Tim Lookingbill 
, Feb 26, 2009; 07:44 p.m.
Got a wild hair from a previous topic asking for software that can emulate Kodachrome. It was the impetus that forced me to try out ACR 4.6's color tools in ways I hadn't before. Once I got into it, I couldn't stop tweaking because it was like sculpting color similar to my painting days many years ago.
Thought I'ld post my results and see what you veteran film guys and digital imaging enthusiasts thought. Am I close or way off? If close could you tell what type of film each image emulates. I derived the look from examining the color palettes (mainly split toning color temp appearance) of several Kodachrome sites new and old as well as letting my intuition feel my way toward the final goal according to what I remember from prints I got back from the lab years ago.
Some come across unintentionally looking like HDR, but all were rendered in ACR 4.6 primarily tweaking Color Temp, HSL, Split Toning and Shadow Tint sliders along with contrast and other tonal adjusts to emulate the dynamic range of slide film in general.
Welcome comments and thanks for your time.
Tim Lookingbill , Feb 26, 2009; 07:46 p.m.
Tim Lookingbill , Feb 26, 2009; 07:51 p.m.
I seem to be having some trouble posting several images in this thread. I have a total of seven different images I want to post in this thread and the forum notice keeps telling me to not post to the same thread or something of that nature.
I'll give it another try. Here's another image:
Does this look like Velvia?
Tim Lookingbill , Feb 26, 2009; 07:56 p.m.
I think I figured it out. You have to post something different in the Contribute an answer. Now I have to make up something to say with every posted image. BTW the before pic is the default ACR settings of my Pentax K100D PEF's.
This one kind of looks HDR-ish?
Nicholas Andre , Feb 26, 2009; 07:56 p.m.
As far as I'm concerned that sort of program is used to enhance the colors. You've done just that. Which film it emulates is rather irrelevant, and I'm not entirely sure if it does so accurately. What does it matter to you? All that matters is that you (and/or other people) like the look of the picture. I like the more saturated look, and this program does a nice job.
Tim Lookingbill , Feb 26, 2009; 08:01 p.m.
This one I'm not sure what film this resembles but I remember the high contrast, high saturation and cyanish green I'ld get back from my lab when I thought photography was going to be an easy way to express myself and capture what I saw.
Tim Lookingbill , Feb 26, 2009; 08:11 p.m.
Nicholas,
Agreed, but this subject gets asked a lot and I've always wanted to give it a try and pass it by some seasoned experts here.
What's funny about this and quite enlightening is how dull looking the majority of my raw images that are edited to my tastes according to how I remember the scene compared to these images which were strictly copied by eye from several film samples.
And surprisingly it was quite easy and fast to get their using ACR's tools. I like the results but they just seem to look odd to me. Maybe because I've been so used to the way digital renders color.
Anthony Gross , Feb 26, 2009; 08:42 p.m.
I'm no film expert, especially not familiar with the higher end films you were mentioning (although my dad shot exclusively K64 as we kids were growing up), but I much prefer the more saturated colors (the after shots) to the stock ACR versions. I've been finding that every darn photo I want to "publish" needs work from the RAW file as LR sees it originally.
Cheers on experimenting, I'd say forge ahead and keep refining, it looks very good thus far!
Tom Watt 
, Feb 26, 2009; 09:05 p.m.
Nice looks. I agree that I prefer the slightly more saturated look, and it's what I'm often pushing towards.
I'm not certain that it matters whether it emulates film. At least to me, it more closely approximates what I see - so pumping it up brings it more inline with what I saw when I pressed the shutter.
Tim Lookingbill , Feb 26, 2009; 10:34 p.m.
Thanks for the encouraging responses.
Both the ACR default and the edited versions look nothing like the original scene. Pretty sure of it since I'm minutes away from where these were taken except for the two "tree" shots, so my memory is pretty good regarding accuracy.
I've seen sample images from other sites that claim to emulate a variety of film stocks with their featured software and none look even close to actual film images posted on the web which were old snapshots, the look I was going for as shown in this link:
http://sites.google.com/site/earlykodachromeimages/Home
I'm sure a modern pro shot captured on 4x5 film and scanned at a high end lab facility wouldn't exhibit the odd color crossovers and funky hue/saturation shifts.
All in all it was a very invigorating learning experience not only in testing my editing skills but also finding out how messing with color this way can induce an unexpected emotional response that kept me going with each tweak. I noticed the mood and my feelings and attitude toward the image would immediately change once I pasted the copied saved settings exported to an xmp file in ACR onto other images. It was like entering a dream like world.
There's someone else on the web who sells action scripts that give a very beautiful, professional, clean looking "pop" style cross processed look, but that look has been done to death already. When I stumbled upon this little editing venture, I realized the potential of imbuing one's own unique look to an image I wasn't aware of before just with subtle tweaks.
Photography is hard enough acquiring this type of uniqueness you can call your own. I mean look at the unique visual styles seen in images by illustrators like Howard Pyle, Norman Rockwell and Charles Bragg to name a few. There's not a lot of photographers that I've seen that can inject that level of individual style mainly because it's photography, not illustration.
