In an attempt to squeeze every last bit out of fall before mud season bogs us down for the year, Kassie and I went backroad exploring through the Uinta National Forest. Fall colors are fading fast, but I did manage to find some amazing light for the above photo. However, after the shutter clicks, there’s still plenty of work to be done to produce a great image, and for that I turn to VSCO film packs. Having been turned on to VSCO originally through the iPhone camera app, I’ve been using the film pack presets to drastically reduce my editing time. Below I walk through my typical workflow and the steps I took to achieve the above image, the original of which can be seen below.
Above is the original file as it appears right off the camera. As you can see it’s overexposed, and a little washed out. While I’d like to claim having some grand vision for each of my photos, the truth is I go through and make slight tweaks until ultimately I’m satisfied with the result. The beauty of the VSCO film packs and presets, is that they allow you to quickly achieve lots of different tones and moods without having to manually process each effect in Lightroom or Photoshop. Below are the settings I applied to the RAW file.
VSCO Cam ACR 7 Workflow & Settings
- EV Adjustment -.7
- Apply Kodak Portra 400 Preset
- EV Adjustment -1.2
- TK – Grain None
- TK – Blacks 0
- Shadows +30
- TK – Tone Kodak
- Contrast +5
- Saturation +5
- Yellow Saturation 0
- TK – Green Shadows +
- Contrast +10
- TK – Highlights Save ++
- TK – Saturation –
- Contrast 0
- Red Saturation -25
- Crop
And below a quick vid of the presets in action as they are applied to the image:
To view more photos, visit me on Flickr or Tumblr. Have any VSCO film tips or tricks up your sleeve? Leave a comment below.