How to Create the Film Look in Lightroom

The film look continues to gain popularity, and whether you use it as part of your personal aesthetic or for clients, knowing how to create it from digital images is a good skill to have. This helpful video tutorial will show you everything you need to know to create the look using nothing but Lightroom. 

Coming to you from Pat Kay, this great video tutorial will show you how to create the film look using nothing but Lightroom. Of course, replicating the film look digitally is not a replacement for actual film, particularly the joy of the actual process, but you can get quite close to the real thing a lot of the time, and when it comes to clients, most are not going to be that discerning. As much as I love shooting film, it can be prohibitively expensive, particularly if you are doing it for yourself and do not have a client paying for the film and processing, and especially so if you are shooting medium format. I still try to pop in a roll at least once a month, but this is a great substitute a lot of the time. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Kay. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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4 Comments

Film look = a perception or even a myth
how is it being presented; where is it being viewed
in the printing process you can simulate film from digital or digital from film

everything can be manipulated by software once you have the code

I disagree, film is twice removed from the image and always looks less three dimensional than digital.

That's a very impressive microphone.

Except for shooting film & digitizing, the only proper way to create the accurate film look in LR is to use real film profiles. I want to give a huge shoutout to RNI - their film profiles are excellent (yet expensive) and cover a lot of film stocks. And their customer support is really good too. And my second favorite is DVLOP - their Jose Villa Fuji Pro 400H implementation is quite good, I use it a lot along with the RNI Pro package, depending on the subject, it's just a different flavour of one of my favorite film emulsions.