I know this is supposed to be a tutorial on how to make your photos look like something out of a cheap, plastic excuse of a camera. But spare me for a moment, and let me talk about something very much related to this topic.
The oil spill. You know, the one that happened at our coast in the south? And the one that's raging the politicians over in the big U.S. of A. I tell you, it's a goddamn conspiracy for two major oil spills to occur within the same time. Gil Grissom from CSI would tell you that there is no such thing as a coincidence, and I'm inclined to believe him in this case.
And of course, there is the whole mess of the cleanup. Oxymoron aside, it's a well known fact that the operation at the Gulf of Mexico has seen failure after failure, and the oil still remains there today. On the other hand, we cleaned up our East Coast oil spill successfully in just a week. This right here is complete proof of our superiority. Hoo-ah.
Of course, the skeptics to my claim will say that the extents of the disasters in both places are vastly different with the one in America being a hundred times worse than ours.
To appease my critics, let me bring up a totally related statistic such as our population size. We're almost one hundred times smaller. Which means we have one hundred times less manpower. But, we still cleaned it up well, and fast. My math can't be wrong.
And then, there's the environmental impact. Usually, I'm not one to be squeamish in horror movies where characters get impaled on spikes, and blood and bone splatters as if the person is a can of paint in a microwave oven. When I watch the Fear Factor, I'm usually laughing when the participant eats some animal's reproductive body part.
But when I see the photos of the damage of the oil spill disaster, I feel sad.
You know what I'm talking about. It's the classic oil spill photograph in which an egret is covered in crude oil and cannot fly. Or the picture of a once golden beach now stained black, with dead fish all over the place. I'm not joking. It's disheartening to watch.
And now you ask: what has this got to do with lo-fi photography? Bear with me, I'm getting there.
Photography is a bit like a photo of an aquatic bird covered in oily muck. Imagine looking at a simple picture of a duck floating about and…doing whatever a duck normally does. It's a common, everyday shot, you know, the kind you see beginner photographers snap away as if it'll end up being some Sotheby's masterpiece.
And now, picture that image of the same duck being covered in tar and crude oil. It's still visibly alive, but deep inside, you know it's doomed. The water around it is sickened with the oil slick, and the entire image screams of humanity's evils, and death.
"Photography is a bit like a photo of an aquatic bird covered in oily muck."
This, then, is the point I'm trying to make. An ordinary picture of a duck might be all good and nice, but it takes a thick film of oil to evoke emotional appeal in your audiences. Of course, I'm not saying you should carry around a jerry can of diesel along with your camera and pour it on your subjects every time you take a photo.
Instead, what I have elegantly shown in your past five minutes of reading this article, is that today's tutorial on selective toning is to teach you a way to add that thick film of crude oil on your photos without destroying what's left of our environment.
What Toning Is
In basic terms, toning is what the Wachowski brothers did to the Matrix films, by making it all greenish without making it completely monotone. It's the same in post-processing your digital images. You tone your pictures in order to impart it an ethereal, highly saturated quality reminiscent of cross-processed film. Here's what I mean:
Courtesy Warner Bros.
The Original Form of Toning
Ignore this section if you have never done any traditional darkroom work before, but read on if you are interested.
In the old film days, photographers do selective toning as well. The use of sepia would tone the entire image a soft, low-contrast brown. The use of selenium would tone everything with a slightly magenta shade. Other toning chemicals, such as those with copper (red) or iron (blue), or even uranium (yellow), were used by photographers as well.
Split toning, another form of selective toning, is what happens when we use two or more of these toning chemicals to tone a single print. For example, when the print is immersed in selenium, the property of selenium causes shadow areas in the print to tone first before the rest of the image.
The print is removed before the highlights are affected, and then subjected to another toning process, such as sepia, to tone the rest of the highlights. This selenium-sepia split-toning technique gives the image a unique look. The shadows will take on a slightly magenta-ish quality, whereas the highlights will look yellowish. Couple this with a photographic paper that is cooler in nature, and there'll be a nice mix of warm and cool tones in the final print.
An example of selenium-sepia split-toning:
Photo by Ng J. S.
Toning Digitally
Mastering the techniques of digital toning would give you the foundations for further editing, converting your original pictures into one imitating the effects of film, or even surpassing what traditional film medium cannot do.
We call this the digital darkroom. It's another version of the old darkroom, but with bits and bytes instead of chemical developers and fixers. Adobe Photoshop is the standard manifestation of the digital darkroom. You'll need Photoshop in order to proceed with the rest of the tutorial, but any other similar software will do as well.
The process of image editing is a long and tedious one to explain. There are multitudes of ways to get the final effect that you want, and it is not possible for me to explain everything here. Hence, I shall provide only a simple guide; for more variations, consult myself or toy around with the settings.
Note that the colour properties of pictures from LOMOs or Holgas are not the doing of the cameras, but from the work done on the film and print in the traditional wet darkroom by the lab technicians.
So, I shall start off with a picture that is already decently edited, but not yet selectively toned to resemble that of film. Let's begin with this image that has been edited already.
Photo by Ng J. S.
Here's where it starts getting a little bit complicated. To tone your image, you need a combination of various tools, all found in the Layers palette. These are known as Adjustment layers, and can be used to do many things, among them, to edit the colour properties of your picture.
Channel Mixer
The first of these is the Channel Mixer tool. Play around a little with the sliders and the drop-down menu, and see what it does. All of your pictures consist of 3 channels, red, blue and green, which make up the primary colours that form the image you see. The channel mixer tool allows you to increase or decrease the level of intensity of each channel, allowing you to modify the overall colour cast.
To emulate a cross-processed look (usually yields a dramatic cyan-yellow result that also lacks magenta casts), I used these settings.
Red Channel: R/129%, G/9%, B/-3%, Constant/-15%
Green Channel: R/0%, G/135%, B/51%, Constant/-17%
Blue Channel: R/-18%, G/35%, B/123%, Constant/-13%
To emulate an aged-film look (slightly desaturated and low contrast, purples in the shadows, yellows in the highlights), these are the settings.
Red Channel: R/100%, G/0%, B/0%, Constant/5%
Green Channel: R/16%, G/58%, B/41%, Constant/4%
Blue Channel: R/9%, G/10%, B/51%, Constant/14%
There can be many different variations to give you a spectrum of results, from wild colours to muted, neutral tones. The Channel Mixer adjustment layer requires a little bit of practice to wield effectively, but once mastered, you can have full control over the colours of your image.
Selective Colour
The Channel Mixer tool is not the only utility in the adjustment layers menu that allows you to edit colours. Select the Selective Colour tool in the same menu.
You will see that this is similar to the Channel Mixer tool, but instead of directly manipulating the output of the 3 channels, the Selective Colour tool directly alters the overall colour in the image without dealing with channels. Experienced users of Adobe Photoshop will realize that this concept is almost the same as how the Hue/Saturation tool works, but with more control.
However, while the Selective Colour tool may be preferred by many, it does have a danger of posterization, an effect caused by the limited number of colours a digital image can hold coupled with the heavy editing by the user.
Here are some samples:
Next Lesson
Stick around on this blog to see the next tutorial lesson on Vignettes, Curves and Contrast. I will be overseas, so, wait patiently. :)
