Recreating an 1970s analog street photography vibe in Capture One

Rather watch a video? See it on YouTube here.

Recreating the look of analog films is a surprisingly subtle job that can require several different tools. There are of course magic filters for mobile apps that attempt to achieve the analog look, and desktop applications that have powerful and effective analog presets, like the DxO Nik Collection or ON1 Photo RAW. For this project I’m creating my analog effect manually in Capture One – though you can do the same in Lightroom (see the brief instructions at the end) and other photo editors.

I’ve always been a fan of minimalist street and architectural photography from this particular era and the distinct color rendering of films from this time. It is very difficult to technically identify and measure the differences between analog film and modern digital capture. Usually, the best we can do is to use digital editing tools to try to evoke the looks we remember from the past.

So this 1970s ‘look’ I’ve come up with here isn’t based on any specific film emulsion or process. It does, however, capture some of the warmth, grain, color and contrast shifts of films I remember from that era, together with some of the fading that tends to happen with analog materials over time.

Here’s a before-and-after comparison. The modern digital version is on the left and my analog treatment is on the right. You might edit this slightly differently, but you’ll probably find the same tools useful for your own analog treatments, and I explain what I did in the steps below.

01 Creating what I call my ‘winter sky’ with the Color Editor

In the original, the sky is a very vivid, no doubt accurate blue. What I want is something darker and less saturated, and the Capture One Color Editor is the place to do it. I want to shift one particular color range here, not all the colors, so I use the eyedropper in the Advanced tab to click on a representative area of sky. The panel now shows this selected color range, and I can get the color and tonal shift I want by reducing the Lightness and Saturation with the sliders below, and also shifting the Hue a little towards cyan.

02 Darkening the reds with the Color Editor

Still in the Color Editor, I want to make another change. The reds in this image are ‘popping a little too much for my liking, notably in the No Entry sign on the street. I use the eyedropper again to click on a red part of the sign, then I reduce the Lightness but increase the Saturation to retain some of the depth of color.

Underneath the sliders, you’ll see that Capture One creates a list of your adjustments. You can select these to modify them and use the checkboxes alongside to temporarily switch them on and off to compare the effect. Below are before/after swatches to show the effect of the color change.

The Capture One Color Editor is a powerful tool, and used widely in Capture One presets. It’s worth spending time getting to know what it can do. You can even use it to turn color range selections into masks.

03 Global color shifts with the Color Balance panel

Earlier on I said I only wanted to shift some specific colors, but now I think I do want to apply an overall color shift, and the Color Balance Panel (not the Color Editor) is the place to do it. You can break down color balance shifts for Shadow, Midtone and Highlight ranges, but I’m just using the Master tab to apply an overall shift.

This is really simple to do. You just drag the center control handle out towards the circumference in the direction of the color you want to add. I’m going for a yellow/orange/red shift for an overall warming-up effect. The further you drag the control handle out to the edge, the stronger the color. You can drag the handle around to change the color too, or use a circular slider around the edge of the gadget.

04 Adding some punch with the Clarity panel

Not everyone likes big Clarity adjustments, so this is optional. Personally, I do like the way it makes objects stand out with enhanced local contrast, and with this image I think it can stand being pushed all the way up to 100. The Clarity panel also has a Structure slider, and this is great for enhancing textures and micro-detail, though I haven’t used it here.

05 Adding grain with the Film Grain panel

Of course, no analog effect is complete without some film grain, and Capture One is extremely good at adding grain realistically. You can do this manually with the sliders, but I prefer to start with one of the grain presets in the panel’s drop-down menu. These produce strong and effective grain effects with a couple of clicks, and you can always modify them to taste with the Type drop-down and the Impact and Granularity sliders. The grain effect, incidentally, works in tandem with the unusual curve adjustments to follow.

06 All this, and a vignette too?

Vignetting, or corner shading, is not necessarily a characteristic of analog photography, but it can be an effective visual ‘cue’ for the analog look and photographs from past eras, so I’m going to add one here. Capture One’s Vignetting panel has few options, so all I need to do here is reduce the Amount value. A setting of -1 looks about right.

07 Curve adjustments for a ‘matte’ effect

Now I’m going to make a couple of curves adjustments which may upset histogram fans. First, I drag the black point handle upwards so that the tones in the image don’t quite go to a solid black. This is a ‘matte’ effect that’s becoming quite popular – though I don’t really know the derivation of the ‘matte’ term. I also drag down the white point control handle so that the brightest parts of the image don’t quite go to a solid white.

This takes some of the digital ‘hardness’ out of the image but it also works particularly well with the grain effect, because even the darker and brightest parts of the image still show a grain pattern and an authentic film-like texture.

With the Curve panel open, this is also a good time to make adjustments to the middle of the curve to increase or reduce the overall brightness.

08 Finally, a Saturation tweak

All these edits have affected the overall saturation of the image – not by much, but enough to make it worth a slight Saturation boost in the Exposure pane. This already has some adjustments from applying Capture One’s Auto Adjustments to the image before this whole walkthrough – they are not part of this analog ‘look’.

So this is my final image. If you like the treatment, just follow my steps above. Don’t forget you can adapt the settings to your own tastes and skip any parts you don’t want, such as the vignette, saturation or clarity adjustments.

And after doing all this work, why not save your edits as a Capture One Style? There are no layers and masks in this process, just a set of adjustments applied across the single base image layer, so it’s a perfect candidate for a Style that you can re-use as often as you like.

How to do this in Lightroom

1. The sky adjustment can be carried out in the Color Mixer panel and the new Point Color tab is best for targeted adjustments like this. You may need to tweak the Hue Range, Saturation Range and Luminance Range adjusters to approach the level of finesse in Capture One.
2. The adjustment for the reds can be carried out the same way. You can use the regular Mixer tab, which is simpler but is a bit of a blunt instrument for fine color adjustments.
3. Global color shifts can be carried out with the Color Grading panel. There is a ‘Global’ option here for adjusting the whole image.
4. You can use Lightroom’s Clarity adjuster in the same way as Capture One’s.
5. Like Capture One, Lightroom has a grain effect (Effects panel). It’s also very good at replicating real film grain.
6. Lightroom Classic has its own Post Crop Vignette slider (Effects panel).
7. The Tone Curve panel in Lightroom works just the same way as the Curve panel in Capture One.
8. You can add Saturation in Lightroom’s Basic panel. You can also try the Vibrance slider, but I often find the results sickly-looking and unpredictable.