VSCO Film 04 Review by St Louis Wedding Photographer

Today VSCO just released their new version of their very popular film emulators…VSCO Film 04. I have purchased and used every version of their film packs (as well as their cell phone app VSCOCam since its launch). My fascination with their products is not because I feel like it is “cool” or “trendy” (which is certainly is these days), but rather because of my history of shooting actual film and my current process of getting back into it more and more. Currently, I have mainly been shooting tri-x, portra, kodak gold, fp-3000b, and fp-100c in the film world. So, I love that fact that I can get similar looks easily with my digital work. Granted, a film look is not usually what I am going for in my professional work, but I love it for my personal stuff. Thus, I decided to do a quick test with the new presets on some photos my Shannon’s and my trip to Ireland, Wales, and England this past March. Here is a link to my past review on VSCO Film 03 in case you want to read up on that.

Two important things to mention: 1) This is not a scientific pixel-peeping test. This is a basic overview based on my initial feelings of the presets. For the most part, the images have a little additional editing past the preset, so I will not say that the images are one-clicked to their current state. At the most, though, there is a bit of shadow/highlight, exposure, and white balance adjustment. Several have exposure based gradient filters added to (usually lower the exposure of the sky. And 2) Unlike the other film packs before now, I NEVER actually shot slide film. I just never did. So, I cannot compare the results to anything I have experienced. Although, to be honest…I have always felt like these presets need to be viewed on their own merit and not just how accurately they represent the specific films. Film is film, and digital is digital…and it should be left at that. Although, things certainly have gotten closer than ever before.

My general feedback so far is that I like the presets very much. They are strong and crisp. Unlike some/most of the other presets in the past, I genuinely believe I can use altered versions of the presets in my regular workflow. The main reason I have avoided using the presets in my work until now is that the digital film look is so popular, but that these presets have an entirely different look to them. They do stand alone to a certain extent. A few more specific notes:

Contrast: This is the biggest one of my observations thus far. I was always told that slide film has a much narrower dynamic range than print film (negative film), and because of that, you really have to nail the exposure in camera. The range was only around 4 stops or so (again…only based on what I was told). Due to the limited dynamic range, the contrast across the spectrum is much higher…especially at the ends. I think one main complaint that many will have is that the contrast can be a bit heavy in images that already pushing the opposite ends of the dynamic range. In some images, the contrast is a little overwhelming. This can obviously be tweaked in the preset to your liking, and while I love contrast, I also love maintaining details in the highlights and shadows. Personally, I imagine I will have to do a bump to the shadows for most of the images I would edit. Many users of previous versions of VSCO may feel the need to roll off some of the blacks (because obviously…all film was faded, right? just kidding…it’s not). I tried this and several and found the results mixed. In some, it worked nicely and in others, it totally killed the look. For the sake of uniformity, I kept a 100% straight tone curve in all of these samples.

Colors: When I think about slide film, I think mainly about striking landscapes and bright, strong colors. These presets definitely do well with giving the colors the pop that you would expect. I was actually more pleased with this than I expected to be. There are some color shifts that you will need to deal with that will vary image to image, but on the whole, I found it manageable so far. On about half of the images that focused on a person, I found that I needed to do a white balance shift to get the skin tone where I wanted it, but when I did, it looked fantastic. There are some new tonight options in the color toolkit, and I only played with a few of them and only for one image or so. On the whole, I do not tend to go for additional tone these days.

Grain: For grain lovers, you are not going to see as much here. But, that is to be expected. With the stocks that do have more grain, I think it fits nicely.

My one huge disappointment is that there is no Kodachrome preset. Since the last Kodachrome developer shut down a few years ago, there will never be Kodachrome developed again. Thus, the VSCO guys could not do proper tests to create the preset. I never shot with the film, so my sadness is more based on knowing how many amazing, award-winning images were shot on that film and it had such a wonderful look to is.

These are my limited thoughts thus far. I will likely update this post with more feedback once I have the chance to work with it more. Hope you enjoy them. All images shot with a Canon 5D mark III, and I have the preset type listed directly before each image.

Fuji Velvia 50