I decided I would do something different with this post. Instead of working on a single image or showing how to use this feature or that dialog, I thought I would try to explain a few things, like why I shoot in black and white, and the editing style I use. Most importantly, though, I wanted to look at how to edit a sequence of images so that they form a cohesive whole.
A small selection of images from the Life after Photoshop archives. Some stand the test of time a little better than others 😉
I normally post editing techniques and ideas on Life after Photoshop, but this is slightly different. It’s about where we live and how we see it – or even IF we see it. The fashion in photography is to chase around the world looking for ever more spectacular subjects, sights and experiences. Now we take photographs for audiences and algorithms, not ourselves, and that’s our loss.
Digital images don’t look like analog. They just don’t. And it’s not just as simple as changing the colors, adding a sepia tone or applying a vignette, or a frame. There are plenty of programs and plug-ins that can recreate that analog look, or they promise to do that, but often they use very obvious techniques to make pictures look old. I’ve done this lots of times myself, I’ve nothing against this approach. It’s fine if you want to create a very obvious effect, but what I want to do today is different.
Bi-Colour Filters are just one of the Filters in Color Efex, part of the Nik Collection. What they do is apply one color to the top part of the picture and another to the bottom. This might sound like a bit of a cheap novelty, but it’s surprising just how effective this Bi-Colour Filter can be – and how often.
Solarisation is a darkroom printing technique made famous by photographer Man Ray, and it involves re-exposing a print to light half way through its development time. This results in a partial reversal of the tones in the image, so that you get a mixture of a positive and negative image.
Dodging and burning is an old-school black and white darkroom process for enhancing black and white images. It was (and is) carried out while the print is being exposed under the enlarger. It’s a process that sounds unsophisticated and largely unrepeatable but it’s at the heart of black and white photography, whether it’s carried out in a traditional darkroom or in photo editing software.
Infrared photography is fascinating because it uses light below the visible spectrum to produce ethereal black and white images and surreal false color with color films. Strictly speaking, it requires film sensitized specifically for infrared wavelengths or camera sensors with the infrared filters removed. But it is possible to achieve the same look digitally using regular color images.
One of the ways to create a vintage look for color photographs is to use the color grading tools in most photo editors to shift and fade the colors to look ‘old’. You can use guesswork (or experience) but in Nik Color Efex there’s a Film Efex: Vintage filter that can give you a good head start but still lets you make your own adjustments. Here’s how it works.
The bleach bypass process is an old analog darkroom technique that produced characteristically punchy images with high contrast, high definition and reduced saturation. You can reproduce this effect digitally in many different programs. Here, I’m using the Bleach Bypass filter in Nik Color Efex, which is one of the easiest and best implementations of this particular look.