Reverse Engineering an Image

[pbjef]

<p>Is there a way to take an image and put it in Photoshop and see what is missing from an image? Specifically, I'm looking to emulate Kodachrome 4 x 5 transparency film or get close to that look. Is there a way to see what colors are present or absent, how rich the colors are, things like that?</p>

[howard_m]

<p>I've seen a number of K25/64 'presets' for Lightroom (dont recall if I saw them for PS/ACR)</p>

[m_tt_donuts]

<p>There's a plugin from AlienSkin called "Exposure" where you can select different films. Kodachrome is one of them (I don't know if 4x5 Kodachrome was the same as 35mm). They did all the testing, you can download a fully functional 30 day trial of Exposure. <br>

I ended up buying it after the trial expired, I found myself spending so much time seeing what more contrast will do, less contrast, adding this color, that colors, it was my answer I was able to just click Next through 100 different films until I found the one I liked. </p>

[JDMvW]

<p>There are myriad plug-ins for various film types, of which Kodachrome is perhaps the most common.<br>

A huge percentage of my images were originally shot on Kodachrome, mostly Kodachrome II and K 25. I have had decent luck getting these into digital form, and retaining some of the features of the original slides.</p>

<p>I have tried some of the trial installations of various of these Kodachrome settings, and unlike Mätt, I have not personally cared for the results. I certainly don't think that they do much to actually emulate real film when starting with a digital image.</p>

<p>I will admit that I occasionally add 'grain' to an image, and once I even made some efforts as emulating Dufaycolor and Autochrome (below ;). However, I couldn't see that the so-called Kodachrome emulations ever did much more than boost saturation, and kick up the red a little.</p><div></div>

[tom_mann1]

<p>I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but ...</p>

<p>JL: <em>"Is there a way to take an image and put it in Photoshop and see what is missing from an image?"</em><br>

No. Not using Photoshop, and not even if you use a "real" image analysis program. The reason is that the software would have to know what's missing, what's supposed to be there, which colors and tonalities are right, and which are "wrong". No software or algorithm is smart enough to do that for arbitrary input images.</p>

<p>JL: <em>"Specifically, I'm looking to emulate Kodachrome 4 x 5 transparency film or get close to that look."</em><br>

As was pointed out, there are PS plugins which purport to do this, but, in fact, their results depend dramatically on the image fed to them, so in actual use, they don't save you much effort. If you restrict the input images to outdoor photos of landscapes taken on bright sunny days with the sun at your back, yes, several of the plugins might produce reasonable approximations of Kodachrome, but if you start with an indoor shot, the output of these plugins won't look anything like a true K-II or K-25 shot of that scene and will need to be fixed manually, often needing dramatic changes. </p>

<p>The best way to emulate a certain look is to train your eye and become skilled enough in the basic image editing primitive operations in PS so that you can achieve the look you want starting from a wide variety of input images.</p>

<p>JL: <em>"Is there a way to see what colors are present or absent, how rich the colors are, things like that?"</em><br>

Of course, there are many ways to do this. To start, you can use the eyedropper tool in PS to tell you the hue, saturation and brightness in different areas of an image. There are even ways to make Photoshop display a histogram of the hues in an image and many other similar summary statistics. Such a histogram tells you exactly what colors are absent or present, but that doesn't even give you the smallest clue about how to modify that image to look like a KR-64 shot from 1980.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

[pbjef]

<p>I think the plugin route is the best way to go. I downloaded Alien Skin Exposure 3 and tried the settings. I was surprised how many different films were available. I also tried DXO's version. Interface is nicer, but films are not a numerous. Thanks for the help.</p>