Turning Digital Photos into FILM (actually)

In this video I'm using a service that turns digital photos from my Fujifilm GFX X100S into actual Kodak Ektar 100 film negatives that can be scanned/printed. An interesting way to get a film look on digital photos.

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GEAR

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MUSIC
The music in this video was all sourced from Musicbed -

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MY BAG COMPANY:

[linusandhiscamera]

you’re welcome to come scan your digital film photos whenever you’d like bröther 🫶🏼 excellent video dude

[CadenceHelser]

They did this kind of process for Dune, shooting digitally, printing everything to 35mm and then scanning the film back to digital. And Greg Fraser raved about the ability to have the benefits of both worlds. It’s really cool to see this in the stills world & it turn out so well!

[TommyGrisselFilms]

One must imagine Sisyphus converting a digital photo to negative, and scanning that negative to a digital photo

[gregbarry]

In general, it's very cool how people are experimenting with the combination of digital and analog mediums and seeing what the results are. As opposed to throwing one out over the other to keep them separate. Art still innovates!

[Tomzhinsky]

Sebastião Salgado has been doing this for more than 10 years and the results he's getting are amazing. You cannot tell the difference from his digital photos to his analog photos

[stevenhightop]

I was involved in the digital original to slide film output around 2002.

I was the unit photographer on a TV show, and did all the onset publicity photos on a digital camera. But the contract with the broadcast network stipulated that the photos had to be provided to their publicity department as slides. The contract was a hold over from the 1990s. Plus, many print publications had not yet switched over to a full digital workflow. Art directors and photo editors were still used to putting slides on a light table and picking the one the wanted. Computer were much slower at that time when it came to reviewing dozens of images.

So, the production team picked their favorites and I brought them to a specialist lab that had the output equipment, and we shipped slides.

The next year the contract stipulated digital files only.

[DeoAbarquez]

this is nuts! the side by side comparisons truly show those digital vs film color balancing. for the average shooter i think the cost would be incredibly dissuading but for work you truly care about it looks like an incredible way to archive. Great video Willem!

[fuzzytalz]

I've wondered for years why there wasn't a service to convert digital images to film, now I know there is. And this looks gorgeous! Very, very interesting...

[bobsykes]

Whoa! The photos of the houses and the surrounding landscapes from your arctic circle book are amazing scanned like that! Incredible. I guess this serves to remind us just how good Kodak professional film stocks are and always have been.

[Yolligraphone]

Whoa, that scanner is absolutely sick. I love how it's an entire table, with a computer, monitor, the unit itself. And that Windows 2000-esque UI!

Very cool experiment. I think it was worth it. The results speak for themselves.

[yaronicious]

I've only seen this in movies before, as Greig Fraser (like Batman or Dune) has a similar approach.
Definitely interesting to see what comes out of it.

My previous approach in this way was a little more complicated: roughly adjust digital photos in Lightroom, export as DNG and load into "Davinci Resolve" and there create an accurate film emulation (highlights, color rendering, film curve, color density, halation, grain, etc.) and at the end add a negative curve, export this again and then "scan" the "negative" again in Lightroom via Negative Lab Pro and then have the colors interpreted correctly there and the result often comes very close to real film.

[Eliguitar]

Very interested to watch this. One of the charms of film is the way it glides up through the highlights, whereas digital sees deeper into the shadows and clips highlights in a more abrupt fashion when overexposed. The way colors are registered also feels inherently different. So I'm wondering how this service works. The new Dune movie was created this way (shot on digital, transferred to film then back to digital) and it does not look shot on film, just a sort of softened digital.

[rodrigoquirante]

This is absolutely wild! As a hand printer myself, I would definitely love to see the c-prints you make with these. Thank you for producing such great content! Love from Spain. 🤍

[zach.sorensen]

This process is actually super interesting. Thinking of the use case of needing to shoot something in a faster pace, needing quick autofocus or faster frame rate than film could ever provide, but still wanting it to be on film. Super cool, would love to see some darkroom prints of these

[marknachmias]

Peter Turnley has been converting digital images to negatives for a long time. As you may know, he works primarily in B&W. I think the negatives are then printed in a darkroom. I have some of his prints and that’s what they look like to me. Great video. Thanks

[BigBenAdv]

This is really awesome! Unfortunately such a service doesn't exist over on my side of the pond.
I lost the first 2 years of my photography (non-professional works but it was when I was learning) because all my digital copies gave up on me;
My primary harddisk crashed, the backup drive that I plug in on occasion (and stored separately) also gave up the ghost when I put it back in, and my last copy on archival grade DVD (and stored in a dry cabinet) suffered from bit rot corruption. It was the closest thing I could do to the 3-2-1 backup method at home but even then, it failed on me.
The only photos I have from that time were the negatives that I shot and still have a copy of.
Being able to use negatives/ slides as an archival means is really awesome - whilst cloud backups exist, the companies behind them may not necessarily last as long as well-kept negatives would.

[Istorian]

What an interesting idea! Thanks Willem!

[siathomas]

wow! beautiful images, i'm in awe!! was wondering wether you would recommend sending over with a light edit or would you send raws?

[locuraphoto]

BEAUTIFUL... i'm absolutely floored by all the subtleties that just turn these images into such wonderful versions of their digital selves... the way some colors jump out in comparison to their digital capture and yet overall it's mostly subtle nuances that simply invoke that film medium love <3

[ChoaYeon]

as soon as i saw the scanned photos i can already tell and see how it changed it without a side by side, it looked so much more alive, and the film like looks just gave it even more character per each photos.