darktable preset inspired by AgfaVista 200

What the style changes

The style sets five darktable modules. It aims at a saturated, fairly contrasty Vista 200: dense reds, intense blues, deep blacks and visible but fine grain, as the datasheet and the reviews on the Agfa Vista 200 film page describe. The figures below come from renders of the same test photos, measured in CIELab. The film reviews mostly concern the later AgfaPhoto Vista Plus 200, so the style follows the 2003 Agfa datasheet and treats those reviews as approximate.

• Contrast and blacks. The RGB tone curve, applied per channel, has no soft shoulder. Contrast rises (Lsd 14.3 → 17.4 on photo 0775, 30.7 → 34.0 on photo 1014) and the darkest 5 % of photo 1014 fall from L 2.6 to 1.4.
• Saturation. color balance rgb adds 8 % saturation and 0.08 vibrance, and color equalizer raises red saturation by 10 % and blue and green by 5 %. Chroma goes up everywhere: sky 27.5 → 32.3, skin 16.4 → 21.5, pink T-shirt 33.7 → 46.2.
• Hues. rgb primaries turns reds toward crimson, greens slightly toward yellow and recenters blue. Sky and sea hues stay within 2° of the base rendering; an early version drifted them toward purple by 11°, which the blue primary correction fixed. Skin moves 6° redder (44.2° → 38.5°). Reds and pinks do not turn toward orange, which sets the style apart from the Kodak Gold 200 one.
• Color balance. A color balance rgb instance named “film” adds a faint purple to the midtones and a teal tint to the shadows, with no warm cast: the sources disagree on the film’s warmth, so the style stays near neutral.
• Grain. Sized from Agfa’s RMS granularity of 4.3, finer than the Gold 200 style.

For comparison, the t3mujinpack Vista 200 style on the same files gives Lsd 16.5 and 32.4, sky chroma 30.9, sea 25.3, skin 18.6 and pink T-shirt 42.2. This style goes further than it on the sea and the pink, which is our interpretation.

What it leaves alone

• Your base development. The style contains no exposure, no sigmoid or filmic, no white balance and no LUT. Those settings stay as you made them.
• Your color balance rgb. The style’s instance is named “film” and is added next to yours, which stays untouched.
• But not your tone curve, rgb primaries, color equalizer or grain. When you apply a style from the lighttable or the darkroom, each of its modules replaces the instance of the same module with the same name, if the photo has one, and is added otherwise. These four modules carry no instance name, so they replace any settings you had already made in them. Your earlier settings remain in the history.
• Your pipeline order. The style file carries no module order list.

Exporting with a style, or rendering with darktable-cli, works differently: every module of the style is added as a separate instance. The measurements above were made that way, on darktable’s default rendering. The details are in Install and apply darktable styles.

Limits

• Sources disagree on warmth. Reviews call the film warm, neutral or blue-green, so the style stays neutral.
• No numeric reading of the curves. The density curves in Agfa’s brochure were not used to tune the style.
• A different film in most reviews. Many reviews cover AgfaPhoto Vista Plus 200, reportedly Fujifilm-made, not the 2003 Agfa-Gevaert Vista 200.
• Single-source details. The purple tint in the grays and the reddish skin each rest on one review.
• No exposure shifts. The style does not simulate color shifts under- or overexposure.

Tips

• Apply it early. If you plan to fine-tune the tone curve, rgb primaries, color equalizer or grain yourself, apply the style first: it would replace those settings if you made them before.
• Everything stays editable. Each module the style sets is an ordinary module instance: adjust or switch it off afterwards, for example the grain strength or the “film” color balance rgb.
• Watch skin. Skin gets more saturated and slightly redder. If that is too much, lower the red saturation in color equalizer.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.