Someone asked me how I got the sunbleached faded photo treatment from this photo (mouseover to see original):
Olympus E-P2, Lumix G HD 14-14 f/4-5.8 OIS
1/400sec @ ƒ8, iso 200, 103mm (206mm)
The film effects section of my last article on Aperture presets reminded me that I really like the film effects in nik Color Efex Pro and nik Silver Efex Pro.
I thought I’d try to emulate them in Aperture with a set a presets, starting with black and white film.
Download the presets here. Current version at time of this writing is 0.4.
(Note that my friends of Aperture Users @ Flickr are thinking of creating a website to house presets so I don’t know how long I’ll keep updating this. In the meantime, I added Pavel Sigarteu’s SinCity, El TiDY’s presets, and Ian Wood’s Aperture 2 Image Presets Project to the download.)
In order to show the B&W film effects, I hacked in an extension to my IMG Mouseover plugin. Above the image there’s a control panel where you can click to see the effect of the preset (and compare it to Silver Efex Pro):
Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/30sec, ISO160, 35mm (47mm)
Click on the controls above to test the different film presets. Mouse rollover contain images processed in Nik Silver Efex Pro.
(Note that Aperture has decided to have a brain fart and replace all my photos even if they haven’t been changed at all. This breaks the images in Flickr. I tried my best to fix this. If any are broken or incorrect, please tell me in the comments below and I’ll fix them.)
Continue reading about How to use Aperture presets and about black and white film after the jump
More Aperture presets
Aperture Presets are not new to Aperture 3. Before this however, you had to apply them by using the lift-and-stamp tool and share them by generating an Aperture project. It was never a very good solution. But my recent post on presets, made me look into our archives for some Aperture 2 settings to add to my Preset Library.
Download the presets here. Current version at time of this writing is 0.3b.
Without further ado, here they are: (Remember to mouseover the images to see the pre-preset versions…)
Sony DSC-WX1
1/320sec @ ƒ7.1, ISO160, 4mm (24mm), panoramic video
This photo was a sweep panorama of the Embarcadero to the Bay Bridge was done by the amazing Sony WX1 on my walk home from the San Francisco Farmer’s Market.
Graeme Smith came up with this setting darken and saturate the sky. When coupled with a brush and other enhancements, this should be a pretty good start for landscape photography.
Sony DSC-WX1
1/250sec @ ƒ7.1, ISO250, 4mm (24mm)
On a street corner in Chinatown there’s a guy yelling, “Happy! Happy! Happy! Everybody’s happy!”
Bakari finds this levels tweak adds some much-needed contrast to outdoor photos.
Sony DSC-WX1
1/125sec @ ƒ4.5, ISO80, 18mm (100mm)
These band was playing at the Farmer’s Market. I think they’re from the Haight normally.
Aperture now has two cross-process presets, but I thought I’d bring in the one created by heber vega also. Cross-processing probably started with a mistake from dipping films in the wrong chemical bath during development… now it creates an interesting recognizable effect.
Nikon D3, AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D
1/60sec @ ƒ1.8, ISO800, 50mm
Scott Beale, a fixture of the art, culture, and technology underground scene of San Francisco back when it really was underground decided to celebrate adding cloud hosting services at Varnish when I took this photo of him. Varnish Fine Art was recent victim of eminent domain.
This is an old trick from the video camera world. One way to get video, in Final Cut, to get a look resembling a movie was to adjust the output curve of the finished video to resemble film’s characteristic curves. You do this by creating an slanted S bend in the curve. Since Aperture 3 finally has curves, it was time to create a “film look” preset, which I did.
Hope you enjoy the presets, and contact me if you have other suggestions for more.
Keep shooting.