



REALGRAIN 2 SOFTWARE
The plug-in software simulates 288 different color and black-and-white still photographic film stocks, motion picture films stocks and historical photographic processes. Less well-known than other film emulation programs, Film Stocks v1.5 from Digital Film Tools is the heart of the Film Stocks category of Tiffen Dfx.
REALGRAIN 2 MAC OS X
With an MSRP of $149, Alien Skin Exposure 6 is available for Windows 7 or newer and Mac OS X 10.8 or newer operating systems.Ībove: The same panel that displays film types in Digital Film Tools also displays adjustment options when you select the Parameters tab. (Exposure does not include a browser, but you can drag and drop files onto its desktop icon or open files from the program.) Layer opacity or blending mode can be adjusted at this point if the host program supports them-a flexible and welcome touch.Įxposure 6 installs as a standalone application or as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS6 or newer, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 or newer and Apple Aperture 3 or newer. When used as a plug-in, Exposure sends the image back to the host program with each adjustment on a separate layer. Once you create a custom look, you can save it as a user preset.Īlien Skin claims over 450 preset effects can be applied with a single mouse click in Exposure 6, which now integrates both color and black-and-white processing so you don’t need to switch between tools. The custom adjustments include those for color, focus, grain, infrared, vignettes, borders and textures, and a tone curve. There are also presets for focus effects, tonality, split toning, vintage films, cross processing, lo-fi (lomography), etc. Of all the film emulation programs I’ve viewed, Exposure 6 has one of the widest ranges of available film-style presets, including black and white, color print, color slide, color and black-and-white infrared, and Polaroid color and black-and-white films. Exposure 6’s image-processing engine has also been tweaked to make the app run faster, and full-sized instant previews of the effects allow you to compare before and after looks more quickly than in the previous version. There’s a new basic control panel that gives you access to sliders for global adjustments of exposure, contrast, clarity and vibrance. Other changes to Exposure 6 include a cleaner user interface for quicker access to the program’s tools. (At press time, Alien Skin’s Bokeh 2 was still available as a separate program as well). The right-hand panel of the program holds extensive adjustments to apply once you select a preset.Īt press time, Alien Skin Exposure 6 was just announced as a replacement for Exposure 5, and the revamped program offers a few key changes, including the addition of Alien Skin’s Bokeh functionality for selectively blurring backgrounds. Here, I concentrate on the software that simulates the look of film while offering both color and black-and-white presets.Ībove: Alien Skin Exposure has one of the widest ranges of film emulations. For now, the future of that classic “analogue” look lies with film emulation software, so let’s look at some of the more popular programs (along with a few others that I think should be more popular). Is film making a comeback? Judging from the increasing number of software programs that adjust digital images to simulate the look of film, it’s worth a discussion.
