Experimenting with Lightroom 4.1 RC with VSCO vs manual adjustment

I installed Lightroom 4.0 yesterday but after reading about all the bugs and slow response and also in anticipation of my 5D III (ha I wish!) and RAW file support I updated to LR 4.1 RC.

My initial reaction is that its improved in the controls around the basic Delvelop panel and the replacement for the fill light slider is superb.

Coupled with that VSCO told me that the LR3 presets have been updated for free for LR4 users which is fabulous – not many companies would do that! So i downloaded and looked at the differences between the LR3 presets and LR4 and there is extremely little difference although its almost like having a choice of 2 sets of presets now.

After watching Laura Shoe on Creative Live this weekend and catching the black and white conversion in LR I thought I would try the manual process against the VSCO presets. I know presets should only be looked at as a starting point but I left one of the images below as TRI-X 400 and one of them I converted to BW in LR and arranged sliders to suit. No local changes were made to either image and both had the TRI-X 400 grain applied.

So which is which and which do you prefer? Answers on a black and white grainy postcard only. No rounded corners accepted.

And one with a direct VSCO TRI-X