I was pleasantly surprised the other day to find out that VSCO released the fifth installment of its film emulation software. They called it “The Archetype Films Collection” describing what’s inside as “mass market consumer film emulations, from the golden era of analog.”

If you’ve visited my blog before, you’ve probably seen one of these posts. It’s basically to give people a sense of what you can do with these collections. There are 12 films included, each with at least a dozen presets. There are the usual cold/warm and +/- settings, but this seems to be the first VSCO installment with color correction settings like Green and Blue. They have also introduced Night/Tungsten settings. My choice for most of the images below was the Vibrant or Soft Highs presets – they were usually my favorites.

I’ve selected a recent shot that I got at the Miami International Boat Show with my X-Pro1 and 23mm lens. The first image in the series below is the unedited original version – I just opened the RAW file in Lightroom and exported it to my desktop (the image to the right is a quickly edited version to which I applied my standard settings). For all the subsequent images, I did the same thing except for adding the noted VSCO film emulation preset. No further adjustments were made to any of the settings as I would otherwise do. My last post on the Bahamas features a few shots that were edited using VSCO presets.

Again, the differences here are slight, but much more so than in previous collections. You might want to take a look at the slideshow at the bottom of the post for the best comparative perspective. I know…

the original

Agfa Vista 100 Vibrant

Agfa Vista 400 Soft Highs

Agfa Vista 800 Vibrant

Kodak Ektar 100 Vibrant

Kodak Gold 100 Vibrant

Kodak Gold 200 Soft Highs

Kodak Max 800 Vibrant

Kodak Royal Gold 400 Vibrant

Kodak UltraMax 400 Soft Highs

Kodak UltraMax 800 Vibrant

Kodak BW400CN Soft Highs

Fuji Neopan 400

Now that I think of it, I probably should have selected a different image for this post, specifically one with a greater variety of color and contrast. Too late now… but if anyone really cares, I can redo it (grudgingly).

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