The film look, taken apart: what film actually does to a photograph

What people mean when they say film

Ask ten photographers what the film look is and you will hear ten lists: soft highlights, creamy skin, pastel greens, lifted blacks, grain. All of them are real, and all of them are symptoms. They come from one cause, which is that film does not record light the way a sensor does.

A sensor is a counting device. Twice the light gives twice the number, in a straight line, until the pixel is full, and then it gives nothing more. Film is a chemical reaction, and its response curves. That curve, and the fact that each color layer has a slightly different one, is where the look comes from.

Highlights that ease into white

Plot how dense a negative becomes against how much light it received and you get an S-shaped curve. The top of the S is called the shoulder. As light increases, film responds less and less, so bright areas are compressed gently instead of being cut off.

This is why film photographers overexpose color negative on purpose, often by a stop or more, and get soft pastel highlights for it. Do the same with a digital camera and the dress becomes a white hole. A sensor clips. For digital, the rule is the opposite: protect the highlights when you shoot, and build the soft shoulder afterwards, in the color.

Color that changes as it gets brighter

Color film has three layers, sensitive to red, green and blue, and each has its own curve. They do not rise in step. So the color of an object on film depends on how bright it is, in a way it does not on a sensor. Skin in shadow and the same skin in sun are slightly different hues. Greens warm up in the sun.

Each stock does this differently, and that difference was its character. Photographers chose Kodak Portra for warm, forgiving skin, and Fuji 400H for cool, minty greens. They were choosing a response to light.

This is the part a simple preset cannot reach. A preset moves hue and saturation by the same amount whether a color is dark or bright. It can make greens mint. It cannot make them mint in the shade and golden in the sun.

What happens at the ends

Film does not go to pure digital black. The deepest tones keep a little density and often a slight color of their own, which is where the idea of faded or tinted shadows comes from. Carried too far in an edit, it becomes the grey, milky look that dates a photograph to a particular year. On real film it is subtle.

At the top, highlights lose saturation gradually as they approach white, so a bright sky or a white dress glows without turning to a flat patch. On a sensor that falloff has to be designed, because the sensor itself offers none.

Grain, halation and the scanner

Grain is the structure of the film itself. Halation is the red glow around bright lights, caused by light scattering back through the film base. Both are physical accidents of the medium. They are also the easiest things to imitate and the least important, which is why so many film presets are a normal photo with noise on top.

The scanner matters more than people expect. A negative has no fixed color until it is scanned, and each scanner has its own rendering. Much of what photographers call the look of a stock is the look of that stock on one lab’s scanner, set by one technician.

Why most film presets only get the surface

The last row but one is the quiet failure. A film stock looked the same in every camera body, because the body was only a dark box. A digital preset looks different in every body, because each camera brings its own profile and the preset sits on top of it.

Building a response, on purpose

This is the problem NIPIK was started to solve. We call the technology DYNAMIK, and the idea behind it is on our About page under the line "Our own kind of film". Every NIPIK look is designed as a response to light, with its own behavior from shadow to highlight, the way a stock had.

• Skin stays soft. In bright light, faces stay gentle and whites stay clean.
• Each color has a path. Skin stays warm in the shade and turns a touch pinker where the light falls. Greens pick up a little gold in the sun.
• The ends are gentle. Highlights ease into white, and blacks go deep without a color cast.

It also starts where film started: from the same color in every camera. The looks are built on NIPIK Base, our own profiles for 741 camera models, calibrated to match each other and measured against reference charts. That gives a look one starting point, whichever body took the frame.

What we left out is deliberate. There is no grain, no halation and no light leaks in Riviera. You get film’s way of answering light, in clean digital files, and you can add grain yourself in ten seconds if a frame wants it.