Each pack comes with a myriad of emulsions, and while you may well debate their accuracy as well, at least I’ve never found myself working against the preset to make a useable image. If you’re hellbent on starting with a preset family and working from there, I personally and without any pre-arrangement with the company put my stamp on VSCO presets as a much better investment. The addition of a handful of blunt one push modifiers makes for a workflow that forces you into a corner, one that you end up having to fight with the sliders in order to get out of, or simply reset the image altogether. At $119 per pack, Mastin only offers a slim selection of emulsion emulations, only one of which (Delta 3200 35mm) I would consider within miles of accurate. When it comes to value there’s sadly no debate in my mind that the Mastin packs are a poor investment for any photographer, amateur, professional, and any in between. There are three Packs: Fuji, Portra and Ilford Fuji Granted, Mastin also states that these presets are a starting point and designed to be manipulated. the Ilford Black and white pack while equally iffy at times has a saving grace in the addition of a solid emulsion of Delta 3200, and a very useful red filter emulator for fans of high contrast skies. The treatment of shadows especially unpleasant, the highlights shifting minimally, really the only difference being odd and typically undesirable shifts in color. While the tones changing visibly for sure, I’ve found more often than not, in my pursuit of a finalized image I ended up correcting away from the preset functions. The Fuji and Portra packs both have a very minimally noticeable effect on each image. In testing the Mastin labs family of presets, I found this company to definitely be in the second camp.
While many of these companies essentially slap your images across the face with a practically instafantastic palette riding saturation, fade and clarity like bucking broncos, others take the time to take a subtle approach, leaving the tuning up to you. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a slew of companies claiming a be all end all digital solution to mimicking film emulsion through a simple yet effective preset process.
Editor’s note: we’ve also provided more samples to better illustrate our points.
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