Exposure

Photoshop Plug-in From Alien Skin

Exposure is a plug-in and must be used with one of the following host programs:

Windows:

Adobe Photoshop CS or later
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 or later
Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 or later
Corel Paint Shop Pro 9.0 or later

Macintosh:

Adobe Photoshop CS or later
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 or later
Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 or later

Why would you want to make your work seem as though it had been achieved using a outdated technology?

The answer is that some people wouldn't dream of turning their digital photographs into noisy, analogue looking, images; while for others this would be the ideal way of achieving a traditional feel without the inconvenience and expense of using film.
The ability to emulate extinct film stock even goes back as far as the daguerreotype. You can also apply cross-processing effects without effectively destroying a set of negatives in the process.
This plug-in will appeal to digital photographers who lament the old days and to anyone trying to capture the 'retro' look. The effects are good and should satisfy anyone with a background in film photography, while the versatility of the parameters will amuse the digital purist who may wish to experiment with the settings.

Getting Started

The Factory Settings

Colour Presets Colour Settings

Film Presets

The available film stock settings are extensive as you can see. If you want to achieve a particular authentic film appearance then there should be something suitable within these factory settings. Though you are, by no means, limited to simply selecting and applying these defaults; you can adjust, tweak and muck-about with all of the additional parameters such as colour, tone, focus and grain.

Selenium Effect

The above picture represents a selenium toned digitally captured image. Additional grain and contrast adjustments could give the appearance of age to the picture, though it was not required in this particular case.
For Aging/foxing effects the TTC series of plugins by Auto Fx may be used in conjunction with this package

Black &White Presets B&W Settings

Selenium toning is a process of treating black & white prints to a selenium solution. The effect is to increase the tonal range without decreasing the contrast! Unlike sepia toning, the stability of the print is not enhanced. Therefore there are less selenium tone prints around today than there are sepia ones.

Colour Settings

The first thing to note on the color menu is the output tick-boX. when ticked this will create a new layer above the one you're working on in photoshop. It's a matter of habit - most people will create a new layer before applying an effect in any case.
The intensity slider acts like the filter fade in photoshop and will decrease the overall effect of all of the parameters that you change.
Filter color allows you to apply a virtual lens filter of any colour you choose.
Density will increase or decrease the effect of the chosen colour filter.
Having chosen your filter colour and density you can then tweak it warmer or cooler.
If you don't wish to affect the luminosity of your image then you should keep the Preserve Luminosity box checked.
The saturation sliders are self explanatory and you probably only use these in order to 'pop' your subject a little from it's background.

Tonal Settings

If you're familiar with Curves in Photoshop then you'll only need to glimpse the chart on the left to know exactly what this menu does.
Either by adjusting the sliders below or by moving points on the graph, you can alter the tonal qualities of your image by increasing or decreasing the levels for specific tonal areas - shadows, highlights or any point in-between.
The most common use for curves is to correct contrast problems. Often you might need to increase the levels of the shadows in an image that is otherwise well exposed. For example, the subject may be well lit by the flash of the camera, while the background, where the flash has become less effective, is underexposed. You may wish to boost the shadows in this example.
As with curves in Photoshop, you can save your settings to your hard-drive.

To have increased the luminosity levels of this image uniformly would have resulted in the subject becoming over exposed to the point of clipping much of the detail currently retained in the highlights.
The contrast has been reduced, but this is unavoidable and inherent in the procedure. You have to decide what elements of the image need to be seen; if none of the people in the background are relevant then leave them in the dark. The only reason for boosting the shadows in this instance is for the purpose of illustrating the use of the tonal correction curve.
It may be better to adjust your levels in photoshop prior to employing this plugin. In photoshop itself, you will have the option of using the shadow/highlight filter which is a lot quicker than manipulating points on a curve and the results, though not as flexible as curves adjustments, will, nine times out of ten, give you the results that you need.
The inclusion of parametric levels correction tool such as curves is very useful especially if you are working on one or two images. For batches though, you would be wiser to make all of your tonal corrections before hand.

Focus Settings

The focus settings are represented by a sharpen and radius slider (an unsharp mask in other words). Again, if you know photoshop this will be routine.
The radius determines the size the the area to be sharpened (the resolution of the effect, if you like). The radius setting is entirely dependant upon the qualities of the image. A small radius can often do little more than emphasise the grain or noise, too large a radius can sometimes create a halo effect of soft bright areas.
The Sharpen Brightness Only check-box will diminish the halo effect created by using a large radius value - effectively the same as sharpening a luminosity layer in photoshop or sharpening the luminosity channel in LAB mode then converting back to RGB.
There are also blur controls - should you deem your image too sharp.

As with the tonal settings, you may prefer to apply these adjustments using photoshop's own tools and use Exposures focus settings to fine tune the affected image.
Photoshop's lens blur filter does a more realistic job than ordinary blur and allows you to apply the effect proportionally based upon the values present within a selected alpha channel.

Grain Settings

Alien Skin claim to have studied film stock through microscopes in order to accurately emulate grain patterns for various film stock across their tonal range therefore when you choose one the the factory settings the fruits of their labour will be applied to your image - but if you think they were just wasting their time and probably should get out more, then you can always adjust the settings for yourself.
The Grain settings allow you to set the amount of grain for shadows, midtones, and highlights, as well as selecting a grain size and colour variation.
Your digital image will look like film after this (for better or worse).

The grain settings are much better than anything that photoshop has to offer. Photoshop's film grain filter is little better than add noise and tends to make your image look even more digital - or as though the image were composed of iridescent grains of sand.

Conclusion

This is a great plug-in - no question about that.

The usefulness of a plug-in is easy to gauge by how far it departs from it's host application. Ask yourself the question 'Can I do these things on photoshop without this plug-in?' The answer in this case is no. Certainly many of the menus and parameters are blatant photoshop borrowings. But the research involved in building the factory presets, the realistic grain and the intuitive interface mean that this plug-in can do things that would require a day's work to emulate using photoshop's own filters and tools.
In practical terms, the most useful application of this plug-in is in the area of matching images from various sources. Oftentimes you will have a number of images that you need to combine, in whatever way, to create a single composition; some of these images may be from scanned negatives or prints, some of them may be decades old and shot on archaic film stock. You can use Exposure to unify all of your images to match a specific image's qualities- from the colour and tonal aspects to the grain and sharpness. The price is around £100 for the single user package. Multi-user versions are available for educational or corporate use. Additional film stock and effect definitions are available from the Alien Skin website. They are free to download.