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It's so common now it's practically a habit: take a picture, adjust some settings, tap a filter and boom. The photo of your smartphone suddenly has the warm and nostalgic charm of a portrait photographed with a manual Canon in the 1970s. While digital over-sharing on Instagram, Facebook and other social media feeds is becoming In addition to focusing on the image, the use of filters has become a necessity, a second nature – and a form of art in its own right.
But that's how smartphone users interact with filters. The way these tools are made is a different story. Applications like Adobe Photoshop Express are able to transfer traditional image editing tips to your device, but the VSCO application has a different behavior: its X-film filters recreate the appearance of missing analog movies such as Ektar 100 , Portra 400 and Kodak Tri. X (a favorite of late street photographer Garry Winogrand). This is a long process that involves not only coding, but also locating the old film stock and reversing the captured images.
"It's much more scientific, we measure how the film reacts to light and makes it a physical model," says Zach Hodges, whose real title at VSCO is "Image science-ish". "This allows us to really simulate what would happen if you were directing a film camera exactly to the same scene as you are driving your phone's camera."
A view of a car parked in front of a house without added filter.
VSCO
View of a car parked in front of a house, after the application of VSCO KE1 preset. KE1 is based on the film Kodak Ektar 100.
VSCO
It all starts with a freezer in the company's lab in Oakland. This refrigerator-sized box, which sits among the office desks, couches and whiteboard wooden desks, contains hundreds of rolls of film, most of which are hard to find and which are all capable to capture images like no other movie or smartphone. , can. The Fujifilm Superia 1600 is ideal for taking bright colors in various lighting conditions, but its production has been stopped. The Agfa Ultra 50 is also rare – so rare that Hodges had to shell out more than $ 500 to get its reserve on eBay. "They claimed that it was the most colorful and saturated negative film ever made, and I think that might be true," he says.
Containers filled with film boxes are in a freezer at VSCO's Oakland laboratory.
VSCO
About once a month, a lab technician opens the freezer door and chooses a film from which to create a filter. To do this, the company's technicians must understand everything about the film's interactions with light, from the moment it is exposed to the moment it is digitized on a computer. But first, the technician thawed the film, loaded it into a camera and made a series of special scenes and checkerboard graphics with dozens of colored squares representing the entire spectrum of colors. After developing the film, they transport it to a secret fingerprint room – walls, floors, and ceiling painted black so that the light does not bounce back and forth – to see what they have.
This is the most delicate part, the one that VSCO says is too exclusive to be revealed. In a nutshell, the technician places the film – negatives or slides – on a robotic arm that slowly moves it in front of a light measuring instrument called a spectrometer. It takes hundreds of measurements on tiny sections of film to show how they let in light – specifically, the color dyes that you get on the film after a particular wavelength l? hit during the show. Once this is complete, the film goes into a Fuji Frontier scanner so that VSCO knows how the cyan, magenta and yellow dyes of the film's emulsion layers are converted to RGB colors that you view on the screen. your computer. All these images and data are then connected to custom software that creates a template for a filter. The Hodges team tests it, refines a few things and then converts it into a format allowing the application to function as a preset.
A photo of a building before the application of a filter.
VSCO
Photograph of a building after its treatment using the VSCO AU5 filter, based on the Agfa Ultra 50 film.
VSCO
Finally, the filter is added to Film X and distributed to users. Many of them have never shot a real movie or even realized that the filter is based on it. "It shows me that these looks are just amazing, whether you know they're filmed or not," says Hodges. "It's a credit to the engineers of the past who have done incredible work to make these things look different."
A room in the VSCO lab where the technicians develop the film.
VSCO
The popularity of VSCO tools, and photo filters for the wider smartphone, shows that creating photos in soft tones is more than just nostalgia. Although today's cameras can do almost anything in front of Xerox, the interest of photography is not just to make a copy of a moment, but to communicate. "What it is to desaturate the image to make it less colorful, to express what you feel for your life or scene, or to make the picture really colorful." and warm, that's just as much part of the reality of the scene as a precise representation of it, "says Hodges.
Of course, you can do it with a real movie too, but it's a lot harder to carry in your pocket.
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