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Black and White Film


Color Tab: Color Conversion | Equalize Channels | Colorization
Tone Tab: Curve Editor | Black/White/Gray Points | The Sliders | The Buttons
Focus Tab: Sharpening | Blurring
Grain Tab: Background | Overall Grain Strength | Tonal Ranges | Roughness | Color Variation | Push Processing | Grain Size
Infrared Tab: Color Contrast | Halation Opacity | Halation Spread
Settings Discussion: How We Did It | Tone Curves | Grain | Getting Ready – Adobe Camera Raw
Factory Settings: Color Film | Black and White Film



Color Tab

This chapter describes the Color tab of the Black and White Film filter. This tab controls the conversion of color images to black and white, as well as colorization. The Color tab of the Color Film filter is described in the previous chapter.


The Color tab for the Black and White Film filter.


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Color Conversion – Red, Green, Blue

The Red, Green, and Blue sliders control how much each color channel affects the final black and white photo. In a portrait, the blue channel can be downplayed to de-emphasize wrinkles and blemishes. You can use these sliders to simulate a color filter over the lens of the camera. For instance, a deep red filter will make skies darker, as in the example. If your photo is in Grayscale mode then these controls will be disabled.


Here setting the RGB values to 100/0/0 simulates a red filter. Note the darkened sky and brightened car body.


These sliders also go down to -100%. While this is not physically realistic, it can be used to increase contrast. When simulating infrared film, a negative value for Blue will make the sky very dark.

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Equalize Channels

When this option is enabled, the Red, Green, and Blue sliders add up to 100%. This is useful for ensuring that your photo is roughly the same brightness as your original.

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Colorization –Ink Color, Strength, Position

The ink controls at the bottom of this tab are for creative effects like sepia or selenium toning. For each ink, you can set its color, how much the ink shows up, and where it appears in the brightness range of your photo. Think of the Ink Position slider as a gradient from shadows on the left to highlights on the right. Ink colors appear much stronger when placed in the shadows versus the highlights.

The left photo simulates selenium toning, the right sepia toning.


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Tone Tab

Both the Color Film and Black and White Film filters have a Tone tab. The Tone tab includes a curve editor along with some sliders we added to make common tasks quick and easy. Use the Tone tab to address issues like contrast, brightness, shadows, and highlights.


The Tone tab for the Color Film filter.


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Curve Editor

The curve editor displays how input brightness is converted to output brightness. The horizontal axis represents input brightness, and the vertical axis represents output brightness. By default, black is in the bottom left corner and white in the upper right corner. If you prefer to think in terms of density rather than brightness, you may want to flip the curve. To do that, click anywhere in the gradients on the left or bottom of the curve.

Channel Pop-Up Menu

The Color Film curve editor has separate curves for the red, green, blue, and RGB channels. Changes made to the curve editor or the sliders below it affect only the selected channel. The RGB curve affects all channels and is applied after the individual channel curves. Switch between these curves using the Channel pop-up menu at the top of the Tone tab.

The Black and White Film curve editor has just a single gray curve and does not include a pop-up menu.

Editing Control Points

Changing contrast, brightness, shadows, and highlights involves adding, moving, and removing control points in the curve editor. To add a control point to the curve, click anywhere there isn’t already a point. To move a control point, simply click on it and drag it while the mouse button is down. To be more precise, select a control point by clicking on it and then edit the numbers in the Input and Output text boxes. To delete a control point, drag it out of the curve area. You can also select it and then click on the Delete button.

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Black/White/Gray Points

Use the three eyedropper buttons to easily set the black, white, and gray points of your photo. These can quickly expand the dynamic range of your photo or remove a color cast. After you click one of these buttons, the cursor becomes an eyedropper. Click anywhere in the preview to select a color. Note that the color selected will come from the original photo, not from the filtered version.

Black Point

To select the black point, click on the leftmost of the three eyedropper buttons and then click on the blackest part of your image in the preview. This will set the leftmost control point in the individual Red, Green, and Blue curves. The point you selected will become pure black after filtering.

White Point

To select the white point, click on the rightmost of the three eyedropper buttons and then click on the whitest part of your image in the preview. This will set the rightmost control point in the individual Red, Green, and Blue curves. The point you selected will become pure white after filtering.

Gray Point

The gray point eyedropper tool is designed to help remove a color cast and is only enabled in the Color Film filter. To select a gray point, click on the middle eyedropper button and then click on a pixel of your image that should be any shade of neutral gray. This will set a middle control point in the individual Red, Green, and Blue curves. The point you selected will become neutral gray and any color cast it had will be removed. All other non-white and non-black pixels in the image are adjusted accordingly.

In the top of this photo, a color cast was removed using the gray point tool.


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The Sliders

Many people are scared of the curve editor found in Photoshop. Therefore, we provide four sliders that perform the most commonly needed curve transformations. When you move one of these sliders, a blue transformed copy of the curve is displayed in the curve editor. This blue curve is the one that affects your photo.

Contrast

Increasing this slider brightens highlights and darkens shadows. Increasing contrast will usually make a photo more dramatic at the expense of detail in highlights and shadows. In some cases, you may be able to recover detail in photos that have harsh shadows or highlights by decreasing contrast.

Shadow

This slider brightens or darkens only the shadows. If your shadows are blocked up, you might be able to recover some detail by increasing this slider.

Midtone

This slider brightens or darkens the image, having its strongest effect in the midtones. The result is similar to gamma correction, but is not quite as harsh.

Highlight

This slider brightens or darkens only the highlights. If your highlights are blown out, you might be able to recover some detail by decreasing this slider.

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The Buttons

Editing curves can be a lot of work, and a complicated curve is tedious to reproduce. So we thought you might want an easy way to save and load curves. In addition, we have provided a way to reset the parameters of the Tone tab.

Save

The Save button brings up a standard file saving window that lets you save your curve to a file. For the Color Film filter, the curves for all of the channels are saved together in one file.

Load

The Load button brings up a standard file loading window that lets you replace your curve with one from a file. For the Color Film filter, the curves for all of the channels are loaded together.

Reset

To reset all the controls in the Tone tab to their default positions, press the Reset button. This will result in a curve that does not alter the photo. Note that in the Color Film filter, the Reset button resets the curves for all of the channels.

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Focus Tab

The Focus tab contains controls for sharpening and blurring.


The Focus tab for the Color Film filter. The Sharpen Brightness Only checkbox is only present in the Color Film filter.


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Sharpening

First a word of warning about sharpening. Oversharpening quickly makes a photo look artificial. As a general rule, we suggest that you reduce sharpening until it is not immediately apparent that the photo was sharpened. When your photo will be printed by a process that causes blurring, you may need to sharpen to a point that looks strong on the screen but will look appropriate in print.

Sharpen Amount

This slider controls the overall strength of the sharpening. Typical usage is a value less than 30. Generally a larger Sharpen Radius will require an even lower value for Sharpen Amount.

Sharpen Radius

This value determines the size of features that are most affected by sharpening. You should generally use as small of a radius as you can. Try a value of 20 and keep increasing the radius until you start to see sharpening.

This slider is not measured in pixels. The sharpening radius is proportional to image size, so the same slider value should look the same on a 6 Megapixel image as it does on a 22 Megapixel image.

Sharpen Threshold

This control restricts the sharpening to areas with strong edges. Increasing this slider leaves smoother areas unaffected. Most people find this control a little esoteric. If you like your tools simple, then just leave this at zero, and you’ll be fine.

Sharpen Brightness Only

When this option is enabled, only the brightness of a color photo is sharpened. The hue is unaffected. This reduces obvious color halos and other artifacts. To be honest, we haven’t found a situation where we would turn this off. This feature is present only in the Color Film filter.

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Blurring

Why would anyone want a blurry photo? A very slight blur can reduce the harshness of a digital photo or reduce the effects of oversharpening. Most of the time, however, a simple Gaussian Blur adds little to a photo. If that blur is very transparent, the result is that familiar, hazy glow found in glamour portraits. This effect is great for making wrinkles and blemishes less obvious.


The left half of this image was blurred to reduce the appearance of wrinkles.

Blur Opacity

For a very subtle effect, try values less than 20%. Your subject may not realize that you softened the photo. For an obvious effect, like the photos made at the mall, crank Blur Opacity up to 70%.


A more subtle blur gives the right half of this image an artistic look.

Blur Radius

Like Blur Opacity, increasing the reach of the blur will make your effect more obvious. A very high radius will make a photo hazy and lower contrast.

This slider is not measured in pixels. The blur radius is proportional to image size, so the same slider value should look the same on a 6 Megapixel image as it does on a 22 Megapixel image.

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Grain Tab

The Grain tab adds realistic grain to selected tonal ranges of your photo.


The Grain tab for the Color Film filter. The Color Variation slider is only present in the Color Film filter.


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Background

Real film grain is nothing like the noise feature in today’s image editors. Real grain appears selectively in different tonal ranges, is not square like a pixel, and has subtle color variation. We studied grain in archival photos, did test shoots, and used microscopes to examine the structure of film grain. With that knowledge we created a grain generator that is sophisticated and very realistic.

Below are some photomicrographs of some of the films we examined. Notice the irregular shape and random spacing of the grains. You would never blow up an image enough to see this level of detail, but these variations cause the effect we call grain.


Kodak TRI-X is on the left. Ilford Delta 3200 is on the right. The graininess of the high-speed film is very apparent.


Below, a photomicrograph of Fuji Velvia 100 shows why modern color slide films have very little grain. Ignore the bubbles. Those are part of a protective layer above the pigment. During development the silver grains were replaced by clouds of pigment. These clouds do not have a sharp edge like the grains in the black and white examples. The result is much less noticeable grain.


In Fuji Velvia 100, the edges of the grain are barely apparent. This is why modern slide films have very little grain.


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Overall Grain Strength

This slider gives you an easy way to turn grain completely off, weaken it, or strengthen it. When Overall Grain Strength is zero, most of the other grain controls are disabled.

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Tonal Ranges – Shadow, Midtone, Highlight

The Shadow, Midtone, and Highlight sliders add grain selectively to the tonal ranges of a photo. Film tends to have more grain in midtones than in shadows and highlights.


Grain appears only in the midtones of the left half of this image, but in all the tonal ranges of the right.


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Roughness

This slider controls how sharp grain edges appear. Low values make grains soft and provide smooth tonal changes throughout the grain. High values give grains sharp edges and make entire areas appear completely bright or completely dark.

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Color Variation

This slider controls the amount of color variation the grain causes. We found that real grain is quite colorful, but you may want to tone it down for aesthetic reasons. This slider is only present in the Color Film filter.

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Push Processing

Push processing is a film lab technique that compensates for underexposed film.  Side effects are increased grain, increased contrast, and some loss of detail.  You can use this slider for a grungy look.

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Grain Size

If you turn off Automatic Grain Size, you can directly control grain size in terms of pixels. That is how Exposure 1 worked and it is easy to understand grain size this way. However, in this approach your grain size does not increase when you go from working on 6 Megapixel images to 22 Megapixel images. The result is that the same grain applied to both images and both printed out at the same physical size results in the 22 Megapixel print having much smaller grain.

So, that’s why all our factory settings have Automatic Grain Size turned on. In this mode, you specify the film format you are simulating and a relative grain size. Smaller format film produces larger grain, with 135 format giving the largest grain. A Relative Grain Size of 1.0 with a 3000 pixel high image (shortest side) simulating 135 format film gives grain of size 2.5 pixels. If the length of the image changes, the pixel size changes proportionally. That means that your 6 MP and 22 MP photos will have the same grain when printed at the same physical size.

There is one caveat to the automatic grain size system. Grain size will never get below 1.5 pixels. Below that size, grain becomes digital noise with no clumpy natural quality and that’s just ugly. This means that images below about 3 Megapixels will usually be stuck at 1.5 pixel grain. Unless of course you grab the grain size slider and increase it. Feel free to take over!

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Infrared Tab

The IR tab is only available in the Black and White Film filter.  This tab controls special effects that simulate infrared film.  It is of course impossible to exactly simulate infrared film since your input image does not have infrared information recorded in it.  However, you can get pretty close with these sliders.

Images containing blue skies, blue water, and green plants will give the most dramatic results.

Warning: You should start with a high quality image, preferably from Raw format.  The Color Contrast feature will enhance noise and compression artifacts in JPEG images.  Saving a JPEG image in another format will not get around the fact that it contains compression artifacts.


The IR tab for the Black and White filter.


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Color Contrast

Increasing this slider darkens blues and brightens greens.  Skies and water are usually dark in infrared images, while plants are usually bright.  This is sometimes called the “wood effect”.  If this slider makes noise or compression artifacts (blocks) visible in your image, decrease the slider or start with an image saved in a lossless format, like Raw.

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Halation Opacity

Halation is a glow around bright objects.  It comes from light passing through the film and bouncing off the camera back.  Most film has an anti-halation backing, but the most well known infrared film, Kodak HIE, does not.  This slider controls how solid the glow appears.

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Halation Spread

Increasing this slider makes the halation glow appear around more parts of your image.  It also makes the glow spread farther.

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Settings Discussion

How We Did It

To imitate film stocks that were available during creation of Exposure, we did test shoots with the film and with a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II digital camera. We shot a special chart, as well as scenes including flesh tones and colorful natural objects under controlled lighting. The digital photos were processed through the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in with default settings. We then measured differences between the film and digital images using custom software we created. This enabled us to create settings that mimic the look of these film stocks.

Most of the film settings control warming/cooling (or sometimes filter color), saturation (for color films), RGB sensitivity (for black and white films), a curve in the Tone tab, and grain parameters. We chose to leave black and white colorization and focus controls alone in the basic film settings. Those controls are more for special effects or for you manipulate yourself.

For film stocks that were discontinued years go, like GAF 500 and Kodak EES, we obtained archival photos and experimented until our settings closely matched the images.

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Tone Curves

Compared to digital sensors, film has a less linear response to light. Below is a characteristic curve for a film stock.

If this curve were a straight line, the response would be perfectly linear, and the film would reproduce a perfectly realistic image within that brightness range. Whenever the curve is shallower than 45°, contrast is lowered. Areas steeper than 45° designate increased contrast. This S-shaped curve would increase contrast in midtones, block up shadows, and blow out highlights. Expect to see varying amounts of these effects from all of the settings based on real film stocks. If these effects bother you, simply reset the curve in the Tone tab after loading the settings.

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Grain

The Grain tab is the most unique part of Exposure. We put film grain under a microscope, literally. There we found that real grain can be larger than one pixel, has subtle color characteristics, and often appears with different strengths in the highlights, midtones, and shadows. Below are some examples of our microscope photos. As you might expect, the higher speed film has larger grains.


Above are photomicrographs that we took while studying film grain. From left to right they are Kodak TRI-X 400, Fuji Velvia 100, and Ilford Delta 3200.


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Getting Ready – Adobe Camera Raw

Our film settings were developed using Raw images processed through Adobe Camera Raw using its default setting. If you use the ACR automatic setting your results will come out higher contrast. If you set all the ACR sliders to zero, your results will come out lower contrast.

Generally you will get more predictable and attractive results if you always treat your input images the same way. Moderately low contrast before entering Exposure is recommended.

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Factory Settings

Factory settings can be found in the far left tab in the user interface at the top. Factory settings are broken into groups. This chapter gives some guidance on the most commonly used settings groups and describes a few of the more interesting specific settings. This is not a comprehensive list.

Color Film

Slide Films

Slide films tend to be high contrast and many of them are high color saturation too. Slide settings are most often used to punch up dull low contrast photos. Some slides also have a slight color cast, Kodak generally being warmer and Fuji being cooler.

Here are a few of the most commonly used slide settings.

Fuji Velvia
All the Velvia’s are high saturation and contrast. 100F is the mildest and 50 is the most over the top. These are primarily used in nature scenes with colorful plant life. Human skin tones can become quite unnatural with these films. Velvia 50 is no longer commercially available.

Kodak Ektachrome EES
This long extinct film has slightly muted colors and noticeable grain. Some photographers preferred EES for portraits. Kodachrome 200 is another grainy film sometimes used for portraits.

GAF 500
This extremely grainy film was discontinued in 1977. It can give your photo a retro gritty look.

Print Films

Print films tend to have lower color saturation than slide films and many of them have lower contrast too. These films are most often used for scenes containing people, such as weddings, portraits, and fashion.

Kodak Portra 160NC and Fuji Pro 160S
These films are the lowest contrast and color saturation of the slide films. In portraits they produce the most subdued natural skin tones. They provide the most detail in shadows.

Grain

All the settings in this group just add grain without doing any other manipulations. Results range from subtle to ridiculous.

Add detail
These settings add subtle amounts of grain to shadows, highlights, or both. In a photo with completely flat shadows or highlights, this is a way to add a little detail so the picture doesn’t seem so artificial.

Focus

These settings perform a variety of blurring and sharpening operations.

Glamour Shot

These settings perform the “Vaseline on the lens” effect seen in so many mall glamour shot photos. If you use a subtle version, this is a way to make wrinkles and blemishes a little less obvious.

Tonality

These settings mostly consist of curves in the Tone tab. The effects are generally manipulations of brightness and contrast.

Shadow Recovery

When you’ve lost almost all the detail in your shadows, try these settings. Try the Narrow flavor first and progress toward Broad.

Cross Processing

Cross processing is development of slide film in print film chemicals or vice versa. This usually increases contrast and creates bizarre color shifts. The results are pretty unpredictable, so we supplied many variations of these settings.

Print Film (generic), Agfa Optima, Kodak Royal Gold

These settings tend to have cyan or bluish casts.

Slide Film (generic), Fuji Provia

These settings are very high contrast and have sharpening turned on.

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Black and White Film

See the Color Film section above for information on the Focus, Grain, and Tonality settings.

Black and White Films

All black and white films except Agfa Scala are print films. The process of creating a black and white print offers a huge amount of flexibility in manipulating everything from contrast to grain to sharpness. As a result, the black and white film settings we provide are just a starting point. Don’t be afraid to crank up the grain on Tri-X 400 so it looks like you remember and save your own version. Here are a few of the more interesting films.

Agfa Scala

This recently discontinued film was the only black and white slide film. It provides more detail throughout the tonal range, especially shadows, than most of the other black and white films.

Kodak TRI-X 400

This medium speed film has noticeable grain that many photographers love. Try using the Push slider in the Grain tab to get the look of a photographer dealing with low light conditions.

Kodak T-MAX P3200

This is the grainiest film in the list. If you want an artistic gritty look, try this one.

Color Sensitivity

These settings show off Exposure’s ability to adjust the way a color image is converted to black and white. Fiddle with the Red, Green, Blue sliders in the Color tab to see the wide range of results you can get. These settings show some common channel weights.

Mostly Red
This is the most common channel weighting throughout the factory settings in Black and White Film. It makes human skin brighter. Other weightings sometimes make people look dull.

Color Toning

These are simulations of the difficult color toning processes done in dark rooms. These settings are a good introduction to the controls at the bottom of the Color tab.

Selenium - Warm/Cool
This is a popular setting for showing multiple toning colors. Shadows are warm (brown) and highlights are slightly cool (blue).

Infrared

Exposure 2 has vastly improved infrared film simulation that can look spectacular. These settings are mostly using sliders in the IR tab and Tone tab.

These settings can be finicky because they require a very high quality input image (from Raw format is best) that has a lot of blues and greens. If you use a JPEG image, you may end up with blocky artifacts. It’s worth the effort though, because the results can be ethereal and beautiful.

Kodak HIE
This is the infrared film that everyone remembers. HIE is the one that most intensely brightens plants (greens), darkens skies (blues), and has a glow around bright areas (halation).

Fog

If you just want the glow around bright areas, but don’t want to simulate the “wood effect” of brightened plants, try these settings. They are similar to the Focus/Glamour Shots effects, but only have a glow around bright objects.

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