Creating Film Colors

[DeMorcan]

Before Covid (with a year out for cancer) I used to have a mentor program where I would work with 4 or 5 people for a couple three months during the summer. It was to teach people to create prints, calendars, postcards, Christmas cards, etc. Which was/is my niche. These things I write here are just one part of my mentor program although I never wrote them out as I taught by doing. I did have short outlines of course. I am trying to write out some of the things here. Great thanks to Rob for letting me do this.

FILM COLORING A PHOTO

I have seen different people wanting to match film colors. I thought I would explain this in easy steps. After going through the different processes, I found this is the easiest. There are other more complicated ways to do this. They are advanced color grading techniques and not the place to start. You do have to have Photoshop or an equivalent.

First you need to have photos with the color you want. I downloaded mine from the internet to not have to scan old slides. I have a Color Match folder with sub folders for different film. I have 4 or 5 files in each one. You want to have the different colors. I try to have a sky, a portrait, landscape, etc.

Without doing anything more, you can get the film look to your photo. In Photoshop load your photo and then as another photo, the look you want. Keep your photo in an Adobe default color profile if you want to make save this to apply to other photos.

To apply that look do minimal editing of your RAW if you are using RAW. I generally just do shadows and highlights. Color slide film was not really for solid black so you want to pull up shadows. Do not over denoise as you a LITTLE grain so it will look like film not a painting. Then in Photoshop DUPLICATE your photo. Do not do any changes on the original layer. Got Image>Adjustments>Match Color and adjust the saturation. Usually you have to turn it down to get the look you want. Sometimes you may need to adjust the Luminance.

Now go through any other processing you want.

That is the easy way to get a film look to one photo. You can stop here and do this if you want. Anything below this is about making the process faster to apply to multiple photos.

The rest of this is available on line in more detail. I am just going to go through this quickly (for me). Actions are useless here if you want to see different looks before deciding on one.

MAKING A PROFILE OF YOUR COLOR

BEFORE doing any processing as this is about the color go to Files>Export>Color Lookup Tables. Export as a CUBE. Note here, if you did not use a duplicate layer, you may not be able to do this. What you are exporting is the difference between the base layer and the final result.

Now go to Filter>Camera Raw Filter. In ACR go to Presets. There will be an icon that looks like paper with a corner folded. ALT click that and import the CUBE. This is now a color profile in ACR and Lightroom that you can apply in Lightroom. You can scroll through them and see the effect before selecting the one you like. When you apply a user profile on top of an another profile this way, you can adjust the opacity.

For some people they do not appear in Lightroom. For others they do. If they do not show up in Lightroom make sure that in Preferences Presets the Show Partially Compatible Develop Presets is checked.

[DeMorcan]

For those who want to do this, there is a post about using film colors below that has 2 photos, you can download and use. I used one of them when writing this.