darktable preset inspired by KodakEktachrome E100VS

What the style changes

The style adds five darktable modules. It aims at E100VS’s reputation: very strong saturation, a warmer rendering than Velvia, intense reds and yellows, clean blues, neutral grays and marked contrast. The sources are detailed on the Kodak Ektachrome E100VS film page. All figures below come from renders of test photos measured in CIELab, next to the Velvia 50 style as a reference.

• Marked contrast, a notch under Velvia 50. The tone curve is softer than the Velvia 50 one. Contrast (Lsd) rises from 14.3 to 18.4 on one photo, against 19.8 for the Velvia 50 style, and the darkest 5 % of another frame fall from L 2.6 to 0.8, against 0.3.
• Very strong saturation. A color balance rgb instance named “film” raises saturation, chroma and vibrance together. Sky chroma goes from 27.5 to 40.2 (+46 %), sea chroma from 22.2 to 33.8 (+52 %), both under the Velvia 50 style.
• Reds and yellows first. color equalizer boosts red ×1.18 and yellow ×1.15, the points reviewers stress for this film.
• Blues left in place. Sky hue barely moves (273.6° to 273.8°), where the Velvia 50 style turns it toward indigo (279.7°).
• A warm lean. Skin and the pink T-shirt move toward warm (skin +4.2°, T-shirt +7.2°), where the Velvia 50 style goes pinker. This is the warmth difference that reviewers describe.
• Light grain. The datasheet gives an RMS of 11, the highest of our slide-film styles, so the style adds a light grain.

An early version (orange ×1.10, a stronger warm cast) turned skin plainly orange (chroma 32, hue 54°) and was reduced.

What it leaves alone

• Your base development. The style contains no exposure, no sigmoid or filmic, no white balance, no color calibration and no LUT: those stay as you set them.
• Your pipeline order. The style file carries no module order list, so it does not impose one on your image.
• Your own color balance rgb. The style’s instance is named “film”, so it is added next to yours without changing it (unless the photo already has an instance named “film”).

What it does not leave alone: applied from the lighttable or the darkroom, each module of the style replaces the instance of the same name on the photo, or is added if there is none. The style’s unnamed modules (rgb primaries, color equalizer, tone curve, grain) therefore overwrite any settings you had already made in those modules. Your earlier settings stay in the history stack. Exporting with a style, or rendering with darktable-cli as our measurements do, adds the style’s modules as separate instances instead. Details in Install and apply darktable styles.

Limits

• An interpretation, not a calibration. No film was scanned or measured to tune the style, and few reliable sources exist: two Emulsive articles, a Fuji X Weekly article, and forum remarks relayed by a search engine that we could not read at the source.
• Hue descriptions rest on those opinions. The datasheet says only “saturated” and “neutral gray scale”; it says nothing about the direction of hues, so the warmth and the strong reds come from reviewers.
• Contrast relative to Velvia (“slightly less”) is not confirmed by a source we read directly; it was set from the datasheet and that one remark.
• Skin is sensitive. Kodak’s sheet and a review call skin natural, but the per-channel curve renders very bright faces a little orange.
• Grain. The RMS of 11 is higher than the other slide films in the pack; the grain added stays light.

Tips

• For less warmth on skin, reduce the orange hue shift in color equalizer, or lower the “film” instance’s midtone tint.
• For a gentler look, lower the saturation of the “film” color balance rgb instance.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.