Head into the lab with the VSCO team and see how VSCO presets are created. Zach Hodges, photographer and creator of VSCO presets, shares editing tutorials to achieve a range of aesthetics.
"Every preset starts with a vision or an idea, which could come from anywhere."
"The very first product VSCO ever made in 2011 was film presets, so it’s safe to say that presets are in our DNA as a company, even now 12 years later. Back then, presets were just that: pre-set values for various tools to create a look. When we created VSCO CAM in 2012, we sought to bring the same experience to mobile devices, but there were two things working against us in those early days. First, the quality of the cameras was not good, and second, the means to create image editing tools were very crude. Hence, for the first version of VSCO CAM, we had 10 presets (now 01-10 in the current app) that tried to smooth over the rough edges of those early camera phones, but lacked the nuance and quality of our desktop presets. However, later that year, everything changed."
"For the release of VSCO CAM 2.0, we found a door to another world in image editing: Color Cubes - also known as look up tables, or simply LUTs. At its core, a color cube is just a long list of color reassignments in 3D space. By reassigning every point in that cube to a new color location, with a long list of reassignments (the LUT), we can create an entirely new look that can be applied to an image. The software applies this table to the image by reassigning every pixel in the image to its new color location and voila! Your image has a new look.
Standard presets are made of many components that are custom-made each time we make one, and then reduced to a single Strength control. To 'remix' the original presets into Pro Presets with more control, the original recipes had to be re-opened and the pieces for each new control created. The new controls are Color, Contrast and Tone."
As you can see, we’re just as excited about presets now as we were in 2011, and looking forward to the future of Pro Presets. What Pro Preset should we make next? Visit our feature request page on the Community Forum to weigh in.