Experiments in Photography

I have been experimenting with creating a film look with some of my photography, this is what I have come up with.

I am always experimenting with photography, I think it’s in my nature. Lately I have been trying to find a way to make some of my photography look more like a still from a film. I am usually drawn to very saturated colors and super sharp focus. I threw all that out the window and tried something new. This is what came of my experiments.

Before:

After:

So the basic idea was to create an image that looks like a still from a film. I am planning to write a tutorial about this in the future but for now I am just going to give you an idea of how these images were created. All of my favorite films have a less saturated look to them. They tend to be darker with higher contrast than I usually shoot. These films also seem to have a very short depth of field as well. These were the most difficult aspects for me to successfully mimic. I started with the color saturation. In Photoshop I turned down the color saturation quite a bit. This left the image looking less than perfect for sure, but that is not what I was going for. To compensate for the lack of saturation I got into the exposure palate and bumped up the exposure and turned down the offset and the gamma. The idea was to create more contrast in the highlights and blacks. The result was pretty nice, I have always liked images with a whole lot of contrast.

The next part to tackle was the depth of field. I tend to shoot my photography with a closed down aperture to get the entire image in focus. Films tend to have a fairly short depth of field to keep the attention of the viewer from wandering away from the subject. I started by creating a new layer then copying the image into it. I then had two layers that were exactly the same. On the new layer I added a lense blur filter. I had to play with it a bunch to get it right. I then added a mask layer to the layer with the blur and erased only the parts of the image I wanted in focus. I tried to keep it very tight, this makes the image look really nice. It really makes you focus your eye on the part of the image that is in focus.

Before:

After:

After I got the depth of field to a point where I was happy (it took forever) I turned my attention to the overall color. The films I like tend to have a color cast over them. I think that it adds feeling to the shots. I pushed my photographs toward the blue end of the spectrum. I did this by adding a color adjustment layer to the image. By using adjustment layers I can have more control over the entire image. I also added a noise filter to the entire image to give it a more grainy look. The last step was to add the letter box. This was easy, I made an 16×9 image in Illustrator and imported it to the Photoshop image. Then I highlighted it and selected the reverse. I realize that if you have no Photoshop experience this makes no sense to you at all. I would be surprised if you read all the way through this article in the first place. If you did… this is all I have for now. I hope to have a tutorial up in the near future.