virtualPhotographer - by Colin Jones
It all started with an idea. Wouldn’t it be great to make a Photoshop plug-in. And so it began.
After some brainstorming with my friend Peter, we decided it would be cool to create a plug-in that allowed photographers coming from the world of film to be able to recreate the look of film using a digital camera. So work was started on a plug-in to create the look of film from a digital original. Noise algorythms were found along with with algorythms for blend modes and gaussian blur.
Now the fun was about to start. “What do we want this plug-in to do?” Let’s start with film grain was the initial response. So after a few attempts to get the best film grain, Peter said, “We need more features!”, so we came up with emulsion types. Using a combination of the grain and blend modes we came up with some pretty cool looking film grain that mimmicked print film and slide film. “We need more features!” “Different films have different looks, let’s make warm and cool versions and add more grain as if it was a faster film.” So I spent a little time in Photoshop and came up with some numbers and gave them to Peter to add to the code. We now had some cool looking film effects. This is what we wanted from the start. Suddenly digital images didn’t look so digital. We decided that we were going to make this plug-in available to everybody for free….. check virtualPhotographer.