Alien Skin Exposure 2 tutorial. Part 1.
This tutorial/ review will soon appear in Black + White magazine (GMC Publications). I recognise that the screen grabs aren’t easy to read (even when pulled up to maximum size in the browser); such are the restrictions imposed by these narrow columns. Nevertheless, each will be reproduced in crisp detail in the magazine, so… Here we go:
This Photoshop plug-in makes sophisticated black and white conversions a breeze. Niall Benvie, who has never done an honest day’s work in a darkroom, discovers the shortcut to classic effects.
Photoshop has some great black and white conversion tools and, with CS3/4, a whole lot of presets in the Black and White Adjustment Layer menu that provide a good starting off point for the particular look you are after. If, however you would rather spend a little less time with your computer, a plug-in like Alien Skin Exposure 2 does a lot of the graft, while still allowing the user a high degree of creative control.
Exposure 2 goes one better than Photoshop by replicating the look and grain structure of a huge range of (mostly extinct) colour and black and white films to give the finished image the look of having been shot on film. Why would you want to do that? Well, it could be because the picture benefits from a retrospective treatment, or simply because you find the clinical smoothness of a digital file unattractive. I often use filters in the Early Photography folder to create the appearance and texture of historical images, something that would be very laborious to achieve without this application.
At about £140, Exposure 2 is not, perhaps, for the occasional user, but if post-production conversion is part of your regular workflow, you may well save a lot of time, and enjoy more creative possibilities, with this product.
The starting off point for this conversion is a 16 bit digital capture of the church at Sandavagur on the Faroes. Alien Skin recommends working on high quality RAW-derived TIFFs rather than JPEG’s. Since there are a lot of greens and blues in this scene, it is ripe for an Infra-Red conversion.
I launch Exposure 2 from the Filters menu, selecting the Black and White Film option. On launch, whichever filter you last used is applied to the preview.
Here I am going to select the Konica 750 Infra Red option from the Settings tab, simply because fringing around the vividly contrasting spire and sky is less evident with this simulation than the popular Kodak HIE. Note that there is a “grain off” option: use this if you are working on a scanned slide rather than a digital capture.
Moving along to Color, I recognise that I need to darken the spire somewhat (even if that lightens the sky) in order for it to separate properly. Moving one slider here causes the others to do likewise so I had to strike a balance between darkening the spire and not lightening the sky too much.
Crucially, I make sure that the Create Output in New Layer Above Current box is checked. This ensures that the process isn’t destructive since the changes are stored on an adjustment layer above the original image.
I am keen further to darken the sky a little and complete that process by a curve under the Tone tab. I move the slider from the default for this film of 47 to 55.
Since I prefer to sharpen just before output, once I know the final image size, I leave the Focus setting at their default of 0.
Exposure 2 gives options at every turn. While the writers have gone to great lengths to replicate the grain characteristics of lots of different films, under the Grain tab you can modify these to the look you want. And not just over all: it is possible to select the grain in shadows, mid-tones and highlights separately. Normally, I reduce the grain in shaded areas since they are more prone to noise anyway. If you want to mimic the effect of push processing on grain, you have that option. Importantly too, we can specify the relative size of grain under the Film Format menu (with a large format piece of film, grain is proportionately smaller than on 35 mm) – and this is scaled automatically as we reduce or enlarge the image file.
Finally, and relevant for this particular conversion, is the IR tab.
Some infra-red films (notably Kodak HIE) bestow a glow around bright subjects which can be attractive if the subject suits it – but not in this case where there are themes of simplicity, order and clarity. If you select a “glowing film”, you may want to control the spread of the glow with these sliders. The Color Contrast slider selectively makes greens lighter and blues darker. Use it with restraint though or you risk blocking up shadows.
Once you are satisfied with the result, click OK and your adjustments will be displayed as a separate layer.
