is a jpeg of my first attempt with RT.
Edit:
Here is a darktable version as well using scene refered. Main changes from the base were correcting adobe’s yellow color cast in the dng. Adjusting the black rel exposure in filmic slightly to change the way the contrast rolled to be slightly less contrasty. Added some local contrast with tweaks to keep that same feel but bring in the pop I was missing in the mids. Again RGB Curves to grab the earthy colors. This actually felt a lot easier to do in darktable then in RT. Probably due to the filmic curve. The darktable version did lose a bit of brightness trying to figure out how to fix. ( Updated jpeg. Fixed it with tone equalizer I think.)
Thanks for that link! Great reality check, isn’t it…
Yeah, that guy is a goldmine, and very skilled at that. (Reply To Inquiries …)
@blj try the Kodachrome-like preset in darktable color balance if you are into that look (of course it has nothing to do with a real Kodachrome recipe, it’s only in the same earthy spirit for midtones shadows with cold highlights).
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Oh, I just love this guy… 
What I find the most interesting is how he seems to work with custom command line tools to implement his visions. This allows him to go against the normalcies of current software. I would not even know where to begin to do something like that. I can program all be it extremely rusty and all the math is way beyond me. But kudos to him he is a really interesting guy. Reading this stuff is enjoyable.
My favorite tools are command-line. exiftool, dcamprof, img (I wrote that one… 
), sometimes g’mic, a bit of imagemagick just recently to build an animated GIF, gnuplot, although I get the impression that it has morphed in unwieldy ways since its inception.
A well-written command-line tool will give you a degree of control you just can’t get in a ‘boilerplate’ GUI program. Although the rawproc GUI’s (I wrote that one too) fundamental organization is based on experience with dcraw and g’mic, a toolchain you build from scratch, and re-order as you see fit.
Not only flexibility, but there’s learning to be had in stitching together operations, to either joy or sadness. There are insights to be had when things don’t work as well as when they do…
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I agree always liked scripting/building stuff like that. Spent a lot of time modding games and doing microcontroller firmware stuff for fun. Can learn a lot from 8bit micro assembly programming. However imaging seem much harder to find information on.
Regarding motivation, the only thing I can offer is that if I have a camera with film in it I have tremendous excitement when setting up a shot that is totally non existant with a digital camera. It’s what turns me on and why I mostly shoot film. Sure, I shoot digital, but film is where I get my enjoyment. And nothing beats the buzz out of getting the Velvia back from the processing lab, or taking my 6x7 B&W negs out of the developing tank. You can’t do that with digital.
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Actually, I get a lot of excitement when I set up a nice shot with my digital camera. It’s a real buzz downloading the images off my camera and seeing them bloom to life in my raw editor. Or you have guys like @ggbutcher building their own development tank, but instead of mixing chemicals in the tank, they are mixing together algorithms and lines of code in their IDE. In some ways developing your images digitally is more technically challenging that working with film, but also in some ways it is easier. Either way, photography is a lot of fun! 
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