There’s a certain charm to a physical film you don’t really get with digital cameras. The whole experience of slotting the film and queuing up a shot has a certain nostalgia to it, and many are turning back to the old film camera for their photography.
But you don’t need to buy an analogue camera to get similar results. With a bit of Lightroom editing, you can get your photos to look and feel like film photography, even if you have a high-end digital camera.
Today, I’ll walk you through some advice on how to do that, beginning with a few words on subjectivity and film photography!
A Few Considerations about Film (Analogue) Photography
When people are searching for that film photography vibe – be it you, your friends, or your clients – they’re looking for nostalgia above all else.
Why? To understand that, first we need to remember every analog film is different. Some make photos warmer, others make them colder. Some produce very crushed colors with a lot of grain, others get close to the results you see with digital cameras.
Furthermore, every film camera is slightly different. And then, we have to consider the artistic choices of those shooting film photography. Then, the scanning or printing technology used further alters the final result.
So you see – there’s no single source of truth as to what film photography looks like. It’s a combination of the look of old physical photos one remembers and the small number of characteristics that a good portion of film photos do share, all seen through a filter of nostalgia.
That’s all well and good, but how do you actually get a film photography look?
To achieve a film photography look, first consider that film photography does, overall, have some recognizable “features” such as:
- Film Grain
- Overexposed Colors
- Lack of sharpness
- Lack of details
- Occasional imperfections
So during the editing process, we need to prioritize the above elements.
Beyond that, however, it’s mostly a question of what photo you use as inspiration, then emulating that look in your photography. To explain it better, let’s go through a full editing process.
Note! Before moving forward with your editing, ensure your work monitor is calibrated. As screens age, they lose brightness and alter the colors shown. To ensure your work remains professional and your tones are true to life, it’s recommended that you calibrate your monitor at least once per month. For editing digital photos to look like film, color calibration is particularly important since you’ll be making very minor adjustments to your image, and you want to make sure those are correct and true to your intentions. A quick and budget-friendly solution is to try out TruHu, our app-based monitor calibrator.
Step 1: Find Your Inspiration
For this demonstration, I selected the following image:
Now that we’ve zeroed in on a photo, the next step is to write down the characteristics of the film that we want to emulate in our digital photography:
- Very bright, overexposed sky
- Strong black areas lacking detail
- Muted colors
- Greenish tint over the entire image
- Inconsistent colors – you can see some areas that should be the same tint of blue are actually distinct. We may need to use a mask to replicate these imperfections.
To these four, we add the general characteristics of analog photos mentioned in the previous section, and now we have a final idea of what we want: a toned-down, overexposed image with a green tint and very prominent blacks.
Step 2: Edit In Lightroom
Moving on to the editing workflow, first, we need to pick an image that’s similar in tonality to the analog photo you’re trying to emulate. For this demonstration, I went with this:
Next, it’s time to boot up Lightroom and get to editing.
Here are the steps to go through to turn up an image that looks as close to film photography as possible:
1. Edit basic Light settings. Try to match the inspiration image. As a rule of thumb, film photography is overexposed, so attempt to achieve that look by increasing exposure, highlights, and whites while making small adjustments to the other sliders, particularly the Shadows setting, to achieve the desired look.
Pro Tip: Always keep your reference image on your second monitor, if you have one. Just make sure to calibrate both screens to have as close to matching colors as possible. You can simply use TruHu to calibrate both.
Pro Tip 2: Increasing exposure might make sky areas lose too much detail, even compared to traditional film photos. To fix that, you can create a new Mask and use the builtin AI tool in Lightroom to select the Sky
2. Edit the tone curve to drive up blacks as necessary. Using the point curve (pictured), slowly raise the bottom left point to make the whites more muted. Then you can go to the tone curve and increase the blacks in the image by dragging down the same area of the curve.
3. Edit color settings to match your reference image. For my example, I had to increase the greens significantly. During this step, you might say to yourself “it’s too green, I wouldn’t normally do that,” but when you compare it to the original image you can see that they actually match. Now, you can follow your instincts here and leave it the way you want, or you can go for full authenticity and emulate the film as closely as possible. It’s more of an artistic choice than anything else.
Pro Tip 3: As you go through your editing steps, you might need to go back and tweak some settings to match your desired look.
4. Make more edits specific to your reference image. For my example, I used a combination of brush masks and radial masks to make part of the sky blue, add a subtle blue reflection to the water, and highlight some of the colorful foreground options, all of this to emulate the imperfections in the analog photo.
5. Add grain to your image. Go to your Effects in Lightroom and increase the amount of grain. Use the Size and Roughness sliders to visually match your reference photo. For my example, I had to drive those up to 100 to emulate the roughness of the film photo I picked but then I had to decrease the amount to about 13 to keep it from overwhelming the photo.
Pro Tip 4: I find increasing global grain does a number on any sky area in your image. Thankfully, it’s an easy fix – just go back to the mask you have for the sky and decrease the grain for that specific area.
5. Adjust image sharpness. Adding grain makes your image a bit more blurry, but in many cases, you still have to bring down the overall sharpness. An effective way to do this is by adding a new radial filter mask covering the entire image, with the feather centered on the subject in the foreground, if there is one. Then, all you have to do is decrease the sharpness to a level appropriate to your reference film photo. The mask not only helps apply the setting to the entire image, but also helps focus on the subject since it will be particularly noticeable if the subject is perfectly in focus, as digital cameras are wont to do.
6. Done! After going through all these steps, you should be left with an image that closely emulates the look of analog photography.
Summing Up
What does your final image look like? Are you happy with the results? We hope you, your friends, or your clients are getting that nostalgia feeling triggered by film photography, so coveted by many.
Thank you for going through our guide – for more color workflow guides, keep close to the TruHu blog!
