Well, it took me long enough.
And, interestingly, I got similar results this time too: heavy handed, overcooked, garish. It’s too easy to go too far on a tiny little screen, methinks.So here’s the original, my darling, adorable wife at North Avenue beach in Chicago, shot with the FG and 50mm E on Agfa Precisa 100, cross processed.
My wife is beautiful, to be sure, but here, her skin looks a bit green, and the whole picture suffers from a bit of a blue streak.
I sent it to the phone, opened it up in VSCOcam, and started checking out the various presets. After a time, I settled on the se2 preset and customized it a tiny bit (I don’t remember exactly how).
Well, the Hanabibti’s skin tone is a bit better, but the image has gone brown… on my (calibrated) computer monitor, at least. I’m not sure how to share it with you, but on my phone, the picture is much less brown.
How does it look to you? Is it just me and my monitor, or is the picture above just too brown?
Anyway. On the phone, I was satisfied with this, and decided to go one step further and sent the picture on to Hipstamatic 300.
One note about Hipstamatic 300… it takes a long time to play around with a picture. With VSCOcam, I have maybe 50 presets that I’ve blown money bought over the years. They’re all more or less decent as they are, and I usually don’t bother going through the various editing tools, and the interface is a bit kludgy anyway. But with Hipstamatic, I have maybe 50 lens filters, plus maybe 50 film filters, and the editing tools are much easier and intuitive to get to and use.
But all those filters take nigh-on forever to check out. I get a lens filter that I like, and then start hunting for a film filter. I get a film filter that I like and sometimes go and start looking for a different film. The iPhone 5 is still a perfectly good computer-in-my-pocket (and still a lackluster—at best—phone), but it might be a bit slower on the whole edit thing than a newer model, but it’s the vast number of options that takes so much time.
This one took probably 20 minutes to get to this stage, and again, it looked fine, under the fluorescent lights at the office and less fine under the dim (not really) tungsten lights when I looked at it later.
Anyway, here it is.
Way overcooked. Just too much of everything. Too vignetted. Too yellow. It does pull a bit more detail out of the shadows, but still.
So this second compare/contrast test winds up much as the first. I’ll keep trying, I think, but so far this is just another case where film beats digital.
