On the other hand, if you are like me, good enough is, well, never good enough. So the other tabs were made for people like me. The "Color" tab for color film covers color casts and saturation. You have a set of sliders that manipulate the overall intensity, filter density and saturation. For Black and White, this controls the conversion of color images to Black and White.

On the Black and White Film filter, you also have an Infrared Tab that controls special effects that simulate infrared film. This of course is only a close approximation, since there is no infrared information contained in your image.

The Tone Tab controls items like contrast, brightness, shadows, and highlights. There is a curve editor that displays how input brightness is converted to output brightness. You can manipulate the full spectrum with RGB, or you can manipulate a channel at a time.

The Focus Tab contains controls for sharpening and blurring an image. You control the amount, the radius, and threshold when sharpening, and the Opacity and radius when blurring.

The Grain Tab adds realistic grain to selected tonal ranges of your photo. Keep in mind that grain is not noise, and unlike noise, it appears in selected tonal ranges. It is not square like a pixel, and it has subtle color variations. In this tab, you can control shadows, midtones, highlights, roughness, color variation, push processing, and grain size.

I found that Exposure 2 is incredibly easy to use. It is amazing on how accurate; at least based on my memory of some of these films, is. I like the fact that you can save your own presets, as well share preset with others on the online forum where you can also get help from other users.

You might say, why would any one want to put grain, and other effects in to digital images in the first place? Obviously the easy answer is for artistic creativity, and that is a good one. Another is to match a portfolio. That is, you have some film that you have shot, and some digital. You are working a layout, and you want all of the images to appear similar. You can now simulate your film. Exposure 2 is a very mature product and as such, very easy to use. It provides the user with an almost limitless set of variations that one can use to create effects

Snap Art is available at the Alien Skin online store for $249.00 new, or $149.00 for an upgrade.