If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm a big fan of Visual Supply Company and their products. Best known as VSCO, they make a series of very accurate film simulation presets for Lightroom and Camera Raw, (and a few for Aperture) as well as a kick ass camera app for the iPhone. Their speciality has always been simulating film, and they do it very VERY well. Up till now though, they have only simulated print (and instant) film. When I shot primarily on film, I mostly shot on slide film, so you can imagine my excitement when I got their email last night to say that Film 4 was released, and this was all slide films.

"Beer Kegs" With Kodak E200 Preset

In my film days, I mostly shot with Kodak Elite Chrome and Fuji Velvia. I occasionally shot on Provia, and once or twice I shot a roll of kodakchrome. While I'm not an expert by any means, I'm pretty familiar with the look of slide film. With this in mind I downloaded the new presets this morning and randomly picked a few shots from my library to try out. One of the really exciting about this new collection is that it now supports Sony cameras. This is great, because in the other packs I've had to rely on the generic versions (which work ok) but with Film 4 they have provided specific Sony camera profiles. Overall I'm impressed. Images looks pretty much like you would expect them too look. My only quibble is that perhaps the blacks are crushed a little too much. I know slide film would have rich crushed blacks anyway, but this seems to have gone a little to far with that. Still, the results are pretty good and it will be a great addition to any Lightroom user's arsenal.

Here's a collection of shots processed with film 4 for you to get a feel of what the look is like.