20081128

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford Delta


LR Preset: Ilford Delta, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

[Adobe Camera RAW presets added 01132009]

Wow, another week passes and I am just now releasing a new preset. It has been a hectic week, but I have a weeks worth of presets ready to roll now, so hopefully it will get better.

Tonight I present to you my interpretation of Ilford's Delta film. It is very similar to T-max and Fuji Neopan Acros. It is an excellent film in my opinion, better than T-max, but not quite as beautiful as Fuji's. But that is my opinion. Very good for images with high contrast.

I hope you all enjoy this preset and that you are all doing well.

Oh, get it HERE.

Until next time,
Michael

Another Side Project

Sorry for the lack of updates, but Thanksgiving here in the US has been messing me up as far as my scheduling goes. But today I had a little time so I put together a wiki for an idea I had pop up a while back.

Today I started a wiki for designing, editing and refining presets as a community. The idea is to have a community online where people can work on presets together, hopefully making much better presets as changes get provided back to the community. It is an experiment, and may not work, but I wanted to try. Usually many people together will make a better product, but not always. Hopefully we will see if it works...if it does it may become a good source for quality presets.

I started the wiki over at wikidot, so if you want to take part you will have to join wikidot and then join the wiki.

Find it Here.

As I said, hopefully this will take off, but if not I am only out a few hours of work.

Until later,
Michael

PS: More presets coming soon.

20081123

LR/ACR Presets: Kodak Panatomic X, Kodak Gold 100 and 200

[Adobe Camera RAW presets added 01132009]

Sorry for the extended drought of my film emulating presets. I am back after a fairly long stretch of "real" work, and I have presets!

Tonight I release my interpretation of Kodak Panatomic X B&W film. It has been discontinued for quite some time, and I was only able to get a hold of a few samples, and no real film for me to shoot. That is to be expected from a film that was discontinued almost 30 years ago. I feel the emulation is as close as I can get with Lightroom as it stands. There is some nuance with the smoothness of the tone that I noticed in the original film that is impossible to even correctly approximate. I tried for the past two weeks to get the tone nailed, but I could not do it. I feel the overall look is right, and a perfectly exposed image will convert wonderfully. If Lightroom has to work to correct exposure expect the tone to not be so smooth. I can't explain why it works like this, but it does.

While the Panatomic preset is not perfect, I am still proud of it and hope you all enjoy it. You can get it HERE.

Also, as a bonus for you patience, I am also releasing my interpretation of Kodak Gold 100 and 200. I am not a big fan of Gold film, but it is one of the most commonly shot films in existence. Surely someone likes the look. There is an individual release for both 100 ISO and 200 ISO, this is due to a slight difference in the tone curve that is evident in brightly lit photographs. Not much else to say on these, which is why they are "bonus" presets.

Kodak Gold 100 is HERE.
Kodak Gold 200 is HERE.

Thank you to all who visit my site, and my apologies for the extended delay in releases.

Until Next Time,
Michael

20081118

Updating.....

Well, it's been a little while with no updates. I have been overly busy with work the past week and have not had time to do proper work ups on my presets. I don't want to just post one for download with a picture. I like to give a little info and my thoughts on each one. Lately time has been a little tight, but it should ease up as the week progresses.

Also, my stock of preset releases was getting slim. I have a list of presets to do, currently 50+ that I have enough info and samples to work with. However one's ready to release were getting slim. In the next few days I will be releasing more, hopefully one a day again, but I may back off to one every other day, and fill off days with other material I would like to cover here. Either way, I plan on daily updates, ongoing, starting this weekend. I hope to get at least two more update out this week.

Upcoming presets:

B&W:
Ilford Delta
Ilford FP4+
Ilford HP5+
Ilford Ortho+
Ilford Pan F+
Ilford XPS 2
Ilford SFX
Konica IR
Adox CHS 50
Kodak Panatomic X

Color:
Kodak Gold 100
Kodak Gold 200

Lately my releases have been just emulating film stock, since it has been focusing on B&W. Most of the tone and contrast is very similar between different speeds from my observation, ISO primarily effects grain and contrast, both easily altered to get desired look. On my first B&W release I attempted to differentiate by speed, but I was primarily mucking with sharpening and noise reduction to artificially enhance camera noise. I decided that that is a bad idea and that grain is better reproduced in Photoshop, at least until Adobe decides to give me grain control in Lightroom!

However I am going to handle color films differently. I I can decide that I see no discernible difference in color and tone between ISO's, then I will release just the emulsion, just like my current B&W's. However, if there is a difference in color, tone and curve between different speeds, then I will release a version for each ISO. This is what will occur when I release my Kodak Gold Presets.

I hope you all have been enjoying my work so far, I assure you that more is to come. I work my day job for a major package delivery service and my days are getting longer as we head into the holiday season, not to mention more photography jobs coming into Christmas. It caught up with me this week and I plan to change my blogging and preset release habits to work them into this schedule.

Well until later,

Micahel

20081113

LR/ACR Preset: Kodak HIE


LR Preset: Kodak HIE, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

[Adobe Camera RAW presets added 01132009]

Sorry for the missed day all...I had to take it off, it was my first day in a very long time in which I developed my own film. Processed a roll of my favorite, Fuji Neopan 100 Acros. But anyways, that was the cause of the delay...photography.

But today I preset to you my humble interpretation of Kodak HIE infrared film. This particular film stock is no longer produced (production ceased in 2007) and the last rolls of stock are selling at quite high prices on eBay. I'm too cheap to pay $40 usd on a roll of film, no matter how spectacular, so this was as close as I could get with out real negatives in my hand to compare to.

Anyways, many people were up in arms of the cancellation of this film, so I guess it was special to many people out there. So have at it and hopefully it may get near-IR results.

Get it HERE.

I will recommend that you adjust the red and magenta channels give or take 20 clicks on the slider to find the best look for the image. I kept the reds conservative to get better overall appearance, but many photos need those channels kicked to the right a notch to get better IR effect.

Well until next time,

Michael