Film emulation

Film emulation is a technique used to give digital image the appearance of being captured with an analogue photosensitive media.

The result is an image that closely resembles a photograph or motion picture captured on analogue media, even though it was taken digitally.

In the early years of photography, such media as heliography (1822), daguerreotype (1839), cyanotype (1842), tintype (1853) and ambrotype (1854) were used to capture images.

After the success of achieving a consistent look with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Johnson's next film, Knives Out was shot entirely with digital cameras.

For example, shooting digital meant the filmmakers did not have to wait days to see their dailies while the photochemical film was sent to a lab to be developed.

Yedlin considered it to be easier to add halation and grain to digital video than to remove them from film footage.

Directors and visionaries like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch or Wes Anderson shoot on film to create memorable cinematic experiences that are distinct from other styles.

The “magic of cinema” lies in the color rendering, in the depth of the picture, the shadows, but also in the director’s ability to construct the scene and inspire the actors.

Film as a limited resource, a consumable material, allows every moment and movement to be unique.“As far as I’m concerned, digital projection is the death of cinema as I know it, at least it does nothing for me.

Users of the Instagram, TikTok and YouTube platforms, live-streaming broadcasts on Twitch and Discord create huge amounts of content each day.

Turning to the French New Wave or interpreting American classics, they construct for the modern viewer the experience and sensations of cinemas.

Tools like DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere or Lightroom allow anyone - an enthusiast or an entire studio - to create their work in the style of the Golden Age of Hollywood by manipulating color and tone, applying presets and advanced filters to their digital images.

When light contacts the photographic emulsion, a chemical reaction involving silver salts takes place, resulting in the formation of a negative image.

Instead of photographic material, a semiconductor image sensor is installed in the focal plane of the lens, registering light with electrical potentials, then reading and converting these potentials into digital values using an ADC, which are transferred to buffer memory and finally stored on a storage device or memory card as the files.

Based on the method of obtaining an image, features appear on the film due to chemical processes and the medium itself.

In digital photography and video, bloom can be emulated by adding a blur or glare effect around bright areas of the image.

By controlling the distribution and size of the digital grains making up the image, it's possible to reproduce film softness without it appearing artificially blurred..

Developed Kodak monochrome negative film
Example of a set of equipment for digital photography
Number of people using social media platforms, 2004 to 2018 [ 13 ]
Layers of 35 mm color film: 1) Film base 2) Subbing layer 3) Red light sensitive layer 4) Green light sensitive layer 5) Yellow filter 6) Blue light sensitive layer 7) UV Filter 8) Protective layer 9) Visible light exposing film