Yes, I sometimes use film in my Olympus OM-2N camera. And so does Zuleikha in her Olympus OM-1. But how do you get close to the look of film when using digital cameras? Easy, you say: buy Silver Effects, bind it into Photoshop or Lightroom, done.
Not so fast, young lad…
Last week, Olympus came out with their digital reincarnation of the Pen-F camera they once had (and which used film, but made two exposures on each 24x36mm frame in portrait mode). This new Pen-F has both colour and black & white film emulation modes, like some other cameras (Fuji for instance) had it before. And then there’s the Leica Monochrom of course, and people love all these. Film look out of the camera; perfect.
So does that mean that you have to spend money on a new Pen-F, any of the Fujis or even that Leica? Or spend money for Photoshop, Lightroom plus 3rd party plugin software?
Not really. Since a while we have that in open source land as well – Pat David and some others created a very nice “film pack” for both Gimp and also RawTherapee – see his website for all the possible emulations.
I have that in RawTherapee since a while as well, so let’s have some Kodak Tri-X look on two of yesterday’s photos:
Both taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 camera and the Zuiko Digital 50mm/2 macro lens at f/2.8. “In-camera” black and white conversion simulating an orange filter, which you can also apply afterwards in Olympus Viewer 3 (I’ve got the brand new 2.0 version today, for free). Film simulation with RawTherapee, and the “film pack” described above.
No, it’s not film. But it comes close.
Oh, and Zuleikha took my photo – danke Schätzchen!
P.S.: here’s another one which I took some minutes ago. Same processing, same Tri-X emulation:
Thanks for viewing.
Wolfgang
Very nice photos. My schnauzer will not tolerate my attempts to capture him in photos. He sees the camera and turns his head! One quick question about Olympus Viewer. How does the Edit tab differ from the RAW tab in terms of corrections I can see that they are different but do the Edit corrections only apply to Jpegs? I don’t think they do, but I’m confused by the separation of the two groups. Why does Olympus do that? My apologies if this is a daft question.
Hi Peter,
first thanks for visiting, and for your nice comment.
As far as I see it, the raw tab only offers the most basic stuff, and no third-party plugins, while the edit tab offers more options. And both will take the raw .orf file and go from there – you can even use them one after the other if you like. So if you use the raw tab first and don’t save, but go back and then to the edit tab, the changes you made will be taken over to that one as well. I sometimes – rarely – do that if I want to correct tilt for instance. The design philosophy of OV3? I can only guess like you, but I never asked Olympus about it.
Again, thanks for your visit here, and for commenting.
Nice film simulation and I love Tuna … !! 🙂