Fuji Velvia and Digital Photography

Among my photography friends I continue to have this running debate regarding one of landscape photography's standard films, Fujifilm's Velvia 50. I often maintain that the look and feel of this film cannot be replicated in digital photography nor accurately in post processing. Of course, some of my more computer savvy friends claim one can achieve anything with enough work in Photoshop and I have to admit this is true. However, several times over the years I have made a run at comparing images shot with Velvia to those taken digitally to see if I can back up my claim that Velvia's results are unique to film or if my savy opponents are indeed right.However, in preparation to write this piece, the scary thought occurred to me that there now is a large segment of the photographic community that has little if any knowledge of Fujifilm's Velvia. In reality, it must be approximately 8 years since I seriously used Velvia and in those 8 years digital photography has taken a irreplaceable hold on photography, greatly increasing the ease and quality of image capture and reproduction. Don't get me wrong, I love digital photography and have no burning desire to go back to shooting film. Equally, for all of the wonderful images captured with the right kind of light to show off Velvia's capabilities, it did have the draw back of being a color balanced film at 5200 and one did have issues when shooting in other types of light.So what is/was so great about Fujifilm's Velvia. It was introduced in 1990 and quickly became the industry standard in high-definition color film. It had brighter and generally more accurate color reproduction, finer grain, and twice the speed of Kodachrome 25, the film it initially competed against. Velvia was also a high contrast and exceptionally sharp film but it is its tendency to saturate colors is what it was best noted for and as some believed, it went too far. However, it was quickly accepted within the community because of the popularity among photo buyers of the pleasing results. Virtually all of the noted photographers of that time used Fujifilms Velvia including Art Wolfe, Galen Rowell, John Shaw, Frans Lanting and others. John Show, for one, praised the film for its accurate reproduction of purple and here is the particular uniqueness of Velvia.Velvia had a way of adding a purple/lavender accent to the blue elements of a picture that, for me, created a magical quality to the image. If one visits the Mountain Light Gallery of Galen Rowell, one can view a display of the quality results the film represented. Because Galen and his wife Barbara perished in their plane crash in 2002, almost all of his noted work was shot in Velvia and he never had the opportunity to make a serious move to digital. This unique color signature of Velvia once got me into a rather heated discussion on one of my visits to Bishop and a Mountain Light workshop involving a particular snowy seen taken with Velvia. I argued that the image could not be replicated with digital photography and my partner passionately disagreed. Below is an image of Mt. Rainier taken with Velvia. In it one can see Velvia's signature color. There were no adjustments made by me to this image or any of the other Velvia images.After having a more recent discussion with some of my photo buddies, I decided to go out first thing in the morning and take some images of the Seattle skyline at sunrise from Alki Point in West Seattle. My Ephemeris claimed that the sun would be rising directly behind the office buildings on the other side of Elliot Bay. My goal was to replicate digitally several images captured in the late 90's with Velvia. Well the morning was a little hazy, not as clear as my earlier visit and the sun turned out to be a bit too far south, but I did get some images to work with.Here are two images shot with Fujifilm Velvia. In the first image, one can notice Velvia's telltale purple/lavender color added to the water in the foreground. In the second image, one can see how the film saturated the reds and orange of the morning light. As I have stated earlier, these images are the product of the film. I have not added saturation in their post processing.To see if I could replicate these images, I tried several programs that represent that they can digitally replicate Velvia. After working through these programs and testing their features, I concluded that they do virtually the same job that one can do themselves in Photoshop, Lightroom and some of the other RAW processing software. It appeared to me that one could achieve the same effect of these applications by using a combination of the temperature/hue, curves, contrast and black point adjustments. One does not need to purchase any software to add saturation and contrast to an image.Secondly, I quickly realized that where Velvia saturated a single color in an image, like my second example of the closeup of the skyline, it was quite easy to replicate the Velvia effect with the above mentioned tools. The real issue was replicating the look and feel of the first skyline where the purple was in the water; a case where there are multiple colors involved. Neither the commercially available softwares nor the straight forward application tools were able to replicate Velvia. To achieve something close, the task became more difficult with layers, masks and matching colors. The truth is I was able to come close to replicating a Velvia image only because I had an image to work towards. If I did not know what the scene would have looked like with Velvia, I would not have been able to replicate it.So, I guess we are both right. Many fine Velvia images can be achieved digitally either in the camera or with some post processing if a person wants to achieve that objective. But when it comes to those complex images where there is more than one color element, there is not an application that can take a digital file and with some standard steps achieve an image that will look like something shot with Velvia. In point of fact, these are two different mediums with their individual reaction to light; one electronic, digital and the other chemical or analogue. It is kind of like comparing CD's to vinyl records. There is something lost in translation, yet we move on.In reality, after 8 years or so of shooting digital, I have survived very well without film and Velvia. Yes, there are those rare occasions in which I would like an image to be more representative of Velvia, but there are a lot more times when I am just as happy to be shooting digital and like the more natural look. Take these two images of Mt. Shuksan, the first with Velvia an the second with a digital back.In all candor, I like the digital image over Velvia and by the way, virtually all of the other images on this web site are digital with the very few exception of some of the images taken in Mt. Vernon of tulip fields.Earl