Review: Exposure 2, by Alien Skin
I’ve said it before, one of the secrets of effective photography is that one isn’t recording, but revealing. It’s a maxim among older photographers (those who started with film) that film is, in some wise, inherently “better” than digital. That film can do things digital can’t.
This isn’t quite true.
Film did things differently. If you liked grain... sorry, digital doesn’t do grain. Noise is the equivalent, but it’s not the same. Even at that, the way in which noise builds is different from the way grain does. Bump the ISO to 400, and you get less noise than you got grain when you pushed Tri-X two stops.
What film had was variations in saturation. Different response curves. That created some distinctive looks. Take Kodachrome. It set the benchmark for certain types of photography. National Geographic used it, almost exclusively for decades. It has a wonderful response in the darker areas, with wonderful detail in the shadows.
It’s also wonderfully archival, if it’s kept in the dark. Kept where light can get to it, it degrades. It does have a red-shifted color-balance. It still has die-hard devotees.
Velvia has a different profile, the colors are much more saturated. In its original formulation it was almost garish. The greens and blues were so intense as to get the nickname (from those who didn’t like it) of “Disneychrome”. It was to landscapes what Kodachrome was for people (because of how it handled skin tones it wasn’t the best of films for shooting subjects which had people in the frame). Fuji made some changes in 2004, but in 2007; because of pressure from photographers who liked the way it handled yellows and greens, a new formulation which had the same sort of response curves of the original.
Digital doesn’t really have that. With some cameras you can adjust the response curve, and emulate, more or less, a beloved film stock, but its work. More to the point it’s a lot of trial and error. Play with the curves, load the adjustment to the camera, take some test shots, evaluate the test shots, make some more tweaks, load them into the camera, and repeat the process until you have what you want.
When you want to change the “film stock” you have to hook it to the computer, load a new profile, and do it all over again. It did have the disadvantage of changing the baseline information of the file
Which is where Alien Skin comes in. A few years ago they introduced a plug-in for Photoshop; Exposure, which was meant to do such emulations after the fact. It’s a pretty good app. I used it to make the Kodachrome Shevchenko.
They’ve just released Exposure 2.
It’s got some new film stocks. They took samples of out of production stocks, like GAF500, Agfa Scala, Kodachrome 25; and 200, and built curves to automate getting the look of them. With some tweaking you can do it but unless one has samples of those films to play with, it’s not trivial.
I ran a picture through 16 of those profiles. I took a file and made no specific changes to it. Just selected a film and hit, “apply”.
All the samples are here. Exposure 2 Images (I happen to like the Warholish effect the wall of similar images has)
This one:
is the baseline for all the images which follow.
Kodachrome 200
It happens Exposure had a Kodachrome 200 as well. The differences are stark:
My real hope was for a good emulation of Velvia:
That's about as brilliant as I recall. With a bit of wiggling on the slider it comes out a little less over the top.
If you want a more general look, there are generic settings (color fading, as if the image had degraded over time, “magic hour” light, noonday sun, overcast, etc.). Wish you could figure out how to make it look cross processed (for that late ’70 advertising look), it’s in there.
Generic Noonday sun:
It’s got a very nice tool for making your own profiles. It’s a simple curve tool, which allows for playing with RGB, Red, Blue, or Green. In each of the channels one can also play with the contrast, highlights, shadows and midtones and saturation. Grain is adjustable. If you load a profile and move to the Tone setting, you get to see the curves they created. If you move the sliders it shows a blue line of the difference from the loaded curves
Here's one I did with it:
The B&W side of the house is a differently varied. Again, they have a lot of stocks. They don’t have my favorite (Kodak Tech-Pan), but I’ll bet I can play with it and find some decent emulation. A quick hit of “crtl > alt > s” and I’ll save it.
Because I don't think the waterfall is the best picture for showing off the variations of filmstocks (it's a bit dark, when treated in B&W), I have a mushroom picture as the B&W image.
For the first image, we have one of the film stocks anyone who ever took a photography course
is familiar with, Plus X.
One of the things B&W was easier to do was, "push film" (i.e. underexpose the negative, and then overdevelop by letting the chemicals work on it for a longer period of time.) The variety, and types, of paying around with time, temperature and chemistry to get different effects on film is worth a course, all on it's own. There are some settings in Exposure 2 to let you play with some of those effects. For those who never did more than simple pushing, there are presets to emulate doing that.
Pushed 1-stop:
and Pushed 2-Stops:
It does a nice job of showing the increased contrasts, and grainier nature. I like the way it blocks up the shadows.
The fine grained films are well represented, though it's a lot easier to emulate the grain of a film which doesn't have much. The trick on things like Neopan is to get the creamy whites, and inky blacks, with a smooth gradation from zone 1 to zone 10:
It's not quite what I'd like, but then again, what I really want is something like TechPan, and that was an accutance film, which means faking it in the computer is going to be a little harder to do.
The other thing I was hoping for was good emulation of infrared (for various reasons, IR isn't really doable without a lot of hassle, and expense [and some risk] with digital). Exposure didn't, in my opinion have a good IR emulator (and it's one of the failings of LightZone as well). Exposure 2 has much better IR setttings.
Kodak HIE:
Look at the grass in the foreground. The sense of "ghostly" which is thought to be the, "characteristic" feature of IR isn't so evident, but that's OK, because the mushrooms don't have as much of the features of chlorophyll plants which cause that.
Compare it to this one, which is a more generic IR setting, "Fog":
It has the sense of "glow" where the highlights have burnt out
For making profiles in B&W the tools are much the same, Where the color side has generics, so too on the Black and White. There the generic emulations are for different technologies. As film got more sensitive to the full spectrum (ortho and pan) the look changed. This does that. The Daguerreotype doesn’t quite get the level of detail one wants (at least not on the screen, perhaps in the print, but I doubt it. The three-dimensional nature of the plate is no small part of what makes that form of photography so amazing, but I digress) but for the effects, like calotype, which are issues of spectral, not physical, properties, they are solid.
Suffice it to say the preloaded settings cover a huge range of options. One of the nicer features is those who played with making settings in Exposure have those settings ready to hand, since they are imported when the program installs. If there are settings in the original you really like, open it up, start to apply them and hit save. They will be saved into Exposure 2.
One of the applications I’ve been drooling over, for about 4 years is, “Grain Surgeon”, which has a bunch of samples of film/paper grain. Exposure 2 has half of that, the film grain. The strength is user defined.
Honestly, I didn't do much more than take it for a test drive. I played with it for about four hours, didn't do more than look into the more fiddly bits (such as the developer emulations. I'm curious about taking the NeoPan and treating it to a Rodinal filter, or the HIE, with halation). If I'd tried to test everything, the review would be longer and not done for months.
It’s not cheap, but for what it does, it’s about as good as it gets. List price is $249, but right now Alien Skin is having a sale, so everything is 20 percent off until Christmas Eve. Given that Grain Surgeon (by someone else) is more than 300 bucks, all by itself, the price it probably fair. It’s got a 30 day trial period.
