Film Color Reference

Why I Built This Page

As an avid film photographer, I've always wanted a resource like this to help me make informed decisions about which film to shoot. I have always been fascinated by how different film stocks render colors and shape the feeling a photograph has. Each film has its own personality... Kodak Gold's warm tones, Portra's flattering skin tones, CineStill's halation. Understanding why each film looks the way it does without concrete data made me scratch my head.

Then the youtube gods served me Parvec's YouTube video and from the moment I watched it I knew I needed to save his findings somewhere so that I can refer to them easily. It was a revelation — finally, a technical explanation for the "magic" of film color science.

I built this tool to have all that knowledge at my fingertips. When I'm deciding which film to shoot, I can now visualize exactly how each film will handle different colors and make informed choices based on actual data.

How It Works

The radar chart displays six primary color channels from vectorscope analysis:

• Red — How the film handles red tones
• Yellow — Warmth and golden tones
• Green — Vegetation and nature rendering
• Cyan — Cool shadows and aquatic tones
• Blue — Sky and twilight rendering
• Magenta — Sunset and skin undertones

Values above 1.0 mean the film saturates that color more than neutral, while values below 1.0 mean the film desaturates that color.

Credits & Resources