Sony Kodachrome Film Simulation Recipe - The Toughest
- Veres Deni Alex
- Sep 10, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 25, 2024
The Kodachrome film - one of the most interesting film stocks.
That's because the Kodachrome was by far the most challenging custom Sony Picture Profile I have ever created.
Unlike digital, film is an organic medium, so results may vary even if the image was taken in the same place with the same stock. Many other factors influence the final color rendition. (light, heat, method of handling, film processing, and storing).
When you develop your pictures in two different places, they might turn out completely different, and that's what makes film so exciting for me – the unexpected.
With my film simulation recipes, I am trying to bring back a bit of that unexpected and infuse the digital medium with a feeling of novelty and discovery. While these simulations are meant to rejuvenate film, they are not 100% accurate.
That being said - let me introduce you to the Kodachrome film simulation!
Kodachrome Film Simulation on Sony - An overview
This film stock is just so complex and volatile, it’s really hard to find 2 pictures that look alike on the internet.
And the fact it’s not being produced anymore, it’s not making it any easier.
The creation of this picture profile alone, took me about 2 months and at one point I almost gave up because of the complexity of the project.
The funny thing is I accidentally created the Kodak Ultra Max 400 in the process of creating this recipe.
So - for 2 months I kept searching and gathering sample photos of the Kodachrome film, in hopes of putting them all together and finding the characteristic of the film, the so-called pattern, or what makes this film so unique.
And it was almost impossible to find the same characteristics in 2 photos, they all looked like being shot on totally different film stocks. I later found out that Kodak released multiple versions of Kodachrome over the years, each with different characteristics. Apparently, because of the complex development process, Kodachrome was also very prone to a blue cast over the whole image, and colors faded away after years, so scans with accurate colors are not as common.
Asked people on forums about characteristics of the old Kodachrome and everybody seems to have a different memory of how it looked like in terms of contrast and color.
The only thing in common - to most, that Kodachrome was the best film ever made, and they all loved it!
I also checked what direction Fuji weekly has gone with his Kodachrome Fuji simulation, but from the references seen online, it did not look like the original Kodachrome, so I decided to go on a different route.
And finally, after comparing hundreds of pictures, the only 2 characteristics that I could see appearing in each photo, were the blueish magenta tones and the accurate, desaturated greens, so I went for that.
The whole process of creating this film simulation recipe was very frustrating. It took me about 2 months to create this version, and I was continuously going back and forth between adjusting settings and creating new versions for comparison. At one point, I think I had 5 or 6 different Kodachrome recipe variations on my notepad, and I was testing them all at the same time to see which one is coming the closest to the real reference.
It was a complete madness.
It was a point where I lost hope and almost gave up. But also, that was the moment I got lucky and found a forum post with 2 images taken in the same place, same lighting conditions, one on Kodachrome and the other on the Nikon 750D digital camera.
Wow! Now, not only can I finally see an accurate depiction of this Kodak film with almost the whole spectrum of colors, but I can also compare it to digital colors which is more accurate to real life. And see how the film interpreted colors, more exactly how the colors shifted.
Here is the link to the forum post, I am so grateful to the photographer for sharing his photos with us!
Look at the strong magenta shifting over the whole image, slight greens in the brightest parts of the clouds, and the overall the color shifting is pretty crazy.
Now I have a good reference on how the colors are supposed to look like.
I have brought this Film Simulation as close as I could to the original Kodachrome, using only the picture profiles, but I wanted to push the image further. So I created the Film Simulation RAW Presets, to bring it closer to the Original Kodachrome 64 Film look.
The Kodachrome 64 Lightroom preset can be used to match the RAW files to the look of your Sony JPEGs (if you used the custom Sony Picture Profiles).
For the original forum post on Kodachrome 64 and Nikon 750D, I recommend checking the following link https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4213836 for better zoom-in features.
Let us know what you think of this profile, and don't forget, there is a new updated version of the Kodachrome coming up Soon.
In the dpreview link which frame is Kodachrome 64, on the left or the right? The original photographer does not say either.
In digital Kodachrome 64 simulation, maintaining neutral, cast-free highlights is difficult.
Great work! I will be testing this soon. Any chance of a Velvia simulation?