If you are a film photographer moving into the digital world, you most likely have a favorite film stock. Gone are the days hunting around for a fresh batch of Velvia or E100s, but also gone is that familiar look and feel, the comforting grain pattern that was a part of the way we viewed our images for so long. Enter Alien Skin’s Exposure. Alien Skin is a well known name in the photographic plugin software game, they have been offering their plugin packages for popular photo editing programs like Photoshop for years, and one of their newer products is Exposure, a plugin suite that allows you to simulate the look of many common types of film stocks on your digital images. Click on after the jump for a quick review.
When you launch the plugin you are given a choice of either black and white or color film effects and when it loads you are presented with a list of film stocks off to the left and a large zoomable viewing window. The presets offer you a fairly wide range of common films with more downloadable and user created stocks available. Most of the majors from Fuji and Kodak are there, including Ektacromes in many flavors, Provia, Astia and Velvia among others. From there the list branches out into some really cool niches, 70’s Ektachrome blue shift anyone? It’s there. Heat damaged Kodachrome? You got it. In the black and white films you can simulate (in the best way that I have seen done by a plugin actually) Kodak HIE infrared as well, which is a popular effect these days.
Beyond the basic controls you are also offered 4 tabs worth of tweaking controls including color filters and intensities, tonal curve adjustments, focus (who doesn’t love grain-blur!) and a grain tab. The grain tab is probably the most useful, especially with the black and white settings. Using this tab creatively you can get the look of your favorite film without the grain inconsistencies that come from developer temperature variance and lab negligence when maintaining machines.
The process of creating a custom film stock is made easier by the ability to save every one of your settings on the fly and being able to see the changes reflected in a nice large preview window without having to drop out back to Photoshop just to check your results full size. That is usually one of my pet peeves when it comes to plugins, there is no excuse for postage stamp sized preview windows these days.
As with most of Alien Skin’s products, Exposure is a polished, complete suite and while other software manufacturers do offer similar packages, this one stands out as an example of a complete, flexible solution to getting that film look. Highly recommended three thumbs up.