- The Good: A sophisticated plug-in tool for Adobe Photoshop or Corel's Photo-Paint for professional photographers to get the look and feel of photos taken on film stock.
- The Bad: It's expensive, and it takes a lot of experience with film and digital photography to use it to its best effect.
- The Verdict: Exposure is a rarefied tool for an attenuated market, but an important one for those whose livelihood depends on properly finished photos.
REVIEW:
If among your friends you number any rock musicians, you know they can get really fussy over their choice of guitar amplifiers, each one having its own subtle differences and tonal variations. The passions run so deep that software makers have tried to emulate a series of different "classic" amplifiers for digitally oriented rockers. Photographers are like that too.
Despite the amazing recent advances in the quality of digital photography and the availability of astonishing tools in programs like Adobe's Photoshop, Corel's Photo-Paint or any other painting program that accepts plug-ins, digital photographs are just not the same as those shot on film stock.
Exposure, from Alien Skin, corrects this problem. Like guitar amplifier software, it has been calibrated to make any picture look as though it had been taken by a series of current or no-longer-manufactured films, such as Kodak's Ektachrome EES or Ilford's Delta 3200, and to emulate the effects of various lens filters and other photography techniques.
To give a specific example, one trick that had been used by the great portraitist Yousuf Karsh was to photograph his subjects with orthochromatic sheet film, a black-and-white stock that was insensitive to red, and so it rendered reds as blacks. The result, especially with women wearing lipstick, was to make their lips look dark, but it also gave their skin a gritty, tough look that became Karsh's trademark. Photographers who did not have orthochromatic film at hand could slap a blue filter on their panchromatic films to cut the red wavelength to approach the Karsh look.
Photographers have been debating the merits of various films since the dawn of photography, and selecting one for a certain shoot has become part of the professional's bag of tricks. Older amateurs will remember that Kodak's Ektachrome films produced particularly intense blues, while Kodachrome created much warmer colours, favouring the red-and-yellow end of the colour spectrum.
Exposure ($199 U.S.) understands these differences, but goes much further, such as offering darkroom tricks, which photographers still swear by and are desperate to duplicate digitally. One favourite was stretching a layer or two of pantyhose in front of the lens of the enlarger; this softened the focus for a glamour look, and gave a kinder look to older people. Over the years, as pantyhose changed, photographers adapted, some preferring black hose to sheer, and so on.
With film stock, you could tinker with tonal effects by changing the chemical composition of the developer, or its temperature (if you dared), or by changing the exposure when shooting the picture. Black-and-white photographers were particularly drawn to Tri-X film that had been "pushed" from an ISO sensitivity of 400 to 800 or even 1200, adjusting the development times to compensate; the higher Tri-X was "pushed," the grainier the picture, and that grain became a desirable effect under certain conditions.
Since there is no such thing as black-and-white digital photography, computer jockeys have to de-saturate colour pictures if they want to duplicate Karsh's look. But it won't really work by simply leeching the colour out; the resulting black-and-white images tend to be low-contrast washed-out images, because computers relentlessly do everything according to a strict set of rules - and not necessarily the ones you want. You can approach the orthochromatic look by fiddling with the contrast, density and channel settings (such as scaling back on blue and green channels, but leaving the red one close to full strength) to give the photo some snap. But it's not easy.
Among effects Exposure allows the user to push processing, to increase contrast and get larger grain; control grain strength separately in shadows, midtones and highlights; warm or cool colours, remove nuisance colour casts; mimic the effect of colour filters on black-and-white pictures and orthochromatic films; create duotones and bleaching effects; cross-processing, such as putting E6 in C41 chemicals, C41 in E6 chemicals; create glamour photos with subtle blurring; and sharpen a photo without getting those odd artifacts you get with Adobe's sharpen filter.
Exposure elevates the idea of a plug-in to a separate program. Each option is available with a host of menus for detailed work before returning to the main photo editor.
The menus are in place at the usual bar for Macintosh users, while Windows users will see the menus at the top of the filter preview window. Sliders, colour swatches, check boxes, and radio buttons appear along the left side of the window, grouped according to function.
You can save the settings of any special effect you really like and might want to apply to other pictures. A tool called Show Original toggles between the filtered and unfiltered versions of your image, and the Move and Zoom tools offer closer examination. Another menu allows for dividing the preview in half, showing the filtered image in one half and the original image in the other.
Recreating the analogue techniques is not a matter of making digital photography behave like film for the sole benefit of photographers who are having a hard time adapting to new technology. Fooling around with analogue trickery actually offers greater control over the photo than digital photo editors can exert, and so software makers like the venerable Alien Skin jump in to offer that kind of control.
Call Exposure a film simulator. It includes 85 factory settings and 31 film stock emulations, and each one comes with a bewildering array of tweakable settings, offering a lot of the control that film-photographers once had.
Put together, all these add to what is already a staggering variety of effects available to photo-editing users.
But I wouldn't recommend Exposure to casual photographers. To use it properly, you have to know what effect you're looking for, and Exposure helps you find a way of getting there. Mucking about might yield some fascinating effects, but not necessarily the ones that are suitable to the photo at hand, so playing with Exposure might prove a little frustrating.
But if you know your stuff, Exposure offers you excellent flexibility in the tone, feel, and texture of your work.
