Film-like pictures in a digital camera

I don't know that it's camera specific. There are plug ins for PhotoShop that give you some options for converting color digital to B&W, and one (though I forget the brand and product name) allows you to select the type of film you want the result to look like, such as Ilford Delta 400, Tri-X, etc.

To me, the issue is how the lens works with the sensor, and I'd say that the M8 is one of the best digital cameras I've seen for B&W using conventional Leica lenses.

Petter, I remembered this 9/9/06 post on the Digital Darkroom forum. A poster had written a Photoshop Action for converting color to BW so as to simulate the various BW films, showing about twelve different BW-looks to pick from. I downloaded it and it works quite well.

http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00HyXx

Gents, the OP asked for film-like pictures "straight out of camera" . . .

I don't think there is such a thing, Petter. You can make digital photos look like anything you like, provided you do the appropriate editing.

All digital camera images look digital because thats what they are.And just about all digital camera pictures have to be slightly corrected in photoshop to equal the image quality of film.You can use imaging software on your images to make them look a little closer to a sort of film look.But if the film like look is important to you....USE FILM.

The Ricoh GR-D often has film-like grain but, as others say, the important thing is post- processing to get the tones to look like you want: actually, it's the same concept as you would use for contrast control in the darkroom. I don't really strive for a film look as such, but go for contrast and tones that I like. You can see the results withe the GR-D and Leica D- Lux 3 here.

--Mitch/Cape Town

But if the film like look is important to you....USE FILM.

WHY? If you can make it look like film, why do you have to use film?

Smoker, Copyright 2006 Jeff Spirer

Digital, I get asked "What film?" regularly.

Good point, Jeff!

The Fuji S3 has six stops of latitude and give you more film-like tonalities. It still suffers from the unnatural color-smoothing effect that comes from the aggressive color interpolation that digital sensor do. The only way around that is to have a lot of pixels, which means 22MP or higher.

Here's an S3 picture.

Digital b&w, especially from small cameras.... Are you kidding? It looks ugly. If you like look of the film, use it! Unless your image is more importaint to you that printed images.