Spektrafilm "presets" share thread (+darktable styles)

[bazdesh]

Hi!

I thought about a possibility of us sharing some spektrafilm presets/looks, I am not sure if this is the best way (since you cant upload json files directly), but its probably the way that will reach the most of “us”.

I give you 9 presets to start off.

The things you need - spektrafilm experimental branch - GitHub - andreavolpato/spektrafilm at experimental · GitHub - the base settings and the langmuir donor/reciever settings are very strong, and @arctic spectral upsampling preset is also exceptional.

They are all set to work with daylight balanced RAW files, and with “linear” ProPhoto tifs. The previews here are just unscanned saved previews, so no “detail”, but - I didnt touch any settings between the images at all - just shows you how powerful spektrafilm is.

00 BASE - straight to jpeg, no adjustments, only daylight WB, for comparison.

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01 KODACHROME - K64 - inspired by the old Kodachrome “10ASA” slides, heavily leans into magenta in film/base - for even more “flavor”, push the magenta setting to +5/6, it can handle it.

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02 P800push2_EXTRAhalation - Portra 800 push 2 on Supra Endura. The exposure comp ev is set to -2.5ev, because it helps to emulate the push(?), controlled by the print auto compensation being ticked. Extra halation - without the “halation renormalize” tickbox ticked, the extreme warmth is controlled by the film/base tilt setting.

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03 P800 vintage - a relatively tame Portra 800 printed to Supra Endura.

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04 GOLD200_billydeeinsp - Gold 200 on Ultra Endura - started as an attempt to get a look Billy Dinh (Instagram) gets in his wonderful street photos. Of course that failed, but the result is also very useful, tame and warm.

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05 P400 natural - Portra 400 on Supra Endura. Another tame look, started as an attempt to emulate the print looks of Nat Segebre (Projects — Nat Segebre), but, as usual, failed at that haha.

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06 VERITA harman match - Verita on 2383. Tried to get a look I saw in a facebook group of some Harman Phoenix 200 film scans, I am not gonna speak of my failures anymore, you get the gist. A colder looking film, works great on summer european forest kind of scenes.

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07 C200 modern - C200 on Fuji Crystal Archive. A solid base for a daily modern colorful preset - only used exposure comp and film/base tilt and got this whole album done - 25_07_2026 Bigboš | Flickr

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08 TRIX - Classic bnw look. Not using the negative and print means you get more grain in the shadows too.

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09 COOKED - Portra 400 on Ultra Endura. Extremely cooked. If you dont like the highlight tone (it is quite cold), use print/preflash.

A few things to note:

• all the presets are set to film format of 65mm. The grain just feels right, its a bit too much for me at 35mm, but - you do you.
• all the presets have the scanner/white correction enabled. I think it is bugged, but it makes a lot of these presets work. Just try the kodachrome without it, it doesnt have any punch at all.
• not sure if this is intended/accurate at all but - use the film/base tilt setting to adjust white balance (negative is colder, positive warmer), the magenta setting to adjust tint (negative is purple, positive green).
• most of the presets also have a 0.03 preflash setting enabled - use the Y/M to control the tone of the highlights.

P.S. I didnt have the mental power to arrange all the preview images so theres small variations in the placement lol, I hate photoshop
P.S.S. All the images come courtesy of https://signatureedits.com/free-raw-photos

Presets.zip (16.4 KB)
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[Doug-Phoenix]

These images look beautiful!

But darn, I just installed the default version of spektrafilm yesterday. So I can’t try these out yet.

Regarding the film look presets - I wonder if you used model parameters from experience (by eye), or from film data? I’m thinking of couplers and halation. As I’m sure you know, most modern color films have anti-halation layers. Except Cinestill, I think.

Kodak Portra 800 VS Cinestill 800T: What's The Difference? -

I’m just curious - I’m not looking for any changes. Thanks.

[bazdesh]

Honestly, the experimental branch is a huge step up in terms of what you can achieve with color and definitely worth “updating” to it.

I have a few folders consisting of many film images I downloaded from all corners of the web, also flickr is a very good tool, I just open some up, get raw sample photos that look like they were shot under similiar light conditions to the shots I try to emulate and then use my eyes and go for it, youre gonna get the hang of what each setting does pretty quickly - but I definitely wouldnt look for accurate film stock looks, or even something vaguely “scientifical” (lol) in the presets I posted. Its just that they felt more usable than the stuff I usually ended up with, and I like to share - I am sure I am not the only one on this forum who doesnt like gatekeeping.

Regarding the halation. Even with the remjet/antihalation layer “intact”, every film can produce halation if the light hits the frame strong enough. (edit - it of course isnt gonna look like cinestill, but you can see a tiny orange/red halo on most films, when hit for example with stage lights or sun reflections, right?)

For example the preset 06, inspired by Harman Phoenix 200, should, if accurate, have a lot of halation, but it does only have the usual amount, I am definitely leaving all the details up to you, these film artefacts are very much down to personal preferences…

[Doug-Phoenix]

Wow, thank you very much! Looks like I need to install the experimental branch after all. It should be easier now that I have one installation under my belt.

I spent a couple of hours last night testing a fresh installation of the base branch. On top of selecting film stock and paper there are a number of sliders. Some of these clearly need to be available as variables, for example exposure comp, preflash, printer color tuning etc. But it occurred to me that perhaps some parameters would be film or print stock characteristics. So, ideally these would be tuned by picking the stock.

But it would be a very big ask to contemplate a code change just for this. So, just this morning, I thought - why not use presets instead? And then your post appeared.

Regarding halation - of course you are correct: anti-halation layers have limitations. One might hope that a single set of parameters would fit a film stock, and in a way, that is what you have proposed with your presets.

Thanks for the presets and your kind reply.

[Doug-Phoenix]

Installation of the experimental branch went well. I’m able to load your presets in Config > ‘load from file.’ Very nice!

Here is a photo I look last year at the Ferrari Museum in Modena. I used your Kodachrome 64 preset. I like it!

[bazdesh]

A new one. The goal was to get blue blues (not the usual cyan stuff) and green greens, arrived at Ultramax 400 + Fuji Crystal.

umax_fuji.zip (1.8 KB)

This whole album is processed with the preset. 08_08_2026 A GFX weekend | Flickr

[Doug-Phoenix]

Very nice! I think this one will fly.

[bazdesh]

Velveetia - an attempt at Velvia, the deep saturated variety ; works with daylight temp balanced ProPhoto inputs as usual, though certain scenes benefit from colder balanced inputs - in the preview its the two on the bottom, those were exported “as shot”, other than that no sliders were touched between the samples.
One thing to note - couplers do very little here, even the default Velvia settings are at very low values and they already cook the image if you use higher film gamma values. They basically only add pop to the greens, so if you want those more muted, just disable the couplers. (edit - I also noticed that while giving you more bright/punchy greens, the couplers shift yellow/orange tones towards the greener side, therefore can push certain skin tones to places I do not like that much so… try turning them off and on to see the effect)

Velveetia.zip (1.8 KB)

(also forgot to add - slide films with grain enabled take longer to “scan” compared to negatives, just be ready)

[Doug-Phoenix]

Velveetia Coloor!

I’m learning so much from your great presets.

[TonyBarrett]

Oh no. I like the base…

[bazdesh]

What do you mean?

[TonyBarrett]

I just meant I looked at the first set of images and thought these look great and flipped through the rest and preferred the first ones, then realised they were the base pics.

Other than the one with the black model is underexposed.

[bazdesh]

Okay?

[TonyBarrett]

Sorry, wasn’t meant as an insult. Just meant to be light-hearted comment

(More seriously, I like the idea of presets… but then in practice I often find them a bit of a visual sledgehammer)

[bazdesh]

Ektachrome preset inspired by some photos by POP SNAP (POP SNAP | Flickr)

One thing I am constantly fighting is the input white balance (D65), especially for slide films it feels way off, so the base module does a lot of work (and from what I understood, I shouldnt really be using different WB settings because of the spectral upsamplers, so, the base module will probably continue doing a lot of the work :D).
This one is also grainier with some extra sharpening, to get the effect. The couplers again do very little, similiar to the Velveetia preset.

Ektachrome.zip (1.8 KB)

This one can quite easily be adapted into a Kodachrome based look

E-Koda_fix.zip (1.8 KB)

[cometface589]

Are you first inputting into dark table or can you get these results from straight raw. when i input the files you make the images usually come out way too blown out with color shifts. Do you know why or what is your exact process with processing the digital negatives.

[cometface589]

didn’t see your comment bazdesh

[bazdesh]

Hi! Sorry about the deleted post, sent it out mid sentence haha.
The “presets” should work even if you import the RAW files directly into Spektrafilm, the WB is usually set as daylight by default, if not then just set the RAW white balance to daylight in the dropdown menu and reprocess. They should be fine except for the “blown out” part, you need some extra contrast control for that, and for that you need to do some RAW pre-processing, I use Darktable for that nowadays - it goes like this.

FIrst - in settings-processing, switch “auto-apply pixel workflow defaults” to none.
Open your photo in darkroom, reset the history - now you have a 100% clean image.
Set the input/output color profile modules to linear ProPhoto, no clipping, I also recommend to set your histogram profile via the soft proofing button accordingly (right click the icon)

Set your white balance to “camera reference” - its the bulb icon.
Set your exposure so that the image feels well exposed/balanced, without too much blown on the right side of the histogram, dont worry about shadows too much - were gonna fix them in the next step. “Blown” highlights dont matter too much since were exporting ing 32bit float, but you probably dont want any real crushed shadows - but this is what I think, fact check me on this one.
I also use the denoise (profiled) module to clean the file up a bit.

And the “secret” - tone equalizer. This will push the darker regions up slightly, make the image look very flat, but - it will tame the contrast, therefore giving you much more space in shadows without blowing your highlights in Spektrafilm.
This curve is something that works like a +70 shadows would in Lightroom/CameraRaw, Darktables “shadows and highlights” module feels broken when working in HDR/32bit.

Now export the file as tif, 32bit float, profile set to linear ProPhoto, import to spektrafilm, bada bing.

Here is a Darktable style, it should have most of the settings set, you only need to switch the white balance to “camera reference”, cause its different for every camera, then export…
Prespektra.dtstyle (3.5 KB)

If the style doesnt work (I have no idea what version of Darktable I am on right now so not sure about the compatibility) this is what you want to see as enabled.

Edit: for comparison - left is processed via the darktable style, saved as tif, right is the raw file imported directly into spektrafilm, both using identical settings from the ektachrome preset from my last post.

[cometface589]

i messed around with the tone equalizer to help make the blacks not so intense but i feel like something is off since they don’t look anywhere near your examples.

[cometface589]

thank you for taking the time to send all of this. i’m pretty new to darktable but followed all your steps and my highlights are still super blown out when i put your ektachrome setting in. i really want to figure this out as this is my favorite film stock.

i’m shooting nikon d850 and am going through dark table because i want more of the result of the image on the left with less contrast.

when you’re done with your image in dakrtable does it immediately look great like that after u apply your preset or are you messing with the settings for each photo?

my images are coming out super contrasted with the blacks being crushed and the highlights almost pure