analog vs. digital

The headline may be misleading. This blog post is not about whether analog is better than digital or vice versa. Every technology, every camera has its time, its application, its purpose - you also use different focal lengths.

When I did after many years started again analogue When I took photos, I also wanted to achieve a certain look more quickly. Many of you probably use the very popular VSCO Lightroomto breathe some analogue life into the digital images. Apart from the fact that I personally find many VSCO presets a bit too artificial, I have always been more of a fan of Capture One. My Google result "CaptureOneStyles“ made me finally switch when I introduced Capture One 8. For the past six months I have only been using Lightroom for archiving.

Capture One Styles advertises that it can bring out the analog touch with presets from digital files. It's not as extensive as VSCO and not as sophisticated, but it's completely sufficient for my purposes. What's more, it only costs a fraction of the VSCO sets.

Now I wanted to try out whether these presets actually work. At least I've tried it on the T-Max 400. I photographed a very similar situation with the same lens - the Elmarit-M 28mm - once with the Leica M and once with the Leica M6. The latter on T-Max 400, which I then converted into HCD 80 + 20 Intuition developed. I imported the digital file into Capture One, found the appropriate style from Capture One Style and adapted the film grain template provided there. Can you tell the difference?

Of course there is a difference because film handles light completely differently than digital cameras can. The camera industry, especially when building lenses, does everything it can to ensure that the beam path only stimulates a few sensors on the chip in order to achieve sharpness and contrast - to put it in very layman's terms. None of this works with film: light will always excite nearby light-sensitive crystals.

But I'm not interested in these scientific details. I wanted to know how I could achieve a specific analog look with as few clicks as possible. Capture One Styles helped me a lot with this.

Of course, no computer program can beat the feeling of working directly with film...

Oh, if you want to know whether in your assessment which of the two images is the analogue Leica M6 + T-Max400 image: on the right you can see analogue, on the left you can see digital.