I often get asked if I prefer film or digital for photographs. The answer is that I prefer B&W analog film to digital but when it comes to color I much prefer making digital photographs.
I never enjoyed the lengthy 20 minute process to just make one test print and then having to go back into total darkness just to make another test. Working up a good print could take two hours easily. Having started my career in the film era, I did a fair amount of color printing from negatives. As soon as possible I hired out my printing to a master printer named R.L. Dietz. He would deliver prints with these long stories about the battle he went through to produce a perfect print. Even his best prints don’t compare to what I can do with digital photography today. Digital offers a precision that film could never achieve.
B&W film on the other hand, has a unique look because I can manipulate contrast and tonality by varying the chemical formulas I use for developing along with other factors such as temperature and time along with over and under exposure.
Color film follows a strict protocol of uniform chemicals, a strict 100 degree temperature and specific times for each chemical bath. You aren’t really capable of manipulating contrast, hue, saturation, or luminosity in the way you can alter the tone mapping of a black and white negative. You had to choose a film stock to photograph based upon it’s unique rendition of colors. Fuji NHG 400 produced pastel colors and Velvia produced super saturated cartoon colors. Kodachrome was the benchmark that all other films were compared to.
B&W film photographers can really vary the look of images to a much higher degree and digital photographs only come close enough to approximate the look of film. In my opinion digital color photography surpasses film in every way. The good news is that I can use the knowledge of different film stock color palettes to emulate in my digital photographs. This is what we call COLOR GRADING.
Yesterday I gave a demo on color grading digital photographs using Adobe Photoshop and the gradient map adjustment layer. I chose a fairly monochromatic image I made of actor Ernie Vestito in my studio a coupe of years ago and applied a cinematic analog film like effect using this technique. In my class I discussed the difference between a high fidelty image that faithfully reproduces the colors as the human eye sees it to an image that communicates emotion through color interpretation of the image. We often seek to achieve a cinematic look to color photographs. What this really means is that we are heightening the color contrast by using a complimentary color harmony of warm and cool tones.
The classic color harmony in cinematic photographs is either an orange/blue color cast or a Cyan/Red color cast. I illustrated this by using a gradient mapping adjustment layer where I could select the two colors I wanted to use and then apply them based upon the luminosity levels in the original photograph. What really got me excited is how I could then apply a Hue-Saturation adjustment to the gradient map to make even more subtle color shifts to the original image. I added some grain effects to further create depth and dimension of the image.
Here is the original image of Ernie wearing a monochromatic shirt and tie combo against a gray background and an image that adds some orange and green hues like a faded color negative. I think the color graded image adds complexity to the original image that elevates it above a simple reproduction.
Colors do not convey spatial depth but they do convey emotions. Just looking at a color can trigger an emotional reaction regardless of the subject matter.
Here is an image of tulips I made yesterday. I applied a color grading to the image that really pulled out the purity of the yellows and greens.
The use of color grading is exciting for me because it gives me another tool to elicit emotional responses from a viewer that go beyond the like or dislike of the subject matter. I also like how this can apply to still photography and filmmaking. What do you think?
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