Technology

Then they needed to ensure that the processing stage for the negatives and transparencies would not introduce any spurious variables into the results obtained: to achieve this, the help of two highly-regarded professional laboratories was enlisted. Multiple sets of all the films were developed separately, one by Picto in Paris, and the other by Duggal in New York. The only exception to this was the Kodachrome films, which were developed by Kodak’s own professional laboratory (the only one left capable of processing this legendary film).

Once the films were developed, the calibration chain required a scrupulous digitization process, with recourse to a professional color scanner. Then two distinct lines of action were put in place: firstly, the calibration of the color rendering, based on colorimetric measurements taken from all the scans; and then the determination of the grain.


An innovative procedure

The method used for the latter is worth explaining. When it comes to “re-creating” the grain of conventional photography, software solutions available up till now have confined themselves to artificially generating Gaussian noise, the appearance of which is “tweaked” to imitate this or that film. It’s not hard to check, both by accurate measurement and by visual inspection, the extent to which this empirical approach renders the results obtained not very credible.
By contrast, the DxO Labs approach has been to derive “grain matrices” directly from the test images, to then be applied to the digital images.

Participation by photographers

Once the whole of this process was completed, there remained the validation of the results: true to the customary DxO Labs approach of seeking to associate the scientific process with the skills of image professionals, the “looks” were verified both by the DxO Labs technicians and by a number of expert photographers.

These latter also helped design the FilmPack interface, which appears as a module incorporated into DxO Optics Pro. However sophisticated a tool is, it needs to remain simple enough to be used by a novice, yet comprehensive enough to allow expert users to modulate its effects freely. So the FilmPack Man/Machine Interface offers a quick, easy method for applying a “look” by direct selection of the film type; it also offers comprehensive options for setting the color rendering and grain profiles.

The final touch

This way, you can explore some original styles, applying the color rendering from one film and the grain from another; better still, the visibility of the grain and its coarseness can still be modulated. Three presets offer grain reproduction in 35 mm, 6×6, or large-format.

Naturally, all the DxO Optics Pro adjustment modules can be brought into play to modulate the effect of FilmPack. In the case of color negative films, this might be a matter of the user’s finalizing his own “color printing”, using the Lighting and White Balance palette sliders, for example.

One last remark about two very special “looks” provided in FilmPack: the “cross-processed” looks. These are development techniques that involve processing reversal film (in this case, Kodak Elite 100) in the processing line for negative film, and a negative film (Fuji Superior 200) in the chemistry reserved for reversal films! The very original results that can be obtained in one or other of these cases have been faithfully reproduced, to allow digital photographers to draw inspiration from some of the more outlandish creative ideas from the era of silver-based photography…