Last week I posted about some of my recent adventures shooting film, where I talked about shooting some colour negative film with my Canon EOS 5. the other day I was walking past the same spot where I took one of those shots, and as I had my Fuji X-Pro 2 with me, I thought it would be fun to take the same shot again to compare the two.

Disclaimer: This isn’t meant as a serious comparison, and it’s not intended to say one is better than the other. It was not an attempt to do a proper scientific test. There were different lenses used and I wasn’t going for a technical analysis. It’s simply for fun, and because I was curious about the results. I know that it might be silly to have to make this disclaimer, but I know from the past that some people get a little hot under the collar with these kinds of things. So, again, this isn’t meant to be scientific, it’s just for fun.

For the film version, the film stock was Kodak Portra 160. It was scanned at 4000 dpi which gives a file of around 5600px X 3700px. The X-Pro 2 was shot raw, and processed in Lightroom, with Pro Neg Hi as the film simulation mode. I did some very basic tweaking to the X-Pro 2 version so that the two shots matched, but I didn’t really do that much to it.

Here are the two shots, the film one is first.

Zoomed out you can see that there isn’t actually a huge difference between them. In terms of colour and tonality, they are actually pretty similar. I did tweak the shadows of the Fuji version to add a little green, but other than that, I didn’t do much to it.

The X-Pro 2 version has a little more contrast in it, but the film version has a nicer roll-off on both the highlights and the shadows. The film version is softer overall, as you would expect, although I’m not sure what aperture I used when shooting it.

Fuji Vs Film - Zoomed In - Film is on the Right (the Tiff)

If you zoom in, the Fuji is clearly better from a detail and contrast point of view. The grain and the softness of the film is no match for the clarity and pureness of the digital version, from a technical standpoint. From a purely aesthetic standpoint many people still prefer the “analogousness” of the film.

Anyway, as I said at the start, this wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously. I just though it would be interesting to compare the two, and I am actually surprised by how similar they actually are. With a little more tweaking, I would probably get the Fuji version to match the film but it’s fine the way it is too.

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