However many styles I have created so far, no style of mine has satisfied me well enough with animal and landscape photos. When using Fujifilm -camera I really liked the Velvia film simulation, which kind of straight out of camera gave beautiful look for nature related photographs. Though Velvia film simulation alone can’t make me miss a Fujifilm camera.
I really never have thought much about making a Capture One -style based on “real” Velvia film. But now I decided to test what I could carve out of Velvia 50 film. Fujifilm “improved” the film simulation from the real film look. Beforehand I could not guess how much I would do such with a Capture One -style.
I started with all kind of color shifts that the scanned reference gave. But during the process I found that I wanted to make all kinds of “improvements” or polishing, or at least some tuning, to the look. I wanted the grayscale to be neutral with no tints and I decided to take the best out of the colors but make a style that would really be useful for nature related digital photos instead of making an emulation of the real film.
With nature photos contrast is something you want to tune afterwards. Then again, I wanted the style to give a pop in contrasts straight away. When I started testing this style I found that for nature related subjects I used the levels -tool mainly to tune contrast. Almost all of the sample photos in this post are based on this style but have levels tweaked to my taste.
The overall colors of this style are quite near, at least what I can see, to the film. My goal was achieved so that I could use this style to give some Velvia like color enhancement to animal or landscape photos. What I was surprised of was that the skin tones don’t usually look so bad I remember Velvia film to produce. Some skin pigments (like what we have here in Finland) do look too red and really aren’t pleasant looking. But surprisingly most other skin tones or skin types do work to some extent with this style and thus makes it possible to photograph also people in nature.
This study is free to use. The link to download this style is here.
Below are some more photos processed with this style.
Capture One2Three 