15 Ways to Make Your Digital Photos Look Like Film

I love the look of vintage glass and classic film photography, but shooting digitally is just cheaper and more practical.

So, today, I’m going to show you how to make digital photos look like film, no matter what camera you use.

The analog photography look is nostalgic, aesthetically appealing, and keeps us—at least in part—in touch with the origins of photography.

Emulating the look of film photos is a great way to get the right feeling without spending money on the rising cost of film or a vintage film camera.

I shoot film regularly, but most of my photography is shot with my trusty iPhone.

Here are 15 tips and tricks to make any shot look like it’s shot on film!

How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Film

Digital photos are practical, but they often lack the magic of film photography.

These 15 tips will let you edit photos to make them look like they were shot on film.

1. Choose the Right Photos

If you want my honest opinion, you can make almost any digital photo look like a film photograph.

However, no digital photography looks like film without edits. You can get one step ahead with a few tips for photos that are easier to edit.

The first thing I try to avoid is any photograph with many obvious digital qualities.

Photos like AI-generated images, pictures with tons of glitching and pixelation, or even photographs that have had too much post-production manipulation in Photoshop don’t translate well to the film photography format.

Essentially, every other image will do a great job of looking like it was shot on film.

Film photography naturally retains more dynamic range than digital photography, which is why HDR photography is essentially an attempt to emulate the natural tonal range of film.

You might think that you can get away with intentionally shooting low-quality photographs to make them look digital.

However, this is not the case.

You still want to shoot the best photographs you can before editing. A photo that doesn’t look quite right in digital still won’t look as good as film.

2. Use Cameras that Shoot Film-Look JPEGs

Another great option is a digital camera with a built-in film mode. Digital cameras from Brands like Fuji, Olympus, Nikon, and Leica all have built-in presets that emulate a film style.

Here are a few specific cameras you can consider, but if you’ve got a favorite from one of these brands, it might already have a film photography mode.

• Fuji 100
• Fuji X-Pro
• Olympus PEN
• Nikon DF
• Leica M8

The two big digital camera manufacturers, Sony and Canon, are also great choices.

Even if they don’t have dedicated film modes, you can create custom profiles that adjust exposure and color to create a film aesthetic.

Another great tip is to shoot with an older digital camera with a CCD sensor. These older sensors produce unique color profiles that often resemble vintage film cameras.

You can see more digital cameras that produce film-like photos.

3. Shoot With Vintage Lenses

One of the best ways to create a vintage film look is to use some of the tools film photographers used to shoot with. Vintage film lenses can be easily attached to even the most cutting-edge digital cameras and are the best way to get that filmic style.

My personal favorite film lens is the Helios 44M. It’s from a family of legendary vintage Soviet lenses. The Helios has a unique, swirling bokeh you can’t get with any other lens.

A mount adapter is all you need to get a lens like the Helios 44M working on your Sony or Nikon camera. These old film lenses were built to be fully manual, so don’t worry about losing any fancy features like auto-focus.

Photography is all about the quality of the glass you shoot with, and a vintage lens will get you most of the way to having your digital photos look like film.

• Read more: Beginner’s Guide to Using Film Cameras

4. Shoot in RAW

I believe that always shooting in RAW is the right thing to do.

Unless you’re running out of storage space, shooting in RAW gives you the best photos to work with in post-production, whether for a film style or a more traditional digital edit.

RAW is the file type that retains the most information from the scene as you shot it. You’ll have an easier time editing a RAW photo to look like a film photo.

Shoot RAW and save yourself some time in the edit.

You can always save your RAW image as a JPEG if you need to use a photo editing app that doesn’t take RAW images.

5. Play With Filters

Camera lens filters are a great way to add filmic qualities to your digital photography. Putting a filter over your lens can give you greater control over how you shape light and what kind of film effects you get in your photographs.

The Cinebloom filter from Moment creates the dreamy haze we associate with old film camera lenses.

You can even DIY and create a haze by loosely wrapping cling wrap over the front glass of your lens.

When I shoot with filters, I try to soften the focus or create streaking and flares in my lighting.

Here’s a filter tip for the brave. Vintage lenses are often a little damaged or have scratches, hazing, or other light wear. You can always buy a cheap UV filter to scratch purposely, scrape, or otherwise abuse to get the same look as a damaged vintage lens.

• 7 Cool Digital Cameras That Look Like Film Cameras

6. Add Grain/Noise

Here’s another handy photography cheat sheet: grain is for film photography, and noise is for digital photography.

Grain is part of the beauty of shooting film. It’s caused by small silver particles formed when the silver halide on the film stock is exposed to light.

Grain has a natural, random quality and is one of the things that makes film photography so unique.

There are plenty of presets out there that can add grain to your digital photographs. Just remember that you’re trying to add grain, not noise.

Noise is exclusive to digital photography and is caused by random processing errors on the digital sensor.

In short, film grain is textural and painterly. The noise is pixelated and full of random pops of color. Both have their place in the art of photography, but you’re looking for grain if you’re going for the film look.

7. Soften the Image

I could talk all day about the technical reasons film photographs look softer than modern digital images.

Without getting into the weeds of how light is diffused across film, we can still discuss the importance of softness when editing digital photos to look like they were shot on film.

When you shoot a film, each developed photograph will have some natural softness even if the image contains more clarity and visual information than a digital photo of the same scene.

This has to do with everything from the chemistry of film photography to the fact that manual focus is difficult to master and still the status quo of film photographers.

You can get more of the film look by softening your image with a filter or post-processing.

8. Slow Down your Shutter Speed

By this point, you might be wondering about more technical differences between shooting digital and shooting film. Another one of the interesting changes to happen and the shift from film to digital is the speed at which you can shoot.

Modern digital cameras can fire much faster than their film counterparts. This allows for razor-sharp details even when your subject is a bird in flight.

Yet, this kind of speed really doesn’t give the full digital experience film experience. If you’re going for more of a film look, try keeping that shutter speed a little bit slower to preserve some of the motion and life of your photographs.

9. Get to Know Your Film Stocks

Svema? Psych Blues? How about Wolfman? Knowing your film stocks is key if you want to master the digital-to-film editing style.

I try to shoot a wide range of film stocks. I’ll take everything from expired Fuji to Kono. The more you shoot with film, the more you develop an innate understanding of how different film stocks look after they’ve been shot and developed.

This is especially important when working with editing presets, but more on that later!

Here’s a tip: If you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars shooting everything from an 80-year-old expired Soviet film to the latest lomo darling, you can always just get to know your film photographers.

Try checking out the social media pages of active film photographers or grab a book from one of the classics.

• What happens if you expose film to light?

10. Overexpose Slightly

Film photography has so much more leniency when it comes to exposure. You can under or overexpose by several stops and still be able to achieve a perfect photograph when working with your processed negatives.

Digital photography, on the other hand, is much more strict with exposure. If you go a little over or a little under, you’ll have a photo that’s nearly unworkable when it comes to editing.

Film photographers will generally tell you to shoot one-stop overexposed when working with film.

This ensures a good saturation of color and is even more important when working with expired film.

People also think about disposable cameras when they think about film photography.

It’s notoriously difficult to get a disposable camera to shoot properly, especially when you consider that they were designed for mass-market consumers and not career photographers.

In general, there’s an amateur beauty to photography that you should embrace when you’re looking to shoot digitally as if you were shooting on film. Experiment with over- and underexposure to try to get that retro vibe of a disposable camera passed around a party.

11. Add a vignette

Vignettes help you highlight the subject of your photography. They were the standard in the early days of consumer photography as they helped highlight the individuals sitting for their portraits.

Over the years, vignetting has become less popular as photography became more common and the art form expanded.

There’s also another angle to vignetting that we should discuss. Vignetting occurs on physical photographs as they age. The corners and edges of a photograph typically age faster than the center, leading to discoloration around the edges that seems to create a vignette.

Adding a vignette as the last step of your editing process is a great way to bring in some physical film qualities. Remember that vignettes can be dark or bright white. The color of your vignette is simply a style choice, depending on the effect you’re going after.

12. Add a Color Tone

The most impactful thing you can do to make a digital photo look like film is to control the color and tone.

Every film stock brings its own unique color science to your photographs. You’ve got so much creative leeway, whether you want to go for a heavily saturated look or create and edit that’s faded and nostalgic.

The best option for beginners is to pick a Lightroom preset that emulates the film stock you want your pictures to look like.

After you get the hang of things, you’ll be able to make custom presets and adjust existing presets to get the tone you’re looking for.

13. The Faded Look

There’s something I find so interesting about the faded look: It has a complicated relationship with physical film photography.

A properly stored film photo won’t look faded even after decades. There’s no reason you couldn’t store a photograph for generations and have it look just about as crisp as the day it was first developed.

However, most physical photographs we see have been stored poorly. I’ve been sorting through boxes of old family photos a relative kept in their garage, and some of them are in pretty rough shape.

You can get the faded look by compressing the tonal range of an image in your edits. This softens the overall look and will give your image that poorly stored vintage photo look that was so popular in wedding photography a few years ago.

14. Consider Light Leaks

Here’s another way to make a digital photo look like film that has more to do with how we represent film photography than the actual film itself.

An experienced film photographer likely won’t get any light leaks when they shoot. Light leaks are caused by damaged or worn-out cameras, improper handling of the film, and a few other technical errors that an experienced photographer would be one step ahead of.

However, most of us are used to seeing film photos that a film photo expert hasn’t necessarily shot. This makes light leaks much more common in the popular imagination than they might have been in an old-school film photography shoot.

I’m actually a big fan of light leaks. You can use them creatively to add something unique to a film-style photograph.

15. Use a Preset or App

 

Last but not least, the single most effective tip is simply to use a preset.

Presets are your best friend when you start a new photo editing style.

Whether you’re going for the film photography look or something much more modern, picking up some presets from some artists you like will dramatically improve the quality of your edits without having to get your hat around every setting.

I like to use presets and then go through each of their settings to see how they’re achieving the look I prefer.

This helps me build my own presets and understand what exactly is going on under the hood when a digital photo is converted to a film style.

What Are the Characteristics of Film Photos?

There’s just as much diversity within the world of film photography as there is within the world of digital photography.

This means there might not be a perfect list of things that will always appear in a film photograph. However, here are a few things that I would consider to be the hallmarks of film photography.

• Film grain
• Softer details
• Rich dynamic range
• Forgiving exposure, even when exposed poorly
• Iconic color and tones matching a given film stock
• Sprocket holes and other physical details exclusive to film

Why Does Film Photography Look Different?

 

The quick answer is that film photography looks different simply because it uses fundamentally different sciences and technologies to create the photograph than digital.

In digital photography, information is recorded when light strikes the sensor, interpreted by a processor and displayed on a screen as a digital photograph. Noise, glitching, and greater difficulty with exposure are some of the notable qualities of digital photography.

Film photography is more about chemistry. The film stock is exposed to light, which causes a chemical reaction that is then fixed in place when the negatives are developed.

Developed film gives you a negative, which you must scan or continue to process into a photograph. That processing adds as much character as the act of taking the photo, something that doesn’t exist in the digital world.

Can Digital Photos Look like Film Camera Photos?

It is absolutely possible to ensure your digital photographs look like they were shot on film.

All you need are some crafty editing tips and tricks covered at this article’s start.

Remember, Lightroom presets or a film-style app like RTRO would be easier to get started.

How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Film in Lightroom

  You’ve got nearly infinite options for making your digital photos look like film and Lightroom, but I will walk you through a few basic steps. These steps are assuming you don’t have film photo presets already installed.

This is adapted from my general workflow when I’m using Lightroom to help make my digital photos look like they were shot on film.

1. Adjust exposure—Remember to correct for any exposure problems and to try to emulate common film exposure style
2. Adjust color and tone—You can either boost the saturation or go for a washed-out muted look. I also like to boost the yellows, oranges, reds, and blues which is a common tonal shift in film photography
3. Add grain—Every film photo has grain and yours will too! Lightroom has a built-in tool for adding grain to digital images. Adding grain is my last step since I want the grain to be built on top of the rest of the edit

How to Make Photos That Look Like Film Using VSCO

 

VSCO is one of the best apps for making digital photos look like film. It has three essential features that will help you achieve that film photography look.

The first is in-camera effects. VSCO comes with a few in-camera features that let you shoot as if you were using a retro film camera.

My personal favorite feature of VSCO is the premium presets. VSCO has everything from presets that emulate specific film stocks, like Kodachrome, to general presets that capture a vintage film vibe.

VSCO also comes with a tool kit featuring useful editing that is useful for editing. This toolkit alone will give you more control over how your edits come out.

How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Film in Photoshop

 

Most of the techniques you’ll use to make your digital photos look like film in Photoshop will be the same, at least in spirit, as those you used in Lightroom. However, Photoshop does give us a few more tools for some fancier edits, which I’ll share below.

Here’s a quick workflow for a basic digital-to-film transformation in Photoshop.

• Adjust Brightness & Contrast—Everything starts with exposure. Photoshop gives you plenty of tools for adjusting brightness and contrast, which can unlock any vintage photo look
• Add a Sepia Filter or Adjust Color—Next up is color. Photoshop lets you make the usual color and tone adjustments, but you can also use a pre-existing filter to create a sepia tone vibe, for example
• Overlay Textures—Here’s where Photoshop really shines! You can create a new layer, drop in a file with worn-out photo textures and then use one of the blending modes to layer that onto your photo
• Finishing Touches—I like to add in some light leaks in the form of gradients using colors already in the image. You can also add in a vignette or keep piling on textures for a more distorted, even damaged look

I like to use Photoshop alongside Lightroom. I do most of my editing in Lightroom and then move the digital image to Photoshop, adding finishing touches like light leaks and textures.

How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Film Using Presets?

I’ve discussed presets extensively in this article, and it’s time to explore just how powerful they are when it comes to making digital images look like film.

Presets offer you a one-click at it when transforming your photography. I have plenty of presets that recreate old film stocks and the exposure techniques of famous film photographers. This gives me powerful tools for creating the right look for every photograph.

Here are a few places where you can grab film photo presets:

• Really Nice Images
• Jamie Windsor
• Moment

Phone Apps to Make Your Photos Look Like Film

Editing in Lightroom and Photoshop can take a lot of time. These days, I’m shooting most of my photos on my iPhone, and sometimes, I just want faster edits than taking my images back to the desktop for editing.

Here are a few apps I like to use to create retro effects in my digital photography. Remember that these offer more limited editing features than Lightroom or Photoshop, but they’re more than good enough for getting the job done while you’re on the move.

• RTRO
• Lightroom Mobile—many presets carry over to Lightroom mobile, which is great for film-style edits!
• 1998 Cam
• Huji Cam
• Snapseed

FAQs

Does film really look better than digital?

Whether or not film looks better than digital is simply down to your style as a photographer and what you’re going after in terms of your art.

Film offers a lot of visual qualities that digital photography struggles to replicate, and its historic qualities make it sought after by many photographers and artists.

How to edit photos to look like film on iPhone

The quickest way to edit photos to look like film on your iPhone is to use a third-party app. You can pick from free apps in the App Store that are specially built to make your photos look vintage, or you can download Lightroom mobile for some more hands-on editing.

What are the best free apps for making your photos like like film?

You’ve got more free options than ever for editing your digital pics to look like film. A few solid options include the 1998 Cam, RTRO, Huji Cam, and Snapseed.

Final Words

That covers everything you need to know to make your digital photographs look like you shot them on film, whether you’re shooting on an iPhone or the latest mirrorless camera from Sony.

If you’ve got any questions about editing your photographs, let me know in the comments.