I’ve tried this on tiffs and raw files from a few different manufacturers and result is always insanely contrasty and completely blown out highlights. Absolutely nothing like what Portra looks like. I’m confident this isn’t just a matter of opinion or interpretation of what Portra should look like, since other films that are known to be more contrasty work just fine in Filmpack. Unfortunately there’s no way to report a bug in the app so I’m posting here instead.
go to → https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us → Send a request …
While I have no personal experience using Kodak Portra 400 film, after reading your post I first tested the emulation on several outdoor raw images on a bright sunny day and agree that the results were way too aggressive and unpleasant. I would never use this emulation outdoors. I also applied it to low light indoor images and the results were much better although it is unlikely I would use it in low light situations either. Like you I was surprised by how contrasty it was.
Mark
Exactly. I’ve shot many rolls of portra and it’s a film that handles overexposure exceptionally well. It makes no sense for it to blow out like this in the emulation.
My honest impression is that the colour emulations have very little to do with the actual film (which can look very different depending on how one exposes it, and in what light). I wouldn’t treat the emulations as specific to a specific camera (the Fujifilm emulations from Fuji which were taken away from us recently were more consistent), but just look for some emulations that you like.
I’m generally not a great fan of the Kodak emulations but Ektar 100 gives interesting results with softer colours and brighter highlights (more “film like”). For a really rich Kodak style colour the best I’ve found is Fuji Velvia 50 which increases contrast (a bit too much but one can dial it back) and makes colours much stronger.
For all the 100-odd colour emulations (not counting camera bodies), I went through all of them and only use about ten of them. Two of them were those Fujifilm emulations so now I’m down to about eight. I have presets which apply those automatically with some other default corrections (i.e. Lens Sharpness Optimisation at the level I like, Fine Contrast, Crop set to Unconstrained aspect ratio).
I’ve gone off of the emulations completely lately as Nikon’s default colour profile (accessible via Generic Rendering, Neutral Colour) looks so good as a starting point and gives me the most access to shadow detail and very good rolled off highlights. I sometimes experiment with linear profiles for my Nikon cameras but unless it’s a very difficult image, it just takes more time to build up the image I like (which usually looks a lot like the one I’d make using one of the built-in tone curve profiles). It was a good learning exercise though to learn to make linear profiles sing and match the first class tone curves built into PhotoLab: it’s deepened my understanding of curves (which was already just fine but now I can see the underlying curve in the built-in tone curve).
I’m sure I’ll go back to some of my favourite emulations but to save time and create better more consistent sets:
- make your shortlist
- build some presets
- forget about the rest
PS. I’m not against putting DxO’s feet to the coals over a poor or changing film emulation. I’m just recommending a strategy to speed up workflow.
That’s exactly what I’ve done and I have a few that I like. But out of all the ones I went through, Portra is the one that simply looks straight up broken to me, even when dialed way down. It’d be cool if one of the most common and most loved film stocks had its emulation functioning in DXO. Anyways, I reported it as a bug.
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