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Plugin works in many Windows photo editors.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
'VirtualPhotographer' plugin adds film look to digital images for free


Oct. 17, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   Digital cameras put their own signatures onto every picture they take. To a practiced eye, their images are unique. No film camera takes the same kind of photos.
   Good digital images have a couple of huge advantages over scanned pictures taken on film -- they have absolutely none of the flyspeck dust and crud that shows up on a lot of high-resolution scans of film images, for example, and they usually do a better job under low-light conditions. Most importantly, digital images usually have a "live" look that has a video feel to it, whereas film-based images usually look "flatter," the same way film-based movies look "flatter" than TV videos.
   But our eyes are creatures of habit. Most of us grew up using and appreciating film-based photography, and that means our judgments are likely to be biased toward the look of film. Many of us probably consider contrasty, "flatter" images to be more attractive as photographs than the kind of smoothly toned video-look pictures that come from digital cameras.
   Traditional photographs have another attribute that lures our senses -- film grain. Digital photos are always free from grain, although they're not always likely to be free from noise. Given a choice between the classic look of film grain and the rough appearance of digital sensor noise, our eyes are very likely to prefer grain.
   A secondary advantage: The thousands of tiny speckles in film grain bombard our retinas with tiny points of light and dark contrast, which we usually sense, inaccurately but serendipitously, as enhanced detail.
   Even the advertising industry takes advantage of this unconscious preference. You might have noticed that many TV commercials are now processed through software video editors to enhance contrast and add grain. You can notice a dramatic difference when such a commercial comes on while you're watching a live sports event. The difference between the live video of the game and the processed, film-look video of the commercial is unmistakable.
   You can do the same kind of thing yourself. You can add a traditional film look to your digital photos many different ways -- by raising the contrast and adding a touch of grain in your photo editor, perhaps, or by employing a photo-editor plugin designed especially for the purpose.
   Among available plugins, the one I like the best is virtualPhotographer from optikVerve Labs at www.optikvervelabs.comwww.optikvervelabs.com.
   It's also just plain free. optikVerve does not charge for the program and does not slip advertising messages or popup windows into it either. The company simply makes a fantastic plugin and gives it away.
   The plugin runs only under Windows. optikVerve says a Mac version is under consideration. Rather than wait for a possible Macintosh version of the plugin, I installed it under Windows XP running on my dual-processor Mac through Virtual PC. This gave me the equivalent of a Macintosh version of virtualPhotographer, since image files can be dragged across from the virtualized PC's windowed desktop to the Mac's desktop and back again easily. (I reported on Virtual PC last week. See http://technofileonline/texts/tec101004.html http://technofileonline/texts/tec101004.html.)
   The two aspects I like best about virtualPhotographer are the range of options it provides and the convincing film look I could get with a couple of clicks. I was amazed to see how well virtualPhotographer's "Film Type" and "Film Speed" settings captured the precise look of practically any negative or slide film. There are 24 presets for color images and about 30 for monochrome and duochrome (one- and two-color) treatments of color images.
   I've taken thousands of images with high-speed film and know intimately the intense grainy look of color film pushed to its limit. I was able to coax my grainless digital images into that same look by choosing the "800 ASA" setting for color images or the "1600 ASA" setting for images I wanted to turn into black-and-white pictures. The results would have fooled even the photo experts at Kodak.
   You can run the virtualPhotographer plugin in Photoshop or in most programs that work with Photoshop-compatible plugins. I used it without a problem in Photoshop Elements 2.0. It should also work in Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo-Paint, Photo-Brush and Canvas. Check your image editor's help menu to see if it will accept Photoshop plugins.