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Hey everyone! I got a couple of questions regarding the last couple of Behind the Shot posts (here and here). Today I want to address some of the things that were going on in Photoshop, specifically one of the plug-ins I use when editing photos.

One of the things I try to do with most of my pics is to remove the "look" of a digital capture through a variety of techniques and tricks in Photoshop and Lightroom. However, even though I love the look of film I have no desire to go back to mixing developer, stringing up negatives and waiting hours for things to dry or even working in the darkroom to make each individual print.

Lightroom 3 added some fantastic tools to add grain that I've been utilizing more and more but my old go-to technique for making cool film effects has been Alien Skin's Exposure plug-in for Photoshop.  I use Exposure 2 to try a lot of different film effects on photos, especially with regards to film grain, color and tone.

You can see the Exposure 2 plug-in being used at the 1:02 mark of the Durant photo edit video below.

Exposure 2 is an older version of the plug-in. Since I bought it back in 2009 or so they've come out with Exposure 3 and recently just announced the upcoming launch of Exposure 4. Exposure 4 looks to be a very impressive upgrade to the Exposure series.

You can check out all of the Exposure 4 details here.

I've recently become aware of another very interesting film simulator called VSCO Film. VSCO Film is a Lightroom plug-in that uses camera profiles to apply a film look to your photos. 

I love the fact that you can batch apply settings in Lightroom with this plug-in but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. (You can also batch apply settings with Exposure but it works in a bit more of a roundabout way.)

Check out the VSCO film video below for more info.

VSCO Film: What's the Difference? from Visual Supply Company on Vimeo.

Thanks for stopping by the blog today. More to come...