darktable preset inspired by KodakEktachrome E100

What the style changes

The style uses three darktable modules. It aims at a clean, neutral-to-slightly-cool slide film: moderate contrast, crisp blues, natural skin and no visible grain, as Kodak’s datasheet and the reviews describe on the Kodak Ektachrome E100 film page. All figures below come from renders made with darktable-cli 5.6.0 at 1000 px, measured in CIELab.

• Moderate slide contrast. The tone curve deepens the shadows gradually and brightens the upper tones, without a wall at either end. Contrast rises from Lsd 14.3 to 15.9, less than in the Kodachrome 64 (16.9) and Velvia 50 (19.6) styles. The darkest 5 % of the frame drop from L 2.6 to 1.3 (Kodachrome 64 style: 0.7), and the brightest 5 % rise from 87.9 to 90.1, for Kodak’s “whiter, brighter whites”. The curve acts on each channel without color preservation, so saturation follows contrast as on film.
• Slightly cool whites. A color balance rgb instance named “film” adds a faint blue-cyan tint to the highlights and an even fainter one to the midtones. On a white wall, a* moves from −0.4 to −1.3 and b* from −0.2 to −1.8; the Kodachrome 64 style warms the same wall instead. A first version placed this tint at 190°: it pulled the sky toward cyan (h −6°) and skin toward yellow (h +4°), so it was moved to 225°.
• Crisp blues. Sky chroma rises from 27.5 to 34.2 and sea chroma from 22.2 to 29.0, while the sky hue moves by only 2°.
• Skin left alone. Coolness grays skin and the per-channel curve yellows it; the color equalizer’s orange adjustments compensate. Skin chroma goes from 16.4 to 16.5, hue from 44.2° to 45.2°.
• Pinks and reds. A pink T-shirt gains about 21 % chroma (33.7 → 40.7), following a side-by-side test in which E100 saturated pinks and some reds more than Velvia 50.
• No grain. Kodak rates E100’s RMS granularity of 8 as “extremely fine”, so the style adds none.

For comparison, the t3mujinpack “Kodak Ektachrome 100 G” style, rendered on the same files, lightens the sky strongly (+8.4 L), desaturates blues by about 16 % and warms skin by 16° of hue. It targets the older E100G, which reviewers describe as less cold than today’s E100. This style follows the 2018 datasheet and reviews of the current film.

What it leaves alone

• Your base development. The style contains no exposure, no sigmoid or filmic, no white balance and no LUT: those settings stay as you made them.
• Your own color balance rgb. The style’s instance is named “film”. Applied from darktable’s interface, a named instance is added next to yours and does not overwrite it.
• But not your tone curve or color equalizer. Applied from the lighttable or the darkroom, each unnamed module of the style replaces your instance of the same module, if you have one, with the style’s settings. Your earlier settings stay in the history stack, so you can go back to them. Only exporting with a style, or darktable-cli (which we used for the measurements), adds the style’s modules as separate instances. The installation guide explains both cases.
• Your pipeline order. The style file carries no module order list, so it does not impose one on your image.

Limits

• An interpretation, not a calibration. The style is built from Kodak’s datasheet and published reviews. No film was scanned or measured to tune it.
• The coolness is disputed. Some reviewers find E100 neutral, others cool. The cool tint is therefore kept light and limited to the highlights.
• Neutral deep blacks. On the datasheet, the red, green and blue maximum densities differ, which would tint the deepest shadows. Sources disagree on the color of E100’s shadows, so the style keeps them neutral.
• Exposure effects are not simulated. Real E100 has about half a stop of latitude, shifts cooler when overexposed and bluer when underexposed in shade, and needs CC10R filtration at 120 s. A style applied to a digital file does none of this.
• Greens are not validated. The test photos contain almost no vegetation, so the green adjustment is not backed by a measurement.
• Close to Kodachrome on some scenes. On the sea photo, both styles strengthen the blues. The difference is mostly in the sky, lighter (L 55.8 against 52.2) and less cyan (271.7° against 266.4°) here, and it is clearer on skin, whites and blacks.

Tips

• For the “metered for the highlights” slide look, lower the exposure slightly in your base edit: highlights stay clean and shadows go deeper, as with real slide film.
• Warmer or cooler whites: adjust the highlight chroma of the “film” color balance rgb instance, or set it to 0 for a strictly neutral E100.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.