In this tutorial, we will start giving advice and suggestions to our users about the best way to insert our film emulations to the general workflow.

Above is a sample of what you can get from a vanilla raw file coming from an old Canon 5d classic when you apply one of our film emulations; for someone would be the final part of the editing for others just the beginning of the editing. We did work to make every one of our customers happy about our film emulations, giving freedom and at the same time a proper behaviour to our colours; so you can both keeping what we did and export or print your image or go further knowing what to do.

Manage your film presets

The first tip to enhance your workflow is to sort all your presets in a proper way. In order to be able to do that you have to apply your preset and your grain setting first as I did below.

After that, you’ll be able to save the full standard preset as your personal choice.
Please do not forget, for film emulations, you’ll have the colour profile, the tone curve and we added the grain setting, so important to our monochrome film emulations.

Once you did that for all the emulations you own, you can easily pick the proper colour emulations just hovering with your mouse on the list.
If you are not sure about the impact of the colours/bw on your picture or just to have a fresh taste of the full effect emulation/grain.

Manage your black point (and your white point too).

We purposely added a “complication” to our film emulations, compared to our digital emulations, the combination of colour profile and the tone curve.
That has been made to give the proper washed/fade feeling to a film version of the digital picture, reducing the dynamic range and still being able to well edit it for prints or more modern contrast levels.
So if you still want your colour signature from your Superia 1600 but you’d like to print the pictures with your printer without adding a washed look to the already washed adaptation to the paper that is what to do!

-You select the profile (your custom made using the tip above or just the original preset)
-You open the point curve and move the black point to the bottom for both the Blue, Green and Red channels.

After that, you’ll be able to reach the proper black point as I did below just moving the black slider on the right until I saw the clipping point appearing on the image.

And this is just a sample of how powerful is the combination “colour profile/curve” using our film emulation presets.
Below is the preset applied vs the preset with reached black point.

Manage your grain settings.

Grain is a big part of film emulations. We added grain custom settings to our film emulations in order to properly emulate the original texture.
We are aware of the limits of a not random grain pattern made using Adobe/C1 settings but we are also aware of the huge impact of these settings on the final picture; even bigger than expected on prints for the “textured” effect on some papers.

Above you can see 100% of the image with a Kodak Portra 800 emulation profile with a high grain level.
That is perfect in order to emulate that specific signature and feeling IF you export a full-sized file.
If you resize or print the image, you can reduce (or why not increase) that slider keeping his specific texture and behaviour.
That is another freedom you have, if you find a specific grain setting you do love for your pictures, please use it, make it preset and enjoy it, at the end that is what matters!