The Home of the Hybrid Photographer

Today I am releasing the first iteration of a special request. Months ago, a fellow by the name of Maxim Muir asked me if I would be able to emulate Kodak Kodachrome ASA 10. This particular flavor of Kodachrome went extinct years ago, in the mid 1960′s. Needless to say, I would not be able to shoot it myself, and run it through my normal emulation workflow. I had to design the preset blind, relying upon scans other had made of their old Kodachrome slides.

Thankfully, Maxim had made his expertise available to me, and between the two of us we created a preset that captures the flavor and feel of this classic Kodachrome. We spent weeks refining and testing the preset, until we came to the one we are releasing today. Buy no means do I claim this is 100% accurate, it does however reproduce the effect we observed in freely available scans. Unfortunately those scans were retouched.

After a week of forensic emulation refining my first attempt, with a little help from a few members of the Photo.net community, we reached a point where the preset functions reasonably well considering the tools available to me to analyse the film … namely not much.

So feel free to take this final version and give it a spin. We are looking to make this as accurate as possible, so feel free to leave constructive comments to help further improve this preset.

I will be releasing in the coming days another iteration of this preset. Later this week I will bring you my Release Candidate version of the preset to allow for more extensive community testing. The RC has a different look to it and is completely worthy as a good preset on its own, it just does not feel as accurate as the current release.

If you are interested in helping me further refine this, or other presets simulating film long since gone, contact me at michael at lifeindigitalfilm dot com. If you have any slides or negatives for film no longer available I can utilize them for emulation as long as most of the color spectrum is available to me across multiple frames, I get a good sample of skin tone and highlight and shadow clipping. I don’t want treasured family keepsakes for this endeavor, only the frmes from a roll that are not quality shots, compositionally speaking. If you dare not send your originals via the mail (I can’t blame you) contact me and see if you can provide a quality scan for my analysis … I will walk you through a scanning process to retain the most data possible.

In the interest of full disclosure, yes I do sell presets on LifeInDigitalFilm  to further finance my site. The money garnered from LIDF sales do not go toward me and my family, but to keep my site running, acquire film and finance the expenses incurred in the process of emulation.

However, whenever a donation of film, slides or whatnot from the community come to me to aide in the process of emulation, the presets created from that process will be released on the site completely free, under my normal Creative Commons BY-NC license. Non-commercial refers only to reusing the preset itself for further distribution as a preset, the presets can be freely used for commercial purposes from amateur to professional photographers and editors.

All presets on LIDF will be included in Cold Storage collections. The free presets will remain available, even after the collection goes up for sale. My interest here is to preserve classic and modern films for posterity, not to make money. However it takes money to do what I do here on LIDF, I cannot continue to produce presets without available funds to carry out the process. I cannot bear the expense from my normal salary, LIDF must pay for itself. Cold Storage collections help that.

By the way, Cold Storage 2 is almost ready to release, although I have said that before, I have about everything 95% ready for launch.

So enjoy the Kodachrome 10 preset, relive a little of the past through you current images. Comeback for the Release Candidate version of the preset later this week.

Many thanks again go to Maxim Muir for the idea and help in bring this preset to all of you.

Until Next Time,

Micahel

So, again