All the Velvia’s are high saturation and contrast. 100F is the mildest and 50 is the most over the top. These are primarily used in nature scenes with colorful plant life. Human skin tones can become quite unnatural with these films. Velvia 50 is no longer commercially available.
Kodak Ektachrome EES
This long extinct film has slightly muted colors and noticeable grain. Some photographers preferred EES for portraits. Kodachrome 200 is another grainy film sometimes used for portraits.
GAF 500
This extremely grainy film was discontinued in 1977. It can give your photo a retro gritty look.
Print Films
Print films tend to have lower color saturation than slide films and many of them have lower contrast too. These films are most often used for scenes containing people, such as weddings, portraits, and fashion.
Kodak Portra 160NC and Fuji Pro 160S
These films are the lowest contrast and color saturation of the slide films. In portraits they produce the most subdued natural skin tones. They provide the most detail in shadows.
Grain
All the settings in this group just add grain without doing any other manipulations. Results range from subtle to ridiculous.
Add detail
These settings add subtle amounts of grain to shadows, highlights, or both. In a photo with completely flat shadows or highlights, this is a way to add a little detail so the picture doesn’t seem so artificial.
Focus
These settings perform a variety of blurring and sharpening operations.
Glamour Shot
These settings perform the “Vaseline on the lens” effect seen in so many mall glamour shot photos. If you use a subtle version, this is a way to make wrinkles and blemishes a little less obvious.
Tonality
These settings mostly consist of curves in the Tone tab. The effects are generally manipulations of brightness and contrast.
Shadow Recovery
When you’ve lost almost all the detail in your shadows, try these settings. Try the Narrow flavor first and progress toward Broad.
Cross Processing
Cross processing is development of slide film in print film chemicals or vice versa. This usually increases contrast and creates bizarre color shifts. The results are pretty unpredictable, so we supplied many variations of these settings.
Print Film (generic), Agfa Optima, Kodak Royal Gold
These settings tend to have cyan or bluish casts.
Slide Film (generic), Fuji Provia
These settings are very high contrast and have sharpening turned on.
See the Color Film section above for information on the Focus, Grain, and Tonality settings.
Black and White Films
All black and white films except Agfa Scala are print films. The process of creating a black and white print offers a huge amount of flexibility in manipulating everything from contrast to grain to sharpness. As a result, the black and white film settings we provide are just a starting point. Don’t be afraid to crank up the grain on Tri-X 400 so it looks like you remember and save your own version. Here are a few of the more interesting films.
Agfa Scala
This recently discontinued film was the only black and white slide film. It provides more detail throughout the tonal range, especially shadows, than most of the other black and white films.
Kodak TRI-X 400
This medium speed film has noticeable grain that many photographers love. Try using the Push slider in the Grain tab to get the look of a photographer dealing with low light conditions.
Kodak T-MAX P3200
This is the grainiest film in the list. If you want an artistic gritty look, try this one.
Color Sensitivity
These settings show off Exposure’s ability to adjust the way a color image is converted to black and white. Fiddle with the Red, Green, Blue sliders in the Color tab to see the wide range of results you can get. These settings show some common channel weights.
Mostly Red
This is the most common channel weighting throughout the factory settings in Black and White Film. It makes human skin brighter. Other weightings sometimes make people look dull.
Color Toning
These are simulations of the difficult color toning processes done in dark rooms. These settings are a good introduction to the controls at the bottom of the Color tab.
Selenium - Warm/Cool
This is a popular setting for showing multiple toning colors. Shadows are warm (brown) and highlights are slightly cool (blue).
Infrared
Exposure 2 has vastly improved infrared film simulation that can look spectacular. These settings are mostly using sliders in the IR tab and Tone tab.
These settings can be finicky because they require a very high quality input image (from Raw format is best) that has a lot of blues and greens. If you use a JPEG image, you may end up with blocky artifacts. It’s worth the effort though, because the results can be ethereal and beautiful.
Kodak HIE
This is the infrared film that everyone remembers. HIE is the one that most intensely brightens plants (greens), darkens skies (blues), and has a glow around bright areas (halation).
Fog
If you just want the glow around bright areas, but don’t want to simulate the “wood effect” of brightened plants, try these settings. They are similar to the Focus/Glamour Shots effects, but only have a glow around bright objects.