X-Equals – image, workflow, technology, business

If you’ve never heard of a Holga, trust me when I tell you it’s one of my guilty pleasures.

Being a digital photographer at heart, I still love to shoot a roll of 120 in my Holga.

It’s not cheap shooting, developing, and printing images from this baby – but the unique look that comes from this plastic camera with it’s foggy plastic lens and leaky housing which leaves your images prone to light streaks is just beautiful.

I wanted to combine some of the unique components of the Holga look that I enjoyed into a Lightroom Preset. I tapped Mike Gray of Lifeindigitalfilm to take leverage expertise in film emulation to develop a definitive Holga base preset that we could all use to bring components of that unique Holga look into our digital workflow.

As always, Mike delivered what is one of my favorite presets of all time … and now it’s yours to experiment with and tweak to create your own unique Holga look.

Working with the Holga Preset

There are 2 presets included in the download:

1. a Holga Base preset with the core look
2. a Holga Base preset that also includes a Kodak T-Max emulation all in one!

Let’s walk through some sample before and after images to give you a feel for how you might use this preset.

For a standard Digital SLR frame (portrait or landscape), when applying the Holga Base preset:

… you’ll get a nice base Holga effect.

For the pseudo-120 film cropping, I tend to just set the cropping in Lightroom to 1×1:

This is my favorite one … the Holga Base + Kodak T-Max emulation preset:

… and as if it can’t get any better:

The mood totally changes on this one … this definitely reminds me of the black and whites I get from my Holga.

A few basic things to keep in mind as you work with this preset:

• use the Post-Crop sliders in the Develop Module to manage the vignetting on the edges of your image
• the secret sauce is in the Graduated Filter which you can use to determine the angle, brightness, exposure, saturation, clarity, etc.
• Graduated Filter = Lighroom 2.0 so if you’re not running version 2.0 or higher now is the time to upgrade your environment.

If you’re new to graduated filters they’re very straightforward. Once you have applied the preset in the Develop Module, simply press the M key and you’ll open the graduated filter panel:

Select the circle in the image inspector and use the sliders to the right to tweak the look to your liking.

Working with the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) Holga Base Preset

If you want to leverage this look in ACR exclusively, we’ve provided .XMP files to allow you to do just that! For a quick primer on ACR files, you can read more on that here.

There are 2 .XMP files included in the download:

1. a Holga Base .XMP with the core look
2. a Holga Base preset that also includes a Kodak T-Max emulation all in one!

To install the files for use in ACR:

Download the archive, extract the contents to a temporary folder – (download link below)

Go to the temporary folder, and copy the Holga Base Gradient.xmp file.  This needs to be copied to the proper folder, as listed below for popular systems:

Mac: /Users/UserName/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRawFolder/LocalCorrections

WinXP: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\AdobeCameraRaw\LocalCorrections

Vista/7: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\LocalCorrections

(This places the Holga Base Gradient.xmp file in the location needed to be used as a Local Correction Preset)

Next, copy the Holga Base.xmp file to the appropriate folder listed below:

Mac: /Users/UserName/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRawFolder/Settings

WinXP: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\AdobeCameraRaw\Settings

Vista/7: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

(This places the Holga Base.xmp file in the location needed to be used as a ACR preset)

Using the installed .XMP files in Adobe Camera Raw 5+

Now that the Holga Base has been installed into Adobe Camera Raw, it is ready to use.  Fire up Photoshop and open a RAW format image.  Once the file opens, click on the presets tab in ACR:

Then click on the Holga Base preset to apply the first phase of the Holga simulation:

This applies the clarity adjustment and post-crop vignette used by the Holga Base preset.  Now we need to apply the second part of the Holga Base preset; the Graduated Filter.  Click on the Graduated Filter Icon in ACR:

Now click on the Graduated Filter Menu in ACR:

Click on the ìHolga Base Gradientî preset:

This populates the standard Holga gradient adjustment settings.  Now you just need to draw the path of the Graduated Filter:

Click at the starting point you desire and drag to the desired ending point.  Adjust the gradient guidelines as needed.

Once satisfied, click Done to open the image up in Photoshop with the Holga Base Applied.

Again, special thanks goes out to Mike Gray of Lifeindigitalfilm for building another Lightroom gem for us all to enjoy!

Please remember to share your images over on our flickr group … we’d love to see the amazing images you all create with this!

|Brandon Oelling
x=photography+consulting – technology. leadership. commitment.

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6. Presets and Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) – A match made in Heaven.
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