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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Shooting on film has more merit than the "vinyl is better than CD" argument because if you nail the exposure -- especially on Kodachrome -- you get colors and vibrancy that no other film or digital sensor can capture. That said, I cannot see why anyone shooting on a deadline of any kind would want to shoot on film.

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There are Kodachrome presets off the shelf for Lightroom. I did a double-blind test a couple of years back with a few friends who shoot film only and no one could reliably tell the difference. It's another audiophile thing.

Incidentally I still shoot film myself occasionally, Ilford B&W on an old Praktica w/ Zeiss lens. It's slow, painful, I screw up 1/4 of the shots and occasionally destroy a whole roll while developing it. But it's fun. When it's no longer fun, out comes the Z50...

> I did a double-blind test a couple of years back with a few friends who shoot film only and no one could reliably tell the difference.

Wait: how could you possibly do a double-blind test? They'd surely notice the difference between a slide projector and a computer monitor. A digital scan of a Kodachrome slide is not the same as a Kodachrome slide projected with a good projector. The dynamic range from a projector is far greater than any standard monitor is capable of.

The digital projectors used in theatres are getting pretty close. A standard desktop monitor? No way.

Yeah all over that one. We used these guys to make some slides for us https://www.digitalslides.co.uk/ ... They were loaded into an old Rollei slide projector.

I thought the argument was that it fails more gracefully in high dynamic range saturating situations?

It depends how you interpret it. There is some dynamic range compression on over-exposure which can save you if you blow something out. If you underexpose Kodachrome you are screwed.

I prefer the crutch of 12 bit RAW and Lightroom which usually gets me out of the same sticky situation :)

> If you underexpose Kodachrome you are screwed.

Quite the opposite. Reversal ("slide", "chrome") films like Kodachrome are more forgiving of underexposure, while negative films are more forgiving of overexposure.

Back in the heyday of chromes, it was common to slightly underexpose them to get more color saturation.

Good point - got my point the wrong way round.

you get colors and vibrancy that no other film or digital sensor can capture

https://eng.vsco.co/reviving-kodachrome/ ?

The technical difference is that digital color is always* a demosaic of a Bayer filter (or X-trans, or other filter), whereas color film has three layers of emulsion to capture e.g. Red/Blue/Green. Lens focus is indeed very slightly different for each of the three layers.

*There are a few other methods, such as prisms and stacked sensors, but in practice, Bayer/similar filters give better performance and that's what commercial cameras use.

Somehow, you can still downscale a scanned Kodachrome photo and it's still considered a Kodachrome photo. It's about color/LUT, not pixels.

On Kodachrome you’d also get a negative you can’t develop…

I would say you've got film you can't develop if we're going to be pedantic about it, though I suspect someone can run it through some chemistry and get a (likely black and white) image.

Kodachrome if developed in a B&W developer will produce a B&W negative (I've done it but it was decades ago and only as an experiment). That said, one also has to get rid of the anti-halation stuff and yellow filter which normally blocks blue light from hitting the orthochromatic (green/yellow) layer and the red layer below it (they're also blue sensitive). That's messy too.

Really I wouldn't bother (but when done properly it did turn out some pretty decent B&W prints.

I would say it's a good option if you come across an old, exposed roll and what to see what's on it these days, but otherwise, I wouldn't bother either.

Whilst not common, that problem is far from being unheard of.

I've had similar experiences albeit only two instances where 'good' film was developed by commercial operators who put the films through the wrong processes. With much Photoshopping I actually got usable photos but they certainly weren't pretty.

That's different to experimenting. Years ago I worked for a television station that had a huge Eastmancolor processing lab attracted (we processed millions of feet of movie stock per month). Running various 'non-standard' test strips though the baths proved very interesting. We produced many strange effects (it was an excellent way of getting to understand how color emulsions work).

That is exactly what would happen. You can process Kodachrome (assuming you can get your hands on some) as B&W film. Obviously, you can't do K14 process any more. You can't do this trick with E6 film, the chemistry of the emulsion is too different.

As per my comment, use B&W developer such as Dektol, Microdol etc.

I think the main reason people actually like vinyl nowadays is because it's fun and tactile and visual and a very intentional listening experience.

I guess people would probably say similar things about shooting on film though :)

Commercially, film probably shines in larger formats since digital basically only goes up to 645 format which is on the smaller end of medium format and those cameras cost upwards of 50k and most digital cameras use the same sensor technology compared to differences in film stocks. Otherwise it is more of a hobbyist/ artistic choice.

Kodachrome was indeed special, but Ektar is amazing, and while not as good at Kodachrome, has a visual appeal all its own. My best photography has been on film.

https://leho.blastpuppy.com/~aloha/photos/

I can do what I do on digital, but not as well.

Is there a reason that a RAW from a digital sensor can't be "color-graded" (to use the video term) with a preset to match the light-energy response curves from any given film process? Is it something to do with light bleed/"bloom" not being emulated?

It’s a complicated physical and chemical process, so a “per pixel” LUT approach won’t get you there fully. Here’s a very interesting article from the development of “filmulator”, an open source film simulator.

https://github.com/mermerico/filmulator/wiki/How-Film-Works

This is a really cool project. You should submit it as a toplevel post. (A shame there's no website / that the README doesn't embed images of example outputs, though.)

I have a LOMO Lubitel that I love to use, but I have no labs in my area that will process slide film in that format. I just dread the shipping fees for getting a roll developed.

I think sensors and the HDR systems of digital camera processors has evolved to the point where dynamic range is as good as film was.

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