PolarPro is continuing to take us back on a nostalgic journey to celebrate the golden era of film photography and filmmaking with the launch of a new gold mist filter, called CineGold.
Earlier this year, they launched their 135 Series filters with retro-style metal front and rear caps. You can read that review here. One of the three filters in this range is a 1/4 strength gold mist.
The new CineGold is 1/2-strength, offering more bloom to highlights—and a warm glow mirroring the vintage aesthetic of Kodak Portra 400 film.
CineGold has a distinctive copper-colored aluminum frame, and premium German glass contains thousands of tiny gold flecks that create a lovely golden bloom to photos and video.
What Is a Gold Mist Filter?
A gold mist filter not only creates a soft bloom to highlights, it softens skin tones and adds a little warmth to the lighter tones in an image. It’s a perfect filter for summer travel, lifestyle, and portrait photography.
The biggest advantage of a mist filter is that it takes away the clinically sharp edge a digital image creates, giving a more organic, analog look to a photo. This is particularly desirable for video work, and most filmmakers have some kind of mist or diffusion filter on their modern lenses to give a more cinematic look.
Enhance the Vintage Look Further
What I love about this filter is it comes with a LUT/preset bundle—Dream Chrome, Gold Fade, Golden Hour, and Portrait 400 Cine.
All presets are designed to further enhance the warm, nostalgic look when you use your CineGold. I believe this is a first for a filter to come with free LUT/presets, and it’s a fabulous idea to encourage creative experimentation during post-production.
Giving It a Try
I was sent an 82mm CineGold, so I popped it onto my 24–70mm f/2.8 to start with. I found it to be a thicker frame than other PolarPro filters. In fact, as a filter collector (OK, hoarder), it was thicker than all my other filters from other brands I own. Not that this is a problem. Even when adding a VND on top, I was still able to shoot down to 26mm on my 24–70mm lens without any vignetting.
I shoot with gold mist filters a lot, and have found you don’t notice the warm tint unless you’re shooting very bright scenes. A sunny backlit scene on a summer’s day is when a gold mist comes into its own. One thing I like about them is they lighten shadow areas and create a softer overall aesthetic.
I set up a shot in my studio to do a before-and-after comparison. The CineGold filter makes a significant difference, but I was keen to take the look further and try out the presets. It was fun playing and experimenting with them. I locked in my white balance to get an accurate comparison.
They’re quite strong at 100% for the images I shot, so I found bringing down the intensity to around 50% worked best. My favorite for most photos I experimented with was Gold Fade.
Options and Sizes
PolarPro CineGold comes in 49mm, 67mm, 77mm, and 82mm sizes as a circular screw-on filter. It’s also available as 4x5 slide-in for industry-standard matte boxes, and as a magnet option for PolarPro’s Helix MagLock.
Pricing
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49mm: $69.99
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67mm: $89.99
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77mm and 82mm: $99.99
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4x5: $199.99
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Helix MagLock: $199.99
