6 EASY Tricks To Edit Your Photos To Look Like Film

The nostalgic charm of analog photography has grown increasingly popular over the last few years, though this is not surprising. Its effervescent tones, manual touch, and relatively simple approach spark a fresh kind of inspiration in artists around the world. While the tangible process of film is hard to replicate, the pictorial outcome is much easier to manipulate. Software like Lightroom or VSCO makes it fun and easy to process images similar to vintage goodies. While this guide is simple in essence and relatively basic in terms of technicalities, the tips below are a beginner’s guide to understanding the steps needed to host a similar color profile to film. So, let’s dive in.

1. Recognizing The Various Film Stocks

To plot your specific edit, you should first discover which film stock(s) you’d like to emulate. I’ve combined some of the more popular film stocks below.

• Kodak Professional Portra 160 - The Versatile Light Range
• Kodak Professional Portra 400 - The One With Perfect Skin Tones
• Kodak Professional Portra 800 - The Low Light Compatible
• Kodak Professional Tri-X 400 - The Black and White Details
• Kodak Professional Ektar 100 - The Vibrant and Colorful
• Kodak Gold 200 - The Golden Warmth
• Kodak Professional Ektachrome E100 - The Experimental
• CineStill 50D - The Cinematic Tones and Dark Features
• CineStill 800 T - The Grain for Nighttime Street Action
• Fujifilm Superia X-TRA400 - The Purple-Tinted Majesty
• Ilford Delta 400 - The Finest of Detail for Panchromatic Images
• Ilford HP5 Plus - The Stark Contrast and Bright Highlighter

Additionally, if you’re hungry for more, I wrote an example article on the best Kodak 35mm and 120 film stocks that features more information about each roll and additional visual examples from other photographers. There’s also a guide for FujiFilm and CineStill if you want to take a gander. I highly recommend reading these pieces if you want an in-depth analysis of the various stylizations per stock.

Ultimately, ask yourself — Which colors best suit your subject? What stock might look best for your photo’s lighting condition? Do you want a funky hue or a desire for more natural skin tones?

Mimicking Kodak Portra Series

Begin by ensuring skin tones are smooth and even, as Portra is renowned for its flattering rendition of skin. Soften the skin texture slightly in your editing software and fine-tune the hues in the red and orange channels to enhance natural skin tones, making sure that the lightest and darkest parts of the skin aren't too saturated or washed out.

For sharpening, maintain subtlety; Portra typically offers a softer appearance, so avoid excessive sharpening, which can detract from the film-like quality. Instead, aim for just enough to bring out details without introducing harshness (don't mark up that clarity, it'll look tacky!).

Regarding color adjustments, overcast your images with warmth by slightly increasing the temperature without making the image too "green." Reduce saturation to mirror the film's understated elegance, particularly dialing back on greens and blues to achieve Portra's iconic soft and natural color palette.

2. Clarity, Sharpness, and Grain

When editing digital images to mirror the classic charm of film photography, the goal is to replicate the unique quirks and textures of vintage cameras. Unlike the clinical sharpness typical in modern digital cameras, traditional film often displays a softer, dreamier focus. To achieve this nostalgic look, gently reduce the clarity in your editing software. Don't make it obvious; just enough to loose that stark "edge". This subtle adjustment helps soften the image, echoing the mild blurring in many older photographs.

Additionally, a hallmark of film photography is its distinctive grain. Inside software like Adobe Lightroom, grain sliders allow you to introduce and control the amount of grain, enhancing the image with a tactile, organic feel. Slight texture adds visual interest and a touch of nostalgia to your digital images, making them feel more alive and otherworldly.

But please — too much clarity can make a digital image appear overly crisp and unnatural, detracting from the film-like aesthetic. Aim for a balance where the image retains good definition without the harshness of digital sharpness. Experiment with slight reductions and observe how the changes affect various elements like backgrounds and facial details, which can be especially revealing.

Using layer masks or adjustment brushes in your editing software, you can pinpoint areas that benefit from a bit of softening while keeping other areas relatively sharp to maintain depth and detail. For instance, you might choose to soften the background slightly more than the subject to create a subtle depth-of-field effect reminiscent of film. This selective approach allows you to control the viewer's focus and enhance the artistic quality of the image, much like what photographers do in the darkroom with dodging and burning.

3. Play With Tonal Curves

Film photography is revered for its unmistakable aesthetic, particularly the way it renders shadows and highlights. Unlike the often crisp and vibrant shadows and highlights of digital photos, film images typically feature muted shadows and subdued highlights. These qualities can be beautifully replicated in digital images using editing tools like Adobe Lightroom or mobile apps like VSCO, which offer advanced functionalities such as tone curve adjustment.

Start by manipulating the 'tone curves' in your editing software to achieve the classic film look. This feature allows you to subtly lift the dark areas of your image, giving shadows a soft, faded look that avoids harsh black tones. Similarly, you can tame the highlights by lowering the intensity of the whites, achieving the soft and gentle highlights seen in vintage photography. These adjustments should be done with a light hand to avoid over-processing and to maintain a natural feel.

Beyond tone curves, consider adjusting color saturation and hues to further enhance the film-like appearance. Film often exhibits a warmer color palette and less saturated colors. In your editing software, slightly reduce the overall saturation and experiment with warming the temperature of your image. Additionally, tweaking individual color channels in the tone curve section can help emulate specific film stocks known for their unique color renditions, like Kodak Ektachrome's blues or Fuji Velvia's greens.

Another effective technique is to introduce a subtle vignette to your images. This can be done by darkening the edges of the photo, drawing attention to the subject at the center and mimicking the light falloff commonly seen in older camera lenses. This effect adds depth and character to the photo, enhancing nostalgia. Remember, the key to successful film emulation is subtlety; the changes should enhance, not overpower, the natural qualities of your original image.

4. Warm It Up

Vintage cameras are renowned for casting a warm, golden undertone on their photographs, imbuing them with the quintessential charm of the analog era. This appealing warmth can be effectively replicated in digital images using modern editing tools, notably through the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance) panel in photo editing software.

To infuse your images with this classic warmth, start by adjusting the hue settings to shift colors towards warmer tones, such as yellow and orange. Next, reduce the luminance of these colors to prevent them from becoming overpoweringly bright, which helps maintain a soft, authentic feel. Simultaneously, enhance their saturation to deepen the richness of the warm tones, making the image more vibrant yet still naturally pleasing to the eye.

The strategic warming of tones particularly enhances skin colors, making them appear healthier and more luminous, which is especially flattering in portrait photography. This manipulation adds an inviting, cozy feel to the images and lends them a hyper-realistic quality reminiscent of high-quality film stocks, like Kodak Portra 400 or Portra 800.

5. Three Primary Colors

Mastering the primary colors—Red, Green, and Blue (RGB)—in photo editing is crucial for digitally recreating various film stocks' distinct color balances and tonal subtleties. Different film stocks have unique color signatures; some may have cooler tones with bluish hues, while others display warmer reds and oranges. By fine-tuning each RGB channel, editors can precisely emulate these color tones, achieving the characteristic warmth or coolness associated with specific films. This approach offers more control and nuance than broader adjustments like saturation or vibrance, which affect the entire image uniformly.

Moreover, film stocks vary in contrast—some have deep, stark contrasts with dense blacks and bright highlights, while others appear more subdued with lifted blacks and muted highlights. Adjusting RGB channels individually allows for tailored contrast settings that mimic these filmic qualities, such as softening the black levels in the blue channel to introduce a film-like quality to the shadows. These meticulous adjustments ensure that the digital image authentically replicates the desired film look, maintaining the artistic integrity and believability of film emulation.

In another article, you can read more about color theory and why particular combinations of color palettes reflect specific emotional responses.

6. Grain

Film photography's unique character often comes from the presence of grain, which varies significantly across different film types and ISO settings. This grain results from the physical characteristics of the film itself, where larger particles in higher ISO films create a more pronounced texture. This texture can add a perceived depth and sharpness to photographs, giving them a distinct aesthetic that many enthusiasts cherish.

For digital photographers aiming to replicate this filmic grain, the key lies in subtlety and context. Digital grain can indeed feel inauthentic if overdone or applied uniformly across various types of images. However, when added judiciously, especially to darker or moodier shots where the texture naturally blends with the shadows, digital grain can enhance the image's atmospheric quality without overwhelming it. Software tools like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop offer grain simulation features that allow for control over the amount, size, and roughness of the grain, enabling a tailored approach that can mimic specific film stocks.

Lighter grain can subtly enhance areas with more exposure, while heavier, more noticeable grain might suit shadowy parts better, avoiding an overly processed look. But by carefully balancing these elements, you can easily achieve those analog nuances with tastefully done texture in post-production.

7. Try Presets!

Digital presets are increasingly used by photographers looking to emulate the distinct characteristics of film. Our online library of digital presets, which can be applied in editing software such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, are crafted by creative professionals we love and follow who meticulously adjust color balance, grain texture, and contrast to mimic various film stocks. This method allows photographers to quickly achieve a specific look without manually tweaking settings for each photo. It also ensures a uniform style across a body of work, which is crucial for professionals seeking consistency in their portfolios or social media feeds.

Additionally, the photography community, particularly photographers of Fujifilm cameras, has embraced the creation of custom simulation recipes that replicate the look of classic Fujifilm analog films. These custom settings go beyond Fujifilm's in-camera film simulation options, adjusting color intensity, shadow depth, highlight rendition, and grain quality to suit specific environments or desired looks. Ritchie from FujiXWeekly is a fantastic resource for those looking to craft their own digital JPEG recipes or look inside the camera, which is a nod to the analog shooting experience without editing digital images.

Check out 10 of our favorite Fujifilm simulation recipes!