35mm film review: CineStill 50D

Hi, my name is Andrew, and I am a destination wedding and travel photographer. I also write books about my travel experience, and film photography, which you can find here. In this article, I will review the popular but pretty expensive 35mm film CineStill 50D. I have already reviewed its big brother in medium format here, but this time I had a good opportunity to use a 35mm film for a comparison. This film was featured in my book as well, and I would say the book was the main reason why I decided to go ahead and purchase it in the first place. I know this film look pretty well from my previous photo shoots, and to be honest I did not like it very much, but could tolerate its plain color pallet and pretty flat looks. However, this time I have done a small lab test, which means that I sent this film to 2 different labs to see how they process it. I will provide you with the small comparison on the bottom, so you could see how both labs differ. But in general, this film is very expensive and at the same time it is believed to have very little grain. What I have learn about it too, is that you are expected to use some extra color editing on top of that, just like the cinema lab would do with the movie film. This is why its colors are pretty flat - the expectation is to get some mood at the editing stage. Not sure if that is true, or it is just a film photographer hoax, but I treated it in the same way - edited scans in Lightroom a bit, to push for a bit more colors and contrast. You can see the raw footage in the medium format review - it looks too flat to me. So here you will see some beautiful locations in Manarola (Cinque Terre, Italy), and I hope you will enjoy the shots.

And here you can see the comparison of two labs, maybe you will find it helpful. To me, it was quite interesting to see that some shots turned out to be better in the lab "A", and some - in the lab "B".

I guess, it all depends on the mood of the editor at the scanner...

LAB "A" LAB "B"