How I make my digital images look more analog

Digital images don’t look like analog. They just don’t. And it’s not just as simple as changing the colors, adding a sepia tone or applying a vignette, or a frame. There are plenty of programs and plug-ins that can recreate that analog look, or they promise to do that, but often they use very obvious techniques to make pictures look old. I’ve done this lots of times myself, I’ve nothing against this approach. It’s fine if you want to create a very obvious effect, but what I want to do today is different.

I recently shot a roll of modern color negative film and sent it away to a lab for processing and printing, and the prints I got back showed me very clearly how different digital camera images actually are. My analog prints retained subtle highlight tones that digital cameras are really not very good at, they had natural-looking colors and good midtone contrast. They also had crushed shadows, which I personally don’t mind, but I want to just mention this as a warning to digital shooters considering experimenting with film.

To put it simply, digital sensors are excellent at shadow detail but not very good at subtle highlights. Analog film is not usually very good at shadow detail, but excellent at preserving subtle tones in highlights. They really are opposites in the way they respond.

I’m not trying to turn back the clock. However, I do really like the tonal rendering in my analog prints. It’s not practical for me to switch back to shooting film, though, so is it possible for me to get a similar look from my digital images?

I think I’ve found a way to do it. Remember, I’m not trying to create an obvious vintage analog effect. I’m just trying to get the same tonality of color negative film with a digital image. 

However, the two things I’m about to suggest may upset technical purists, because they reduce both the tonal range in an image and the level of fine detail. But trust me. This is an experiment worth trying. I’m using Adobe Lightroom, but you could use the same techniques in other software.

To begin, I am going to do two things to the Tone Curve which will look as if they break all the rules. First, I am dragging the white point control handle downwards from the top right corner of the curve so that the maximum white value is reduced from 255 to 235. The exact amount doesn’t matter, but the point is to make the brightest highlights in the image just very slightly off-white so that the horrible digital white-out you sometimes see in overexposed highlight areas just fades into the highlight tones more naturally.

Next, I select the black point slider and drag it inwards to clip the darkest shadow detail to a solid black. This really crushes the shadows but maintains midtone contrast even after my highlight adjustment. This is how analog film typically looks. If the image now looks a little too dark. Just try raising the histogram curve in the center, as I have done here.

Now on its own, clipping the histogram in this way does not suit digital images very well, but everything changes in the next step, which is to apply Lightroom’s Grain effect.

This is the secret to this technique. The grain gives the appearance of textured detail even as the highlight tones are disappearing, and means the shadows appear to roll off more gently instead of simply looking clipped. I use the following settings for Lightroom’s Grain effect:

• Amount: 30
• Size: 25
• Roughness: 50

These are my settings for reproducing the look of color negative film. You can change them according to the type of film you are trying to recreate. I have one key tip, though. The Size slider actually controls how the grain erodes the image detail. Some film grain tools merely overlay a grain pattern on top of a sharp digital image, which doesn’t look natural. Lightroom’s Grain Effect is different, and actually incorporates the grain into the image detail. In this respect, it’s one of the best and most natural grain simulators I’ve found.

In a bizarre way, adding a grain effect can actually make the fine detail in photos look sharper. That’s because it disguises that sudden cut-off in detail rendering that digital images typically have under magnification. The grain doesn’t just soften the tonal cut-offs in the image, it also softens this sudden detail cut-off. You can really see this in this 400% enlargement – instead of the blank white-out of the digital original on the left, the highlight tones look much subtler in the edited version on the right.

And that’s it. This is my simple two-step technique for simulating the beautiful tonality of color negative film. If you need to make exposure adjustments afterwards, you can use the Exposure slider or adjust the Tone Curve.

It has taken me a long while to find a technique to properly simulate analog film correctly, and I hope you will try this out and see for yourself. Remember that histograms are there only to tell you what’s happening, not to tell you what to do!