Three takes on a shot from the Denver Center for Performing Arts….
Bleach finish
Fujichrome finish
Kodachrome finish
Symmetry, Superstructure and Sky
5280 Lens Mafia
High on Photography…
Three takes on a shot from the Denver Center for Performing Arts….
Bleach finish
Fujichrome finish
Kodachrome finish
5280 Lens Mafia 
I like the bleach. Brighter whites! (And there’s more detail in the shadows.)
I like the stronger, bolder blues in the Fujichrome version.
I’m with Denny. Bleach me. In these days where everyone has the ability to screw with colors in an image (not everyone, of course), the overdoneness of the Fuji seems kind of amateurish to me now. No offense, Dan … I was a Fuji freak back in the day, but the punched blues now seem more off to me than intriguing saturation. Even the Kodachrome (unexpectedly) pushes the blues too much for me these days, especially at bottom-center of that image. I suppose I’m just too much the realist.
It’s ironic that the Kodachrome of old (the actual film) was prized for its warmth. It heightened reds, yellows, oranges. I shot mostly Ektachrome and Agfachrome. Those film captured forests and woodlands far more accurately, methinks. So I wonder who’s doing the designed of these “‘chrome” imitations and what those design parameters are.
The software is made by Nik, if you want to investigate. I can tell you that in playing around with these filters I’m finding exactly what you describe to be true. Also, some of these filters are so grainy I’m playing hell trying to figure out why you’d ever use them, but that’s another question.
about that grainy thing on the filters … here’s a possible reason for it. first, though, we already hacked out the issue about it as a creative thing and this note has nothing to do with that. what i’m suggesting is a possible working reason. suppose you have a digital image that would be great to represent a dusk-time shot of something from 1990. you know that low light and a film negative produced a good deal of noise. so, you would want to introduce noise to your digital image if you wanted to portray it as representing that time period. nothing evil or mis-representative here … just using a tool to give the sense of an older time and tech.
Bleach for me. The silver/grays of the steel look more realistic and consistent to me.
Greg: I see what you’re getting at. The nice thing about the software I’m using is that I can extract a lot of unwanted noise and then replace it with grain.