Hello to all you Uncut readers! Some of you might know me from the forum. I’m the geeky English one who lurks in the shadows until technicalities arise. Then I pop up like a goblin and spell Colour wrong

A while ago, Amit asked me to have a look at Alien Skin Software’s latest offering - Exposure 2.

As it’s name suggests, it’s the second incarnation of Exposure - a program designed to give a digital image a film-like look, by emulating the colour reproduction and grain of a given type of film.

It comes in the form of a plugin for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and above, Photoshop Elements 4 and above, Adobe Fireworks CS3, and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI. Mac and PC versions are available.
For this review, I am using Photoshop CS2 running on a PC.

So, without further ado, let’s have a look at it;

The images in this article are links. Click them to see the full size image.

Installation.
Easy by all accounts. Installation took about a minute and was very painless. As usual, the setup program asks you for your name, company (if applicable) and serial number. Once these details are entered, the program autodetects your copy of Photoshop (or other compatible application), and installs into the plug-ins folder.
There is no product activation, and registration is optional - both plus points in my opinion.

Running the program.
As Exposure 2 is a plugin, it is run from within Photoshop - it resides on the filter menu, and is started in either color or black and white mode. You can also change between color and black and white modes within Exposure.

It opens to it’s main interface;

On first impressions, I like the interface - it’s uncluttered, with a reasonable preview pane, and the folders on the left keep the filters organised.

The preview image can be zoomed in several ways - I found the most convenient method to click on the preview image while holding Alt or Ctrl to zoom in and out respectively. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support zoom via mouse wheel.

There is a small photoshop style navigator box at the top of the window, which makes moving around highly zoomed images easier, and the current zoom level is displayed as a percentage in the status bar at the bottom of the window.

Before and after previews are available in two ways - selecting one of the split screen views from the drop-down box at the top of the preview window, or pressing space to view the original image. Pressing space is a useful way to quickly check the effects of some of the more subtle filters.

Once you finish setting the filter’s options and click OK, you return to Photoshop, where the film emulation has appeared as a new layer. This is a very nice feature, as it doesn’t actually overwrite your start image - if you screw up, you can just delete the layer and get straight back to where you started.

So, it looks nice - but how well does it actually work?

First up for filmifying is a Lilly. I shot this on my Canon EOS 30D, at 160 ISO, using the Sigma 105mm macro lens. I then moved a bit closer to deal with the bigger frame size of the 35mm camera, and shot the same thing on Kodak Portra 160NC in my EOS 1N, using exactly the same lighting and lens.
I’m going to feed this through Exposure 2 with the Portra 160NC filter.
In theory, we should see a very similar image to the actual film shot.

Digital image before.

Digital image after.

The film image.

In reality, the grain is pretty close, but the colours aren’t quite there - the digital image has more saturation and contrast and a different colour palette. It’s still quite a pleasing effect though.

Over the past few weeks, I have tried all of the presets in Exposure 2, and I have found that some are more interesting and potentially useful than others.
The cross processing presets are a little limited, and quite a few of them don’t look very cross processed, showing fairly normal colours and grain - however I do quite like this one;

“Agfa Optima Cross processed”

Black and White
I thought I’d give an image of my cat the properties of Ilford FP4, as I have a similar shot on FP4 to compare with.
I loaded exposure in the black and white mode. I then went to select FP4 from the film list and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not there.
Unfortuntely, neither is my favourite black and white film, Fuji Neopan 400. The only ISO 400 films that are there are Ilford HP5 and Kodak Tri-X. I don’t seem to get on very well with Tri-X, so I’ll go with HP5.

Digitally emulated HP5

And real HP5

I think it’s done pretty well on this one.

I tried emulating Kodak T-MAX 3200, but the grain was much too small and the image has been over brightened:

Emulated T-MAX 3200 using preset

Real T-MAX 3200

As you can see, T-MAX 3200 has pretty extreme grain, which isn’t there in the digital conversion

After I’d run the filter 3 times it was closer, but the contrast was off the wall - bringing the image to almost solid black and white blocks.
Thus slightly discouraged by the presets in B&W mode, I decided to see what I could cook up manually.

Start image

The results of manual tweaking are rather better.

To arrive at this, I started off with the T-MAX preset, and then flicked between the Tone (more commonly called curves) and Grain tabs, tweaking things in both to get the result I wanted.

In the end, I think it’s a pretty good attempt at emulating a fast grainy film.

So, is it worth buying?
I think the answer (as with most things) is maybe. I personally think that for what it does, it’s overpriced at $249 - certainly for the occasional use I’d give it. However, I suspect that for those who frequently spend a lot of time in Photoshop (or similar) manually creating film effects, it could be very useful, and would probably speed up your workflow considerably. The only downside I can see for heavy users is the inability to export custom filter settings - meaning that if and when you have to reinstall, you’ll lose your custom presets.

In summary then; nice idea, good interface, but perhaps a touch light on included presets.

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