Experimenting With Film Stock Presets

This afternoon, I've spent some time playing around with something I swore I never would: digital presets. I think using such tools undermines a large portion of the image creation process. Lately; however, I've found my mind wandering to the dark side and to see if judicious use of these tools could actually add anything to my portfolio.

The final answer: I don't know. Not from a scant hour and a half of fiddling around anyway.

The program I decided to try this out with is Alien Skin Exposure 3. The reason I chose this one is that there are a lot of presets that try to emulate old film stock rather than just do some crazy, gimmicky digital effect. From just a glance, there's dozens of different films to choose from and virtually everything you'd expect to be there from Fuji, Kodak, Agfa, Ilford and even Polaroid.

Once you've selected the "film" of choice, you then have a huge multitude of options to fine tune and adjust the desired effect. Since I'm never happy with any global adjustment, I did play with these sliders quite a bit for some interesting results.

Again, as I was just playing, I can't really make a decision on whether I can use this program in the future, but the option is definitely there should I feel that it can indeed add something to my images. I think some more experimentation is in order to see if I can achieve some subtler effects. That is if I can get over the dirthy, filthy feeling of betraying everything I feel about using presets and actions.




Polachrome - Cool/ Faded



Fuji Pro 400H



Fuji Neopan



Agfa APX 25 - with the effect brought down to desaturate rather than convert to black and white.



Polachrome


Yeah, I honestly have no idea what to think.