darktable preset inspired by KodakRoyal Gold 200

What the style changes

The style sets five darktable modules. It aims at a Royal Gold 200 that is warm and colorful but cleaner than a Gold 200: a light golden cast, warm skin, reds pushed toward orange, an almost straight tone curve and fine grain. Few independent descriptions of the film exist, so it rests mostly on Kodak’s datasheet, as explained on the Kodak Royal Gold 200 film page. All figures below come from renders made with darktable-cli at 1000 px, measured in CIELab.

• A nearly straight tone curve. The curve has a soft toe and no marked shoulder, like the datasheet’s characteristic curves, where no shoulder shows in the plotted range (our reading of the graph, approximate). Contrast rises moderately (Lsd 14.3 → 15.8 on photo 0775, 30.7 → 31.8 on 1014) and the highlights are not crushed (L95 87.9 → 88.7). The curve acts on each channel separately, so saturation follows contrast.
• Warm skin, reds toward orange. rgb primaries turns reds toward orange and greens slightly toward yellow, and the color equalizer adds saturation to reds, oranges and yellows. Skin hue moves from 44.2° to 51.4° and skin chroma from 16.4 to 24.1. The pink T-shirt goes from 358.8° to 13.1°, about 14° toward orange.
• A light golden cast. A color balance rgb instance named “film” tints midtones and highlights warm, keeps the shadows almost neutral, and adds 8 % saturation and a little vibrance.
• Fine grain, sized from Kodak’s Print Grain Index of 32 for a 4×6 print from 35 mm: finer than Gold 200 (44) and Portra 400 (37).

Compared with the Gold 200 style of the same collection, this one is milder: contrast on photo 0775 rises by 1.5 Lsd points instead of 2.7, skin hue reaches 51° instead of 56°, and skin chroma about 24 instead of about 33.

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 color balance rgb is a separate instance named “film”: it 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. The style’s tone curve, rgb primaries, color equalizer and grain carry no instance name, so they replace any settings you had already made in those four modules. Your earlier settings remain in the history.
• Your pipeline order. The style file carries no module order list, so it does not impose one on your image.

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

Limits

• An interpretation, not a calibration. No film was scanned or measured to tune the style.
• Few independent sources. The color descriptions come from an article about Royal Gold 400 (a simulation recipe) and from the datasheet, which gives no figure for color. Warmth and saturation are plausible choices, not established facts.
• A datasheet inconsistency. Kodak’s E-7006 says “Twice the film speed of KODAK ROYAL GOLD 200 Film”, which is plainly meant for Royal Gold 100. The style does not use that sentence.
• Approximate curve. The characteristic curve was read by eye from the datasheet graph.
• Weak basis for hues. The hue values of rgb primaries and the color equalizer rest on no measurement.
• Blues. Sky and sea lose a little chroma (sky 27.5 → 25.9, sea 22.2 → 20.9), a side effect of the golden cast that no source asks for.
• Close to Gold 200. The difference lies in grain, in the absence of a marked shoulder and in a more restrained warmth. On some images it will be small.

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: you can adjust it or switch it off afterwards, for example the grain strength or the “film” color balance rgb.
• If the cast is too warm, lower the “film” instance’s midtone and highlight chroma rather than removing the style.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.