The Jump to VSCO
I've been standoffish about purchasing one of the Visual Supply Co packages of film emulators that give your digital images an authentic film feel because of my general feel that anyone can buy a SLR and one of these packages and get cool images. Even me. I'm not a pro photographer and can't imagine ever getting there. Because of this, I've tried to force myself to focus on composition, raw images, and making simple edits sans filters. It's been a great route to go and I've been happy with my progress.
I think what VSCO has created is phenomenal and I've been a big fan of their free iPhone app for a few years. I've coveted their packages for Lightroom for a couple of year as well but I've held out because I don't want to use them as a crutch nor end up editing all that I do through them. It'll still be tough for me to not want to process all my fall family shoots with it and then have a fall's worth of work deviated from what I normally do. However, I'm looking forward to seeing how these films perform with some beautiful fall landscapes.
This week, I finally bit the bullet and picked up their 2nd package of films based on doing some research of what photographers are using. I wanted gentle films that wouldn't go too old looking or be too far from some of my normal edits. It's actually quite hard to determine which package to get without a trial or side by side comparison. So, with 5 different sets to choose from, you kind of have to guess based on the group of images they have on their website.
We were on vacation a few weeks ago and I was just getting to editing them. So, I ran them all through VSCO and here are some of the results. I'm impressed with the workflow in Lightroom 5 and how these look. Some have more tweaks done than others, but each one is using a VSCO film. All images were shot using a GoPro Hero 3+.
Don't expect to see too many family shoots processed with it, because I'll default to my normal processing technique. However, it'll show up here and there and definitely in some of my personal shots like these.
