Do you have the VSCO app on your iPhone? I know I do. I think a lot of iPhone photographers do. VSCO is a great app to post process photos on your phone if you enjoy the faded, non-contrast photos. It’s a nice effect that many photographers use now and is popular on Instagram. I’ve wanted to write my opinion on this company and the VSCO Film Pack product for a while now. I thought a recent experiment was the perfect opportunity to do this.
Visual Supply Co. started as a film emulation company. Not to get too technical, but VSCO started to create presets for Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture (May it rests in peace). A preset is a predefined setting in photo editing software. It helps editors assign many commands to photos quickly and efficiently. Presets are a blessing and a curse. A curse I found myself falling into from time to time. It is easy to integrate presets into your work flow. While this is great if you are trying to blow through 200 photos, it is a easy way to become like every other photographer, one dimensional and boring.
When you are first starting as a photographer, you are bound to do this. You find a photographer you like. Emulate their style. Then you take what you enjoy from that style and incorporate it into your own. It is how all artists are born. In a article titled Imitators and Plagiarists” published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1892. W. H. Davenport Adams wrote, "That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” It’s the natural progress of an artist. It’s is the same transformation I am going through everyday as a photographer.
Let’s jump back to late 2012. I was a young photographer that had the “eye” as older photographers call it. It is the ability to see through the lens and capture great images. I had gotten out of auto, understood the exposure triangle, and started to make a little money for portraits and event shoots. While I was great at capturing the moment, I was not as experienced at editing. I had aperture at the time and I was trying to learn how to turn an ordinary photo into extraordinary. So over the spring and summer of 2013, I started to work on my technique. I had a few photo shoots with friends to work on my weak areas. During those shoots, I was working on contrast, simple skin corrections, and tonal changes. One of the first shoots I did was with my friends Greer and Ryan.
After working on the shoot concept for a few days, we decided to shoot at the Dallas Botanical garden. If you are in Dallas, I recommend visiting the gardens. It was a hot and humid day. Even so, Greer and Ryan were good sports about everything. At the end of the day, we left and I thought I had gotten some excellent photos. When I got I was devastated. I only had a handful of usable photos. Using Nik software and aperture, the photos I created were horrible to say the least. I had no idea what I was doing and I tried to use presets to save myself and failed miserably. I wasn't happy with any of my photos. Skin became plastic looking and all of the tonal changes were horrific. They didn't meet my own personal standards.
So what was I to do? I love sharing my work with the world, but these photos were not my best work. I decided to archive them and never look at them again. That's how that shoot was for almost 18 months. They stayed in the cold world of deep storage. Never to be shared or seen by anyone. Now back to last week.
I was sitting in a local coffee shop about two weeks ago with a fellow photographer. We were discussing how many of our peers had moved to presets. VSCO was the main part of our discussion due to their recent release of VSCO cam 4.0 and how powerful the new iPhone 6 was. I admitted to my friend that on a recent road trip, I left my two DSLRs at home in favor of my iPhone 6 plus. I will leave the argument over iPhone photography for another day. Then we started to discuss the pros and cons of VSCO film presets. In the past year, I had completely moved away from presets in favor of manually editing in Lightroom and Photoshop. She was still using VSCO film presets. She tried to convince me that VSCO film presets were the most efficient and cost effective way to edit photos. I immediately called bullshit on that premise. I told her by utilizing tone curve in any photo editing software, you could create the same effect. She had never heard of it. I doubt that many rookie photographers have. I know when I first started I had no idea about the tone curve. I had to let the cat out of the bag. I told her how essentially VSCO Film Presets adjusted the tone curve to create that faded effect. While VSCO does a damn good job at that task, any editor worth their salt can emulate the effect. That’s what I decided to do. I proposed a case study for VSCO style results without the presets. I would edit my worst photo shoot in the last two years in this style.
It had been almost a year since I had looked at these photos; but yet, I had a new tool. This tool is the tone curve. For any photo editing junkie, this tool is a work horse. At this point, I was leaps and bound more experience editing than just 18 months ago. I have come to realize that the tone curve is as important to editing as exposure and contrast. For a new editor, I would recommend learning the tone curve as soon as possible. I wish someone had told me that when I first started. Now I know better. That is about 85% of what VSCO Film Pack does. To make it simple, they adjust the tone curve to make the blacks in a photo have less contrast. That’s what I proceed to do with the shoot I did with Greer and Ryan. I took the zeroed, unedited RAW files and applied simple tone curve and grain size adjustments. To say the least, I turned garbage into something presentable. No Photoshop, no pixel for pixel editing, just old-fashioned adjustments.
That’s what is amazing about editing. It’s like chemistry, you take the initial compounds, make them react, filter, and come out with a beautiful product. That is what I learned with this experience. Editing isn’t a cookie cutter process. You can’t just use presets to magically turn your photo from garbage to something amazing. Editing doesn’t work like that. It’s a process like anything else in life. It is something that needs to be cultivated and precisely executed. There are no shortcuts. So here is my word of advice for young photographers: Don’t use presets. They are a waste of money. While they might be a quick fix in the short term, they limit your creative potential. Make mistakes, have fun, and learn. That’s life.
I'd like to thank Greer and Ryan for helping me out all those months ago. I'm sorry it took so long to edit these photos! Like the best things in life, good things come with time.
