darktable preset inspired by KodakVision3 200T

What the style changes

The style sets five darktable modules. It aims at the lab scan of a negative developed in ECN-2, shot without an 85 filter, but it does not paint a strong blue cast on the image: it leaves white balance alone (see below). It does not emulate a print on positive film. What the film is and how it is described is on the Kodak Vision3 200T film page. All figures below come from renders made with darktable-cli 5.6.0 at 1000 px, measured in CIELab. The photos are provisional test photos, not scans of film.

• A long, soft curve. The tone curve lifts the blacks slightly, keeps middle gray where it is and holds the highlights back. Contrast drops a little on one photo (Lsd 30.7 → 29.8) and stays level on another (14.3 → 14.4); the darkest 5 % of the frame rise from L 2.6 to 5.4 and the brightest 5 % come down from 87.9 to 87.3. It is a little less flat than the Kodak Vision3 250D style, whose L5 reaches 6.8.
• Pastel, cyan-leaning blues. rgb primaries and color equalizer shift blues toward cyan and hold their saturation back. Sky chroma falls from 27.5 to 22.3 (−19 %) and its hue moves from 273.6° to 263.1°; sea chroma falls from 22.2 to 18.3 (−18 %) and its hue from 270.1° to 253.7°. The 250D style does the opposite: denser blues, almost unchanged hue.
• Slightly golden skin. Skin hue barely moves (44.2° → 42.7°) while its chroma rises from 16.4 to 18.4 (+12 %). A pink T-shirt keeps its saturation (C 33.7 → 32.2, −4 %) and its hue moves by 5° (358.8° → 4.0°).
• Neutral to slightly blue-green shadows, amber highlights. The “film” instance of color balance rgb tints the shadows very slightly green-cyan and the highlights amber. On one shadow (photo 1014, ground) L goes from 6.9 to 8.8, a* from 1.9 to −0.1 and b* from −3.5 to −2.1: the purple cast of the base rendering disappears. A white wall goes from b* −0.8 to +1.2 and from a* −0.2 to +0.9: highlights slightly amber.
• Very fine grain. Coarseness 900 and strength 8 are finer than the 250D and Portra 400 styles, in line with Kodak’s “reduced grain in shadows” and the “100 ISO” structure it describes.

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 rgb primaries, color equalizer, tone curve 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, 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. Few sources describe this film as a still film, and the ones behind this style are indirect: retailer pages, a review of the 500T (same family) and a digital simulation blog. The choice of green-cyan shadows and amber highlights rests mainly on that digital description. It needs checking against real scans.
• The scanner decides. A scan depends on the lab and the scanner. No scan settings are published.
• White balance is untouched. A photo shot in daylight without an 85 filter keeps the blue cast it started with. Correct it before or after applying the style.
• No print look and no halation. The style has no 2383 print rendering and adds no halation: it follows the version with the rem-jet or the anti-halation undercoat.
• Yellows and greens not measured. The test photos have no reference area for them.
• Subtle by design. The difference from the base rendering is mostly in the hue and saturation of blues and in the blacks. The grain is almost invisible at 1000 px and only shows when zooming into the 2560 px examples. The 250D and 200T styles resemble each other in their curve, not in their color.

Tips

• For shots taken in daylight, fix the white balance yourself first: the style will not do it for you and does not reproduce a blue cast on purpose.
• 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.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.