Fuji X-Pro 2 + T-Pan for Lightroom vs Real Film
I’m really proud of how well my T-Pan set of Lightroom presets turned out. I’m not just saying that as a shameless plug. I set about creating something that would work well to emulate black and white film, and I think the results work really well. I’m sure it’s not perfect. It’s not a full simulation as such, but rather an artistic interpretation, but I think it comes close. To see just how close I decided to do a little experiment.
As I had been shooting some actual film recently I wanted to see how they would compare. I didn’t have the exact same shots on each, and so I couldn’t really do a shot for shot comparison. Instead I thought I’d take a selection of images which have a similar theme and are similarly lit, and create a sort of scenario you would see from something like a photo essay. With the images all mixed in together, would it be obvious which is which?
This is in no way a scientific test or a controlled experiment in any way. I haven’t removed the exif, and in some cases there is still un-removed dust and dirt on the film shots. But taken as a whole I think it speaks for itself. I do have two shots which are more or less the same subject on both film and digital.
All of the digital image were shot with the X-Pro 2 and I’ve used the Fuji versions of T-Pan (see here for an explanation of what I mean by that). the film shots were taken on a Canon Eos 5 with Ilford X-P2 film. They were scanned by me at 4000 dpi using a Canoscan FS4000 which is 15 years old, but kets not go there! I’ve mixed the shots all in together, but if you click on them to view large and then hover over the shot, I’ve captioned which is which.
As I said at the start, this is just a fun little experiment. If you like what you’re seeing be sure to check out the T-Pan product pages on my store for more samples. Enjoy.
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