User Guide - Film Softness & Acutance
Acutance and Diffusion - Create local contrast and soft highlights
If filmic softness is about removing high frequency detail in an image, acutance is all about clarity and defined edges. It's a measure of how quickly film densities change with the distance from an edge. In layman's terms, higher acutance means more detailed, clearer image edges, but not in the sense of digital sharpening.
When it comes to film, acutance is linked to how film grains are distributed. The denser the grains are packed around high-contrast edges, the greater the acutance, and the sharper the image. It's not artificial sharpening – it's an intrinsic property of how celluloid film handles light and contrast. Color.io emulates this grain distribution, to allow your digital images to exhibit the same unique local contrast as celluloid film, enhancing detail without creating an unnatural sharpening effect.
Filmic Softness and Detail
Have you ever looked at a photograph or a scene from a film and marvelled at its dreamy softness yet crisp, vivid detail? While traditional blur and sharpness contradict each other in digital image processing, analog film has the unique capacity to be both soft and detailed at the same time. Analog film works fundamentally different from digital blur and sharpness algorithms. Color.io, an innovative tool for film color and texture emulation, harnesses the science behind celluloid rendering, allowing you to simulate the seemingly contradictory structural properties of film right from your digital setup.
Film Softness vs Digital Blur
Film softness might seem straightforward – it's just about making an image blurrier, right? Not quite. Film softness is a nuanced attribute that selectively hides high-frequency details from an image. It does so via the size of the film grain. Larger grains result in a softer image, where fine details become less pronounced, without blurring over lower frequency contrast edges that determine the contents of the image. In other words, softness isn't about blurriness, but a unique textural quality that gives film photography its characteristic feel.
Color.io simulates this process via its advanced grain simulation renderer to emulate the softness of film. By controlling the distribution and size variation of the digital grains from which the image is constructed, Color.io replicates the softness of film without looking artifically blurred.
Insider Knowledge: At the engine level, Color.io makes a distinction between perceptual grain, which is the grain that is visually noticeable, and a grain layer that is only used for re-texturing. Both the Film Softness and Film Acutance emulations use the re-texturing layer of the grain renderer to rebuild digital pixels without affecting the density or size of the visual grain pattern, which can be controlled separately for maximum creative control.
With Color.io you can edit images and build 3D LUTs with a powerful online raw developer and analog film look designer for photographers and filmmakers. Craft stunning film color in record time that works for any camera, in any software and on any device, directly in your browser.
