Achieving a Film Look in Post

There's an irony in modern filmmaking: we spend effort and money on digital cameras with clean sensors and clinical colour science, and then immediately try to make everything look like it was shot on film fifty years ago. I don't think this is nostalgia for its own sake. Film has a quality of light, grain, and colour rendering that still reads as cinematic. Until that changes, the quest for a film look is a legitimate part of the craft. Here's where I've landed after trying most of the available options.

Plugins: The quickest route to a film look, and the most self-contained. FilmConvert is the market leader - it models specific film stocks, handles grain convincingly, and includes halation (that glow around bright areas characteristic of film emulsion). At $179 for a single licence it's a reasonable investment for a freelancer, though it doesn't port easily to collaborative workflows where others would need their own licence. It also doesn't produce my favourite-looking results despite its impressive feature set. Worth knowing about; not my primary tool.

PowerGrades: Currently my preferred approach. A PowerGrade is a DaVinci Resolve preset that exposes its node structure - unlike a LUT, you can see exactly what it's doing and adjust at any point in the chain. You can also export a PowerGrade as a LUT if you need to share it, with some caveats. The one I return to most is Cineprint35 by Tom Bolles - widely used for good reason, with a colour science that handles skin tones and highlights particularly well. At $69 it includes a LUT pack as well. It's become part of my standard finishing process.

LUTs: The most debated tool in colour grading, and somewhat unfairly so. LUTs are limited - a single layer applied to the image, with minimal variables - and they fail badly when the source material doesn't match what the LUT was designed for. But as a finishing tool, or for translating a look from one camera system to another, they're efficient and practical. I use Triune Films' cinematic LUT pack; they cover a good range of looks, handle skin tones well, and work quickly when you need to establish a tone for a project without a long turnaround.

In-camera colour profiles: The underrated option. The instinct in professional video production is to shoot log and grade everything in post, but modern colour science has reached a point where well-chosen in-camera profiles produce results that need minimal work. Canon has always been good at this. Fujifilm's film simulations are, in my view, genuinely exceptional - they're modelled on actual film stocks the company manufactured, and it shows. For branded content and corporate delivery where turnaround is fast, I'll often start with Nostalgic Negative or Classic Negative and adjust from there rather than working from a flat log image. The look is already in the camera; you're just choosing whether to use it.

Film emulation isn't a single tool or technique - it's a set of decisions that compound across the whole pipeline.