Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Film
The most recent version of Capture One added a rather interesting new toolset: the ability to work with film negatives. The software now includes the ability to work directly with scanned negatives and handles the conversion process directly in Capture One. This is specifically designed for camera scanning, and is similar to “Negative Lab Pro” for Lightroom, although there are some differences.
One of the mildly frustrating things about shooting film in 2025, apart from the cost, is getting your negatives scanned. Most labs will scan your film at the time of development, but the results are pretty terrible. They usually give you very low-resolution scans, with horrible noise reduction and sharpening turned up to eleven. These scans are mostly useless for anything except for previews. I have tried upscaling them and processing them in the past, to make them at least suitable for social media posts, but generally to no avail. Even using super resolution in Lightroom, the results aren’t great. Enter a new feature in the latest beta version of Photoshop.
I’m delighted to share some information about a project I’ve been working on for a little while. As long time readers might know, I used to have a selection of Lightroom presets available back when I ran my own download store. Since I closed that in favour of selling on Gumroad, I have only really kept my black and white presets, T-Pan available. I had wanted to bring some of my other presets back for sale again, but when I looked at them I realised that many of them were quite dated. I started by looking to see if I could bring some of these old presets up to date, but I ended up with an entirely new set!
DXO Labs has just announced the release of Film Pack 6.3. This update brings new camera support, is now native on Apple M1 and has some user interface improvements.
The story of how I was recently at one of my new favourite places to photograph, and I accidentally wandered onto a film set.
A while ago a reader sent me in a rather interesting tip and I wanted to share it. It’s actually something that never occurred to me. When they wanted to re-frame an image in Lightroom, instead of using the crop tool, they used the transform adjustments. In essence they were mimicking the way a film enlarger would work.
When I talk about Processing Fuji raw files, I mostly cover Capture One and Lightroom (with X-transformer). While I still think that Capture One is the best overall option, there is another application that I've been using a lot lately, and that is Exposure X5. While it is not as fully featured as Lightroom or Capture One, it does have some unique attributes. For Fuji Shooters, it offers some appealing options, depending on your preferences.
Since VSCCO Film was discontinued at the start of this year, I’ve been looking for alternatives to recommend to people who want to create a realistic film effect. While I do have some film like presets of my own, they are mostly designed as an artistic interpretation of film. For those looking for accurate and highly regarded film simulations for Lightroom, there are a couple of solutions.
I’m a little late with this but following on from their first Capture One set, Mastin Labs has released another film emulation style pack. This set, called “Fujicolour Original” covers Fujifilm negative stocks, and is similar to their previous Kodak set, and the company’s Lightroom presets of the same name. They sent me a set to try out, and so here is my quick first impressions review.
Just a quick update on yesterday’s post: FilmLUX 3 is now available from my digital download store. FilmLUX 3 is a set of presets for Lightroom 8 or later and Photoshop CC 2019 or later. It was handcrafted by carefully studying the properties of various film stocks and creating my own version. It is designed to create a colour film look that is inspired by scanned film, although it isn’t intended to be a direct emulation of any particular film stock, but rather my own set of “virtual” films.
I recently moved house, and doing my best attempt to Marie Kondo my office during the move, I ended up finding some things that I thought were long gone. One of which was a collection of PhotoCDs from 1996. The PhotoCD format is long since dead, so I wondered if I would have any chance at finding a way to use the files. After a little digging, I was able to get them to open! Here’s the full story…
I recently came across a set of negatives that I took about a year ago, and I realised that I had never properly scanned them. This gave me the opportunity to record the process, something I had wanted to do for a while, but had never gotten around to it. So, in this video I show you the process of scanning film using a dedicated, if somewhat old, film scanner.
I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friends Hasselblad, and so in order to make the most out of it, I headed to one of my favourite places in the country, Glendalough. I haven’t shot with a medium format film camera before, and I didn’t want to waste too much film, so I brought my X-Pro2 with me aswell, and actually ended up shooting most of the images on that.
I have recently been admiring some photographers on Instagram who are shooting on film and using Agfa Vista. I couldn’t get any of this film locally, so instead, I wanted to see how close I could re-create the look digitally using my X-Pro 2 as the source. In this video, I look at how I used Lightroom and VSCO Film to create the “Agfa Vista” film look.
A little while ago I got up early in the morning and headed to a little fishing town just north of Dublin to get some morning shots of the sleepy port coming to life. I had originally hoped that it would be a nice bright morning, and that I would capture the early rays of the sun over the sea and the harbour, but instead a thick cloud was down, and it was beginning to rain.
In this video, a follow up to my previous one on shooting street photography on film, I look at how I process the film after scanning in Lightroom.
I wrote a post yesterday where I compared my new T-Pan for Lightroom Presets , applied to some Fuji X-Pro 2 images, against some real film. It wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously, and wasn’t meant as a scientific comparison. I wanted to show, that I could mix images from both together in a single story and they would work together well. However, someone suggested that It wasn’t a fair comparison, because the film I was using Ilford XP2 wasn’t “real” black and white 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
