Alien Skin Exposure 2.0: Photoshop Plug-in

Posted by LisaHill - 29/10/09 at 03:10 pm

Subject Matter: Photography, Improving digital image quality

Grades: Upper middle school, high school, college, digital photography, photojournalism, media, marketing, nonprofits

Improving Digital Images
You have a digital camera, you’re snapping lots of pictures, but you’re not happy with the results. Someone took your Kodachrome away. O.k., lets be honest. You donated your Kodachrome and the remaining film after getting hooked on shooting digital. Yet, now you want that film look back without losing the convenience of digital. Alien Skin’s Exposure 2.0 plug-in for Adobe Photoshop products is one tool that simulates film quality in digital images.

And in today’s media classes, students may not realize the difference in quality from film to digital quality images. Using Exposure v2.0 will broaden their experience by contrasting different image quality, and improve their photo skills.

Exposure v.1.0 included presets for popular slide and print films from Kodak and Fuji, including Kodachrome and Fuji’s Provia. Exposure v2.0 adds presets for available films, such as Kodak Porta 160NC and VC; Kodak Ultra Color 100; Fuji Pro; Fuji Reala; and Polaroid. Alien Skin also obtained a few rolls of discontinued films to create presets for Agfa Scala, Fuji Velvia 50, and Polaroid Polapan. Exposure v2.0  incorporates a new grain generator with more grain controls, special effects presets, and an improved user interface.

Clean & Easy Interface
With Exposure v2.0, both the color film and black&white film exposure filters open into a clean, easy-to-use interface that provides intuitive defaults, and the power of custom adjustments. By selecting the “Settings” tab, this interface provides a selection of more than 200 factory preset settings. Custom settings can be saved and reused enhancing efficiency. Default and custom settings can be adjusted with sliders after selecting one of the four adjustment tabs: color, tone, focus or grain on the color film user interface. The black and white film user interface adds an infrared (IR) adjustment tab.

Images
To illustrate the film effects provided by Exposure, an image was selected from photos taken with a Nikon D200 (10 MP sensor). The selected image was processed in Photoshop CS4 using Exposure factory presets. Presented below are 100% crops of the original and processed images.

The above examples are just a small sample of over 200 presets available to create the right image mood, or tone. If you have a quality digital image, but the image is well… too digital for your story or portfolio, consider applying Alien Skin’s Exposure v2.0 plug-in to regain that film quality look. Exposure v2.0 can be applied to Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Photoshop CS4, but is not available for Lightroom 2 or Aperture. Exposure 2.0 may also be a plug-in for Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI.

Alien Skin offers a free download at Product Downloads , and video tutorials can be viewed at Alien Skin Tutorials.

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 with PowerPC or Intel processor (Adobe Photoshop CS2 9.0.2; Photoshop Elements 4.0.1; Fireworks CS3); Windows XP with Pentium 4 processor (Adobe Photoshop CS2; Photoshop Elements 4.0; Fireworks CS3; Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI)
Contact: www.alienskin.com
Cost: $249; $149 for upgrades

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Art, Media, Photography/Video. The entry is tagged under Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, Alien Skin, Alien Skin Exposure 2.0, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, Exposure 2.0, Exposure software, photography, Photoshop CS4 plug-in, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Elements plug-in, Photoshop plug-ins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.