If you want to mimic a general film look, or even more the look of a specific film stock, you need to profile the digital camera you’re shooting with in comparison to the film stock, processing, and transfer that you’re simulating so that the color reproduction matches.

The exact same spot on the original shiny jacket kicks off two different colors from two different cameras because the manufacturers have tuned their cameras for different things.Īnd this is where the problems with LUTs begin. One company’s digital camera might record that jacket as a 102, 36, 0, the other as 127, 64, 02. Instead, the digital sensor takes light data and encodes it into a digital file, and there are just as many variables here as you’d find in film.įor example, depending on who made the sensor, its color pattern (bayer or X-trans or symmetrical), its color science and recording format can affect what is recorded tremendously. Replacing film with a digital sensor takes out the stock, processing, and transfer steps of the film workflow. Changing anything in the signal chain, from lens to lighting, and the color will be affected. Combine that with knowing the stock, going to the same lab, and shooting the same lenses, and you could create a consistent look from commercial to commercial.īut change something, from the stock to the processing to the lenses, even an aging light source, and your look would change with it. For instance, there were DPs who only transferred on URSA Purple Door Diamonds and had it in their contracts because of the “look” it gave. In a film-based workflow, all the steps in the image pipeline affected the image. If you book another spot with the same brand a year later, and you got the same stock, lenses and processing, and lit the same way, it should look more or less the same. That’s a lot of variables that all add together for a look, but it’s a somewhat repeatable system. If you were shooting a lot in the film days you know how much each of those steps contributes to how that orange juice bottle looks. Let’s say you have a specific orange color you are shooting with, maybe for a commercial with an orange jacket where the brand is very concerned about making sure it looks “right.” With a direct film pipeline, what matters is the color of the jacket, the color of light on the jacket (warm or cool, high CRI or low), the lenses used (which can have a color cast), the film stock used, and how it’s processed and transferred. What if you need to match a very specific color? The first is the color response of film, which is likely the easiest to recreate digitally if you understand the specific color response of the camera you’re shooting with. None of the techniques and tools here are perfect analogues for the way film works-if you want that, shoot film-but they’ll get you closer to a film look than a LUT can. The first thing to understand is that we’re going to be talking about three aspects of film capture you can start to recreate digitally. Arguably, the best method to get the look of film…is to use film. To understand that you need to understand a little bit better precisely what is happening when film records an image, how that’s different from digital video capture, and what you might want to do to at least get closer to creating something “filmic” with the digital tools we have at hand. What they can’t do is recreate most of the complex image matrix that creates the vaunted film look. So LUTs are great, once you know what they can and cannot do. It’s especially useful in-camera or on set, where you can plug it in to give your clients and collaborators a better idea of what the look is you are going for.

It can help you take the edge off saturation, it can change contrast, it can do all sorts of wonderful things. This can be incredibly powerful for changing the way your image looks. It takes one color value and changes it to another. A LUT can change the color value of one pixel to another. Same basic color, but a little bit brighter. So if you have a pixel that’s set to an RGB value of 66, 123, 232, it might take that and turn it into 68, 125, 234.

It takes a pixel of one color and maps it to another color. What can a LUT do, exactly?Ī LUT is a blunt instrument. But what if I told you that this is functionally impossible? While it’s true to say that you can recreate a lot of the features of a film look in digital post production, the tools you need for this are far more sophisticated than a simple lookup table. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of “film look” LUTs available on the internet.

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