Simulating Film Effects with Curves

I know I'm not exactly inventing the wheel here, but I have been treading one moderately well-trodden path recently: attempting to recreate the look of a few types of film I know and like. The method I chose was the simplest possible: attempting to create a set of Photoshop curves I could use to give photos these looks with a minimum of fuss. I don't even pretend to aim for accuracy. It wouldn't really help much in any case, since the photos on which I want to use them come from a variety of cameras and converters, and therefore no single method would be applicable to all of them. I haven't done any side-by-side comparison shots of film versus digital, although I have compared my results against some scans I've made previously -- and nope, they're not exact matches, nor, I think, will they ever be. But they do go at least a part of the way towards recreating the feel I used to create by my choice of film stock.

Emma Vaaen. Canon EF 50/1.8 on EOS-5D. Straight conversion with Raw Shooter Premium. To me, this has the "Provia feel" straight out of the box. Sometimes it goes like that...

One of the more important creative choices a photographer had the pleasure of making back in film days was choosing what kind of film to shoot. Slow, saturated, contrasty slide film gives a completely different feel to a picture than fast, grainy, high-latitude color negative film. Different brands and makes of slide give their own flavor to pictures: Provia rendering scenes in a cool, low-key, translucent way, Kodachrome in a rich, deep, colorful way, and Velvia in a completely over-the-top almost cartoonish way. When the choice was well made, the result just looked so wonderfully right that it would almost make a grown man weep... and when the choice was wrong, it could mean not getting the picture at all, or jumping through any number of hoops to getting something remotely acceptable out of the exposed frame.

Tyre Cat. Canon FD 50/1.4 SSC on Fujichrome Provia 100F.

Those of us who transitioned to digital no longer have much choice in capture medium. We're pretty much stuck with whatever happens to sit inside our cameras, and our choice of camera is to a great degree dictated by its picture-taking characteristics than its imaging characteristics. Some of us have slow, big, high-resolution cameras for big prints and fast, smaller, lower-resolution cameras for situational shooting, with perhaps a few tiny cameras for take-anywhere shooting, but very few have dedicated portrait cameras, landscape cameras, sports cameras, nighttime cameras, architecture cameras, black-and-white cameras, street cameras, photojournalism cameras, like they used to have dedicated films for each of these missions, and more. Instead, the creative choice of film stock has moved to the digital darkroom. Digital capture can give us a starting point that's more or less neutral and lends itself to being massaged into any of the looks and feels associated with these types of photography. The only trouble is getting there, especially in a repeatable or consistent way.

Autumn reflections. Rollei AF-M 35 on Kodak Portra 400NC.