I sometimes have that bit of nostalgia for that film look. I shot film from my school days until after I got married. We've influenced younger generations to think and feel that organic film colours is something to want.
Movies are often heavily colour graded, like Christoper Nolan's Interstellar. The quirky palettes of Wes Anderson continue that trend. Every photo guru is keen to sell unique Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom presets. There are also, well established colour grading software like DxOLab's Filmpack. Photo editing software often throw in presets or LUTs or Actions (recorded steps).
It is very tempting to put money down and get some yummy film simulations. But. There's always a But. But what if you could have fun and fool around with that idea for free? It might not turn out to be your artistic centre to use such a tool or you might run hot and then cool off. One way to dip your toes in the water is to use Raw Therapee with the HALDCUT Film Simulation Pack. Here's how:
- Download and install Raw Therapee. There are downloads for Linux, 64 bit Windows, 64 bit MacOS. If you don't want to contaminate your Windows computer by installing Raw Therapee, Portable Apps has a version of Raw Therapee that you can unpack without embedding itself into Windows Registry and Windows folders.
- Download and unpack the HALDCUT Film Simulation files into a folder of your choice.
- Start up Raw Therapee and go into Preferences to nominate where that HALDCUT folder is.
- Restart Raw Therapee
- Load an image into Raw Therapee and then go to the Color > Film Simulation panel to start using the Film Simulations
- Save the resulting image.
 |
| SOOC JPEG from Kodak P880 |
 |
| Image after applying HALDCUT Agfa film simulation |
