Emulating CCD Digital Cameras

[@chrisblumarten]

ridiculously good video for so few followers. saw you post this on reddit and an instant subscribe for me.

[@AlchemyColor]

@@chrisblumarten thank you!

[@midknight4681]

Really impressive video!! Came from reddit and earned my sub. One thing that makes me sad about the inevitable death of old digital cameras is how unique they are. I remember being a kid and not knowing anything about photography, but I would pick up my parents cameras and fall in love with how they looked and felt. The main one i loved was a fujifilm that had one of the sliding lens covers that would turn on the camera. Now I collect these old cameras only slightly because of nostalgia, mostly because i still have that same fascination with their design.

[@AlchemyColor]

@@midknight4681 thank you. Glad you liked it. The next one is going to be about color negative film.

[@JayTsPhoto]

This is great, just ran across a post on reddit looking for 5d black and white adobe profiles since i shoot a 7d it only has the natural and natural+ profile

[@AlchemyColor]

@@JayTsPhoto thank you. Which cameras do you shoot with? I personally love the Portrait profile on the 5D.

[@JayTsPhoto]

@@AlchemyColor I use the Minolta 7d most of the time but I also have an e500, a100, a850 and a7r3

[@kaestralblades]

This is very cool, and definitely great information on color science, but what interests me about digicams IS, in fact, their shortcomings - I love the blown out, overexposed and underexposed dynamic range, the soft diffuse glow many CCD cameras often have, the vertical purple bloom on bright lights, CCD color noise, MJPEG compression artifacts, the chromatic abberation, the tinny awful audio in video recording, the terrible low light (incredible and dramatic if you work it right), the unreal feeling mood of digicam flash... when exaggerated, these effects lead to a dreamy, ethereal, incredibly digital aesthetic, and I love it. Watching old digicam video footage especially feels like entering a dreamworld.

[@AlchemyColor]

Those are very accurate and well thought out descriptors of the characteristics of digicams! Do you have a favorite brand or model?

[@kaestralblades]

@@AlchemyColor Not yet :) I just started getting interested in the tech behind them and researching them. Right now I'm leaning towards an earlier Canon model or a CyberShot, but I haven't really been able to make much progress. I was actually looking up videos on digicams for this purpose when I stumbled across yours lol

[@AlchemyColor]

@@kaestralblades Early Canon digicams are cheap and abundant. If you're into hacking stuff, you can install CHDK to supercharge every function, even shoot raw. I like the Sony P200 myself. Had one, lended it to a friend, friend lost it in China :)

[@kaestralblades]

@@AlchemyColor That's actually super helpful, thank you! I am actually - any device I own ends up getting stuffed with some sort of CFW so that fits. Your video definitely is gonna help me understand colors better here too and I appreciate it all :)

[@AlchemyColor]

​@@kaestralblades That's great, you're going to have a blast with CHDK. You can write scripts to camera, have it respond to audio inputs, shoot timelapse, etc. When shooting RAW, you won't have automatic lens geometry corrections or an adequate color matrix for Adobe Camera Raw. If you ever go down that path and get your hands on a colorchecker, I can create a custom profile for it.