Photoshop: Film Look Color Grading

1. Course Introduction: Hi everyone. In this course we will explore the creation of film looks with Photoshop for your digital raw images, I'll give you detailed information about how to prepare your images in order to make colors stick like on a Canvas and show you common mistakes we usually tend to do, which inhibit us from achieving quality results. We'll do this by employing fresh and uncommon ways, by fully acknowledging the actual analog process and implement the same ideas and effects which are often overlooked and digital workflows. After this, you'll have more control and understanding of different ways to achieve a film type, dynamic range contrast colors, ultimately, a more emotional firm look. So feel free to tune in to those lessons in which we will color grade landscape and portrait images. 2. Color Grading Landscape: Intro: Hi everyone, Thanks for tuning in. Today we want to have a look into how we can make this image look like it was shot on film. So in the main things we're going to be concerned about is dynamic range and the colors. Colors specifically within the highlights, shadows, and the mid-tones. Most importantly, though, what give a film and analog look is the colors within the highlights and the shadows. What we also need to target is the dynamic range. And I'm talking dynamic range, not from the perspective as it has been done for over more than the last decade, Let's say since digital photography took over, that I'm talking dynamic range in the sense of where do we have detail in the image? So how many stops of detail that we have in the highlights and the shadows. That's really what gives the image the headroom. In order to proceed, in order to give the whole image actually a look of an analog film image. So you'll see that these days actually digital cameras, especially if we're talking for format, that they're getting much better when it comes to dynamic range. So you'll have more detail and highlights more detail in the darkest shadows if you're looking at two cameras a few years old and especially those that are not full format, you'll have a more limited dynamic range. With film cameras, you'll see 14, 15 stops of dynamic range, which is a lot. And you'll see that in those images you see a different type of contrast. So the fact that we don't have as much dynamic range in a raw image of, Let's say, most digital cameras is nothing we can't do anything about. So this is really where we can work with the raw image in order to get that dynamic range back. And mega image look as if it was shot on film. So these are the main things we're going to target in this picture. And we're going to start out by working this roar in the Camera, Raw editor and Photoshop where we want to make most of the edit. After that, we're going to jump into Photoshop and just do some slight corrections, but we're going to not go into masking things out and so on. As the serosa editor is already really powerful and it will give us the opportunity to target, highlights, shadows, and mid tones. And as we have a curve and all of these tools, we don't really need that. And I want to keep this simple for you. 3. Color Grading Landscape: Editing the RAW: So let's start out by exploring this basic tool. So the main thing I want to do in here, we can see that this is a bit too cold for what it could be. So you can see the highlights here. They're slightly cold this hole. And especially if you compare this to the area where we have direct sun, the shadow is code. And that makes sense that you see most often if you compare zeros, two scenes where there's lots of sun. But we want to have this warmer. And that's one of the key things with achieving a film look. You need to remember. You need to know that film is always set to one white balance. And that's one of the reasons why firm looks the way it looks, because it will often be just a little bit off. Shadows will tend to look blue or too warm. Same is true for highlights. So we don't want to look for neutral image by taking the pipette and using a gray card or anything like that. We want to build confidence in order to be slightly off in order to achieve that film look. So let's start out by working with the cut-out temperature. This should be first thing you do just to set the base. So as I just mentioned, I want to warm this up to start out with, I don't want the shadows to be to code as this image really lends itself to a more warm look. And this is a base where we can start out. And the next thing we list the tent. So this is where we want to decide if we want to be slightly green or slightly magenta. And that depends on your image. I think that images with the city or nature images, they often look quite nice when you are just slightly green. And again, we're not trying to be neutral here. We're not find, trying to find the sweet spot of where it's not too much of either. We want to be slightly too much in one direction. That's how we can achieve that. Look. So right now, we're also concerned about how this will affect this area. I'm not only looking at greens per se, but I'm looking at the whole image. So we're looking at those midtones here and the highlights, where does it get? Maybe even two. Of course, you can make too much, but this is, for instance, this would be just too much. That's not what we want, although we can achieve a nice results with that as well. But for now, we're going to dial this fact the back. And I think this is a point. Good point to continue. So let's just hit P on the keyboard to see where we came from. This is already a big difference right now you can clearly see how blue this actually was. And that's not really necessary for sunny day like this. So I think I want to doubt this just slightly back again. So you can see how important this to actually hit the play button to look where we actually come from. It refreshes our eyes. So in terms of exposure, we're not too far off by clicking in here and using the arrow keys on your keyboard. You can tell this in. And I think I'll leave it at that in terms of contrast. So this is one thing I really want to keep low, if not even into minus, because we talked about achieving the dynamic range. And this way, if we do this, especially in the raw editor now, we have more range to work with later on. So this is really counter-intuitive. I know for lots of people, because lots of people will tend to increase the contrast to make the images look nicer. But we need to remember that if you shooting on film, you don't have extremely contrast to images you have that if you should earn positive film, which also has a much smaller dynamic range, around half of the extra dynamic range from negative film. But most people don't shoot that style and you have much more saturation on positive film and so on. We're talking about negative. And this is what we're trying to achieve. So I want to give us more headroom right now. So this is why I'm taking it out in the raw. I don't wanna do this after as soon as we're editing with a JPEG itself. So we do this now and then later on, we can start to limit the shadows to to really have control when we add contrast, we don't just want to use this contrast knob in order to create the contrast that we just give control away by doing that. Because we'll be able to target the highlights without affecting the shadows. So let's see if we can now maybe slightly just darken the shadows in this area. And this is enough. We don't need more than that. We're not slightly dialing in a little bit of contrast whites. But I want to do here is to flatten the whites so to be not dead white. And this is why I recommend you to work on a white backdrop, because that will be the only way for you to see how wide your actual whites are. So you can do this by right-clicking and by default it will be this sort of gray. And that's not a good way to judge your whites nor your shadows 3D. So that's the best way I recommend you is to have this on white so we can see how to really take care of the whites. And let's see if we want to do more with those plaques. And I think I want to do this because this is something I'd much more preferred to end the curve itself. So we keep this at 0. What we really want to ignore here is the clarity and texture. This won't help us achieve an analog image. This is nothing you'll find when all photography was shot on film. This is something which became a bit popular with digital photography and this is nothing we want to do here. This is this sort of micro contrast. We don't need that. An analog image is much more flat. We don't want a super flat image, but we want a nice contrast. We don't want this micro contrast on in between those areas. We want the most sensible representation of the scene, so we ignore that. And with the vibrance and saturation, the, we don't need to do too much in here. This is, this is fine. I don't want to decrease the saturation because there will be a few tools and the end of this, well, we will do that in some way, other ways. So let's go on to the curve. So in order to do that, we'll click in here as here. We can't really limit our highlights. We can just create, say, a typical S-curve. We can reset that. And I click in here and see how much of this can be reduced. And in the raw editor, it's not necessary to do this to two strongly. You find that with capture one, for instance, you'll have better results by limiting the highlights in the curve itself. But we still want to just slightly maybe turn this down, although we're already at a good stage at here, we don't need too much over here, and we already didn't even bother about it in here. Although this is a bit more targeted in Photoshop, this will not affect your mid-tones, let's say like this one as much. But for this, we have actually a great range so far. So let's see what the shadows are going to do. So as we already increased, the SSP already pushed our shadows by going into a minus contrast. We can maybe he actually start by introducing slight contrast by just limiting the dark, the deepest black. So limit this right here. And you can already see on the graph there's almost no information, so this won't affect too much of your image. You can see that in those trees. And that's great. So let's see what we can do now by using an S curve. And what we maybe one or two is actually invert our S curve. So we don't necessarily want to push highlights, limit our shadows, create this sort of contrast, the COC everywhere. That's a great way to make yourself look like everyone else. But this is not what we wanna do. We want to have that sort of firm luck. So let's invert this in order to create more dynamic range. And then limit here again. And see where this really gives an image that look that we are looking for. So we can press this one here to see what this did. And you can see this already gives us much more detail in those areas, which is great. If you look in here. So these highlights a clipping pretty much. And like this, as we have a good rock to work with, we have enough range to get back our detail. And this right now, I know we can, we will add more contrast in this, but this will give us the first things we will need in order to achieve the film. Look also here you can see this is much nicer in this area. So this is a great way to start out with. At this point, I would be concerned about color. So let's start out with the color grading tool right here. And if we click in here, we started with the shadows. That's where I'd like to do. So we've already introduced some greens in this image and the basic tool. And we'll see if this imagery lends itself really to actually being greenish. And thus in those shadows, or maybe we can even warm then up, warm them up. This really depends on the image you're working on and your general style as well, what you want to achieve. I really recommend you to try to try each, to try an image where you are really green and those shadows where you're warm, where you're more magenta and more blue and see where is the sweet spot for you. And this also always has to compare against your highlights. So for this image, let's see. I'd like to be a bit warm in here. So for this image at lag to be just slightly green and on the verge to almost being yellow here. See how it looked before. Okay, We're already creating something more interesting. And let's see if it there for now. I like to do the mid-tones last because the main thing really giving us the look will be in the shadows and the highlights. And in the end, we will just fill in the mid-tones to match the main concept we will create by coloring our shadows and highlights. So let's see the shadows. We can already see that the sky is quite bluish. So maybe we can emphasize that this is clearly too strong. But here we starting to get a nice look and you will see how it works, how it comes in handy that we actually have this dynamic range. Because since we were in the beginning concerned about creating the dynamic range and creating detail in the highlights, we now have a canvas to play with, Canvas to actually color. And this is where we will achieve that look we're looking for. So you can see how greatest actually looked before. And now we're starting to stylize the image and let's see how it looks. Even now. You can tell now by getting rid of the curve, for instance, or even the basic we've done. We were concerned about the highlight about the dynamic range in both of these sections. You can see that even now that we have color. It doesn't give us that feeling that this is like almost not painted but printed. So, and you need to know that the whole process of film is really ends in the dark room and it ends with a print. And while printing, you will work on your cutters. So this is what we trying to do here. So you can see really how this helps us to set, to give, to give our colors the right environment to work in properly. So I like this bluish thing in the sky. And it really pulls us away from just being gray. And it's just not interesting being gray if you think about if you have to be gray because you shoot a product for an online store. Yes, of course you want to be neutral, but if you just want to create more emotion or feeling in your images, you want to be off. You don't want to be neutral. So, and now I told you, right, we started out by giving this really warm, really warm hue in the beginning and we will get this back now in the smith Jones. So let's see, in those midtones, we can make this area of Walmart as we're now here. We're nice and green right now. We'll see later, we can give this a bit more color, more interest in here. But as we are now, blue, greenish here, we can still work around all of these areas. So let's see the metal ions if they like this idea of being warmer. And now you can see this image comes together, this ties it all. And that's why I recommend you to start with shadows and highlights and then just tie it all together with the mid tones. And this is really a taste thing. You can now really work on your contrast within colors. So we have a greenish hue in the shadows. You could be slightly magenta in here. And you could create a look of a, of a weird film. Pretty much. But if you're looking for like more, more regular film called a portrait, and you'd be probably bit more warm in here. And let's see, can really tell we're covering farmers super gray Boeing image. And we're starting to give this much more feeling and interesting colors. So let's see, Definitely not want to be green because green is already taken care of, are satisfied. The blues are not interesting either because we have those in the highlights. So we're taking a color from everywhere a little bit and add this on our Canvas and Canvas. Right now, it's perfectly set up for us to do that as we have limited, our highlights and shadows and our mid-tones have good as well. So our dynamic ranges the, to do that, right? So let's see, I think this is great to start. Continue. Now we can see what the Now you can see if we blend this in a little bit, this image will benefit from doing that. And I actually think this would look good. And then the balance you can see, again, you can achieve this slightly weird film no cried, where you have sort of too much magenta in some sort of areas and like a weird cy and clipping highlight. This you can do as well, but I want to give you like a more fine art look. But with this base, you can achieve it already. The importance really comes from knowing that you need to achieve dynamic range in order to color your image is nicely because now let's go a little bit back. I'll show you this again to really highlight and stress the importance of creating dynamic range. First, even though, even if it looks weird in the beginning and just wrong because this is not what what we're normally being taught. If we're looking to greater image, we're usually taught to increase contrast, right? But we're not doing that because just by getting rid of these adjustments and look here, this looks horrible. This is just clipping in those highlights and it just looks like, yeah, just have a really warm image. Although we've done so much to the colors, right? We have a blue, we have blue highlights, we have green shadows, we have warm mittens. Suddenly everything just looks a bit cheap, and this way it looks much more expensive. So hope I stress this enough for you guys to be a little bit off. All right, let's hit P actually and see where we came from and P, and you can see really starting to tie this all together nicely right now, right? So maybe I just want to be slightly less warm and thus mid-tones. It's good to do this in between just to refresh ourselves again. And now in my, for my taste are a bit too saturated right now. And there's this great too in the calibration here where we can shift things around a little bit and let's see really what the 10th does. This tent is just focused on the shadows, but we probably don't need that too much if, if we think we want to counter balance again, are greens a little bit, we could do that right now. But I think don't need this too much right now. We just keep it here and let's see just a little bit. And these edits, so marginal right now that on your monitor might not be necessary. I'm working here and a calibrated ISO screen. So this is really what gives me the basis in order to make these minor changes. So let's see, oops. So let's see what the primary red does. And you can see by going into negative values, we start desaturating within those reds. We're not looking to desaturate the image just because we now think, Oh my God. We have now too much saturation that's desaturated. Oh, no, it's much more sensible and what I want to tell you guys, but my messages about the sole thing also when I'm talking about the contrast knob, not to just push it and to introduce contrast by going into the curve and be concerned about those extreme areas is to give you more control. I want to give you more control. I'm not going to tell you to just D saturate your whole image, to just introduce contrast on your whole image, we want to work on every specific area. And there is this, there's the saying about photography that it's painting with light, right? And if there was no light, there was nothing to paint, right? So we want to be, we want to be aware of the fact that the light will also create shadows and it will create those mid-tones in-between. And why should we just try to punch it all together with one knob? No, no, no. We're going to be more controlled about the images to really master our craft and to make our images look nicer by doing that. So here I want to just slightly desaturate this by using a negative value. Don't really want to look into using this one, but just within the hue will give us this appearance of a slight desaturation. So let's see where we came from. It's just very, very marginal. So let's see the screens. And you can see this is again a way to make your image look back a little bit of an hold firm that say it's like 10 years sitting somewhere, was just one of those width firms with a bit funky colors. Then you could do things like that. Again. Where your midtones are just slightly magenta and your highlights. So of fighting with cyan and magenta. And it just starts to look a bit funky, right? But I don't want this for this example, but you're always free to do that, of course. But I think it's quite nice. A free gift is just a little bit of that feeling. And those blues now we have to be careful because these will do a lot to hold the match actually. And this would be a nice look. I think. Cause we coming from blue here, we getting red here now. And this gives us a nice color contrast. Pretty much. The same is true for this one. As for the green, I don't want to be too strong in here because we already, we already did the most part in the color grading to right. So see what we did actually. Now you can see everything is now been blended together sort of, right? So, so we're coming from creating a dynamic range in order to give a color palette, the canvas which we can paint really. So this is really the point where this is pretty much finished. And that's the point where we can say, okay, maybe we just want to add a little bit of grain. And to be honest, on most film stocks like food allergies and cut apart trend, so on. The color firm is not too grainy, They're really low grain, but if you want and you think your image will look nicer by adding some grain, feel free to do that. I recommend you to zoom into your picture and to see where it gets too much. And we can judge that really well by those highlights. And then zoom out and see if it's extreme still, maybe dial this a little bit back. I don't want to be too grainy S like I said, we are looking for a firm look at. You would much rather see that I'm black and white film, which has a high ISO, Let's say above, like with 400, you see it on, you start seeing it. And then you go higher than that and can get quite extreme with especially black and white. So in this one, I don't want this too much, but yeah. Let's open this and finish our image with just some slight adjustments to tie everything together. 4. Color Grading Landscape: Finishing Touches: So what I wanna do here is using the curve. No, we don't want that. And especially where I want to work on is the colors. So let's go into the blue, and the blue will also affect yellows. So let's see what we can do. Again, start out in those extremes. And this is not what I want. And this would be a way, again, to neutralize the effect. We're a little bit warm or quite warm. Let's say if we consider that were coming from a very neutral generic digital image. So this will maybe help us again to sort of D saturate the whole idea again a little bit, right? Without using saturation not but we're just counterbalancing again. And when it doing that with the whole image, we're doing that where the image has too much blue, sort of. So let's see how it looked before. And this gives us just a little bit slightly more neutralized look. And those highlights there already quite blue. So maybe by adding yellow, we can get a nice mix of blue and yellow and not be green, but sort of talk wise. And this is an, actually an interesting look I really like. And it might like to, by mixing blue highlights with yellow highlights. You will achieve that and it can adequately interesting. You don't see that too often. See. So that's quite interesting I think. And probably don't want to use this. This is really extreme now. But maybe just a slight bit continued to start and see what's here. We just a little bit as 21 to keep this shadows fairly warm. But maybe I want to limit these, this warmth a little bit. So if we use this hand and go in here, you see that something gets marked in here and this will give us the exact range we need to target. So by clicking and pulling this up, you'll be able to limit this a little bit. And this again ties in really nice with the change we've done in those highlights. So very slight change. But it puts us into this world of like almost torque was feeling. So let's proceed and go into the reds and see what we can do about our sorrows. I think the chef now the highlights and midtones to for me, they look really nice at this point. And we can now see if our shadows need something to fit into this world we've created. And here you can see now before. Shadows were maybe a bit too overly stylized or they start to not fit into what we have done. So by limiting this here just slightly, you see, we get the redness out because we have probably just introduced a bit too much warmth. And here we can just slightly Dao the spec. And of course on your images this will be always a bit different. But I want to stress here to work on your extremes, right? So always check how your shadows are, how your highlights are within those color spaces. This is fine. So by putting this again, now, we get like ridiculously Cyan, right? And we have really taken care of being sensible about what we create here. So this doesn't need it really, and it's really just the shadows at this point where we can alter things slightly is probably won't need any of the green because we have been concerned about the greens from really early on and think those screens are sitting right where they have to in those highlights. We could see this is again giving us this width magenta. And for this purpose we don't want that, as I'm really enjoying actually. Does the sort of cyan look. Maybe we're just sorry, the sort of turquoise look. I think it's just a little bit too much yellow comparing. So maybe we tell the slightly back. And that's pretty much it. So let's make this smaller and see, recommend this. I recommend you to do this just to see everything on a different scale. Like drawing an image and standing on the chair and really looking at it from a different, from a different distance. It will really help you to see things better. Even stand up if you need to stand up and look at your image from further away, look at it really closely and see what are you Carlos doing? How is your dynamic range? Do you need to add anything? I need to take something out. Always help you look at it on your phone, located on a different screen and sort of find the, find the point where you're really happy with your image. So at this point, maybe we can start introducing more highlights again, as we're now very muted here, although it looks great because this will be a sort of a look you will achieve when you print actually, your highlights will be darker than the white paper. Unless you're extremely overexposed, then it will just be pretty much nothing but talking about film photography. And we don't want to neglect the fact that film photography and by printing your image and the dark room on paper. So let's see, let's create another curve. And just see if we want to add maybe just a little bit on the highlights there. As we now have enough range. And thus highlights to be maybe again, we were like almost like classical S-shape for contrast, right? But for me, this, if you like it, just go ahead with it, but this is not what you see and from photography, so maybe one a dao the SPD back. But to be honest, the share these shadows, they're fine. We don't need to do this 3D. We might be well off by just targeting our highlights a little bit. So you can see that this creates a big curve. So style the speck in the mid-tones. So we mostly affecting this area and see what it does just a little bit. And I think we're great in that sense. So maybe what you could do now is if you see some areas clipping, although this is not too bad if I zoom in. But you could start by masking this out, write it be for your brush too. And these are now, now fine adjustments and they really depends. It really depends on your image. So tau, this opacity slightly back. And you can use the X key on your keyboard to change between black and white. And you could also place a D button if you have other colors than black and white right now. So d and x will give you an immediate way to work with a mask. So you can see in the dialing, this clipping areas just slightly back as it was fine right here, but here we have a more extreme highlight. Condyle the slightly back. And think here it's fine honestly because we don't want to be muted everywhere. It's fine for these areas, but as here, we're really actually in a midtone area. It's nicer to give this more detail. Let's zoom out and see what we've done. So let's have a look where we actually came from. And just have a screenshot here. And that's a big difference, right? We're coming from this really gray, boring image. We're super college right now. So let's actually maybe just dial the slightly back again and go into our highlights as this is really the main area where we're introducing color in order to get that look. But maybe we just went a bit too far and that can happen. That's why it's always good to sit back. Just take a few minutes, look somewhere else and then really judge image again. So we want to have a look at those blues. And maybe what we could even do is now just slightly D saturate these areas, right? So do that with the hue saturation tool we can use to prepare to click in here and then just slightly D saturate that. Only 3D with our sky. That's good way to dial things back when you just went a bit too far and you are realizing the peptide. That's no problem at all. But this above those edits. And now it's actually better to get this below. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I hope you've enjoyed this, and I hope I haven't repeated myself to alpha in F, so please bear with me because I know that for lots of people, it is very counter-intuitive to do those things we started out with. And, and order to achieve this look, we have to be counter-intuitive. Unfortunately, not everything can work out as we used to, especially when we're coming from the digital world. And lots of people probably haven't IM shot on film or have been in the dark room. And now are seeing those images and they're like, Whoa, why my image is not looking that way? And it's most likely because you're working too intuitive. You're working in those ways which you can find all around the Internet. And you already gave up lots of control by just using the contrast, the contrast knob instead of targeting specifically and those things. So that's really why I needed to stress this. And I hope that this helps you and will make your images look even nicer. 5. Color Grading: Portrait: All right guys, welcome to the next one. This time we're going to color grade a portrait image. And that will give us the opportunity to have a different perspective on the topic of how to make your image look more like an image that was shot on film. Now let's jump right into this. So as we underexposed here, the first thing I want to do is to push the image and that's just going to use the arrow keys to do that. Something like a stop underexposed here. And that's no problem. We can already see now as we're pushing, There's that we are quite cold. Source would be reflected by this value right here, right? This is quite a daylight, the value, and yet it's quite cold actually on her skin. Let's see how this looks as we want this up gradually. And we're already entering a much nicer interesting world by doing that. And you see I'm an edit extreme value. By now, we're at 24 thousand. This is nothing anybody would even talk about when learning about Kelvin, right? You usually learn your COVID ranges between 3200 and drag around, okay, for daylight. And 25000 is a lot, right? But don't let yourself limited by values which just look crazy. Just do what looks right to you. It looks good and this looks good if you would be printing this in the dark room and you would do your test strips to see where you want to land with your, with your warmth and that case, then you wouldn't you wouldn't have a value telling you twenty one hundred, ten hundred K, watch out. It's just you, you're really trying to feel which way you want to go. I doing lots of tests. And also what you'll see in the darkroom is lots of people, quite modern. They were pre flash the paper. That means before they even printing the image, they will have a warm pre flesh on the paper so they act the actual image being printed is being printed on a slightly warm backdrop instead of white. So this for us is sort of a way to emulate that if we do that, I could go warm here in, if we're sensible about our highlights. In this case, we don't have any problems with highlights. But if you want to emulate that sort of pre flash look, you will see with quite a few photographers these days. Then you need to be concerned about the relationship in your color, temperature, and your actual highlights, because your highlights need to be toned down. For that case, you can't have overly contrast the bright highlights because they won't pick up your color, right? We have talked about it also in the previous lesson. So that's important to know. Ok, and now let's see if we want to be magenta or green in here. And I feel like in order to now create contrast with our colors, I always feel like that. Real contrasts nicely with warm or even cold colors, although magenta and green is very close, very close proximity to blue and yellow on the color wheel itself. It's not like further or closer way any of these. But it always gives me at least the feeling that, I mean, if we give magenta in here, even at a strong value, it's like doesn't give us that much of a contrast compared to warm image right now, right? So we don't want to only create contrast with with the shadows and highlights, but of course also with the colors. And that's one of the key things you see. Images which are being shot on film, that you have these color worlds which are not just flat and boring, right? Do you have opposing colors clashing and they all fall in place nicely. Usually, if the process is done well. And this is what we are aiming here for. Obviously, they're trying to be sensible about screening. We want to get in here and this is a good value, I think, to start and continue. And with the contrast in this case. And the last one we have talked about negative contrast value in here. I can already tell you that if even we don't need that, that much. Because you can see this image doesn't give us a hard time when it comes to, let's say, an overblown sky or any bright highlights for that matter. So we can be quite chill about the contrast for this image. And maybe even about this highlights you see, maybe we'll just pull it very slightly for us to give us just a bit more, just a bit better basis for colors to actually stick. And let's see, the shadows are quite black. But this doesn't concern me right now because as we have quite good mid-tones in this image, we will need a deep black in order to not be boringly flat, right? We, we always have to find the harmony in between. And contrast is not only in between, very bright highlights and very dark shadows. Contrast will also be some what you have in between midtones and your deepest blacks. So that's also an interesting way for you to create contrast and image which doesn't have bright highlights, doesn't mean that it will not be interesting. In terms of contrast, you can still achieve those contrasts. So this case, probably don't even need to push this too far because you will get something nicely. Also, if you look at this hairlike fading away, then if we, oops, if we pull this is actually, it actually gets quite interesting losing that information here, right and recreate contrast without, without this typical pushing and pulling. In this case, instead of using the shuttle NEP in our favor to create a contrast with bit more control. And we don't use this commonly how this is usually being used to push your sorrows, right? It's like an HDR tools to help you out when your shadows are just too dark. But in this case, the negative value is quite interesting for us as our mid-tones are perfectly detailed. And that's for us another way to create the contrast. So the salmon here, we're not going to use texture clarity as this is not helpful for us to create a look. The curve I will ignore for now and we will jump in. Okay, let's actually also talk about the details section in here. Because here we have something actually quite crucial. And even if it's a bit controversial, you need to consider that. I've been talking about this, that the, that the firm image, the actual process, it ends with a print, right? And you should imagine if you print an image and then you scan it, that by then you've lost quite a bit of sharpness. Your image, your images will never be as sharp as your as an actual digital image. So this is something that you can utilize as a detail for you to be even closer to the look of the film image itself. They will never be as sharp. Know, lots of successful photographers who only shoot on film. And they will do that for big magazines, for instance. And they don't sharpen the images at all. And for them, if they would even should something on film and scan it and afterwards shot mid, there would be like something which is absolutely forbidden for them and they will do the same. Then if they shoot a commercial job, which they would tend to shoot on digital while still giving their best to make it look as if it was shot on film. They will not chop the images because they're so used to a bit more softness in the images that they cannot imagine introducing the sharpness when the actual aim is to achieve a film look. So you can use that in to your advantage, this little piece of knowledge and insight. But you don't have to necessarily. So if you still feel like you want sharpening in your images and go ahead. This is not as crucial as anything else. What we're gonna do in here. But it is something I want to mention as well because it's part of how to achieve the whole look. And that's why I will take this out. Because I've seen this so often throughout my career that this is nothing you want to have if you are looking for the film, look. Alright, so next thing is going to be our color grading tool. And as always, I want to start out with the shadows and then go into the highlights and then fill in with the buttons. So let's see in here, one good thing you guys can do to sort of find your color is take this circle, put it somewhere not too far away from the center. And then. Like if you're really unsure, instead of dragging this around like this can be quite jerky. Sometimes. Just put it somewhere like here, and then take this outer circle and drag it around while you look at the image. And here see I like this sort of in-between of red and orange, but I might want to reserve this color for the highlights. Let's see. Maybe we want, maybe we can utilize some green those well, because we're already working with a green with the green contrasts, right? So does mean that we have to dismiss this orangey idea completely. But we can actually be maybe quite interesting. Yeah, I see. So if we just judge now, obviously this areas like in her face where it looks really nice to be warm. But as we're doing the shadows and the most, the most part of this affecting that is actually the background, right? And as we will later on, fill in the warmth, probably with the midtones and some highlights. It will, we will get this back, this nice feeling on her face. But right now, it's great to get the contrast in the background where we have the darkest areas, sort of almost the darkest areas. Of course. You can see in this as well. Always talking about the Sumatra, the absolute darkest areas in here. At these deep blacks. They won't take the green color. You can't see it, right? That's why I'm always talking about to achieve dynamic range before you apply colors, because that's the only way for you to make the colors stick on your images, right? Okay, so I think that green is a good idea to create more contrast in this image is now, now let's just see how much of the green. And I think it's quite interesting to be sort of close to blue. Because to be honest, even if we're, if I'm looking at the blue, if I look at the blue tones, is quite interesting. So we can think for me, the most interesting look is somewhere in between. Whoops, that's obviously way too much. Yeah, we can see now you could maybe even later mixing some yellow with a curve in the shadow and then get something like that. We could do that for instance, if we are bluish, then want to be able to acquire. So, so that's what I like to do, that's what we've done last time for the highlights for instance. So you can always later on mics, right? Butt. Let's stick with the green because it's actually quite nice and stop messing around with the shadows. So let's jump right into the highlights and get some warmth in her face. So you can see the highlights don't react very strongly as I've told you, we have mostly mid tones in this image. And this image. And the highlights are mainly sort of is some here, some here, some around here. So we're not doing too much at this point. Obviously this is too strong, so I'll do this again. And see I think this is good tone and then just going to increase actual orange. And here we're getting quite a healthy sort of skin tone. This is also nice for us to just have a different look on the grading side of things because we have to be concerned about skin tones as well. We can't just make her look like absolutely sick and wouldn't be nice, right? So leave it here for now. And let's actually jump right into the mid-tones because for this image, highlights are not that interesting, like they would be in most other images. And now maybe we can actually achieve, again, just some slight variation in terms of color. Just to achieve a bit more contrast. Again, picking the right colors. If we are just a bit of like not completely the same, like the highlights, but honestly could even be slightly greenish. It wouldn't be too bad because sort of blends in with the shadows. So, oops. But actually this orange idea is quite good for here. And we can also now see in here, what we can do. Maybe we can just slightly take something out, right? You can see this would be completely decent, Lucas. Well, you can take out against some warmness and you can do that here like really affecting the overall image. And see, see maybe at this point I actually want to take some out. So since we've been working with, uh, with one towns here, really targeted though, I can go back and actually check if this drastic warmness which we applied in the beginning is actually still valid, right? So it's always good to check back. Maybe you can do that, right? I mean, now we're coming from complete somewhere completely else. You can clearly tell what colors are clearly helping us right now. To achieve that, look, I'm taking my time going see I think you can tell and you should too, like don't rush this. Because especially if you are like for a few minutes working in this tool, you need to start refreshing your eyes sometimes because it just, well so press P and sunk, see where you're coming from now this is superglue as I'm going to pursue the next time. The orange will be straight up in my face and quite honest how orange it will actually be. So I have to judge again, if my oranges, if my orange is really good there. And we could clearly tell that this is too blue. Now we have to just think about, is it to Orange? It can be to orange. I mean, we're not looking for the neutral image here. This is not what this course is about. We are looking for a stylized firm like result. So and I think we're going to achieve that right around here in terms of midtones. Now, I'll think can maybe blend this alphabet at yes, and this makes it just a bit more nice and natural. You see, like increasing that would probably not be in my interests because then just get a sort of a weird skin tone, even though it's quite marginal. This depends always also on your monitor, of course, how warm it is or how cold. But I think we're getting a nice natural in-between feel right around here. Maybe as I'm looking at those shadows, maybe they're a bit extreme and the greens could take just a little bit out. Right? So luminance. And this is again something for you to shift. More contrast, right? Getting nice and contrast the retina. Really nice actually. Alright, we have this, these shadows here being green. We have this nice skin tones. See the luminance here. And here you could, I mean here pulling this down doesn't look good at all honestly. But we could maybe push this a little bit and see our highlights. Maybe there's not many iodines here. So believably, if this at 0, That's completely fine. And let's see on the balance. So it's like a green, warm, balanced, write it like this, gives us the balance in between those. This green and warm world we've created. So we can in the end, be really smooth with our decision. So this is quite nice. I think this looks really, this is much more interesting. Now. See, we're coming from here and ended up here sofa. And you've already seen we've been underexposed. I think there was probably not too much light anymore on the situation. Yeah. You can tell even in their reflection of her eyes, this most likely as sunset. So the person who shot this probably was running out of light. And that's why general, we have a quite underexposed base image. So what we wanna do though, is the reason why I'm mentioning this is that we can already see some grain here. And we can use this to our advantage. We can use now grain to get closer to that look again. And also because practically it makes sense, right? So in a situation like this, you might run into this situation where you have to push your film. Like let's say you have a ISO 100 color film with you. And you'll just realized this way, two way too slow of a shutter speed, you can shoot on ISO 100. We already can tell this is being shot and a big aperture. And still this person shooting, this was running into issues in terms of light. So maybe if you would've been in that situation with an actual analog camera. You could've done by then is pushing your film. So then you would just go to your lab and you will tell them to please post to the firm by two stops, and it would be just two stops brighter, right? So that would cause ultimately more grain on your image. So by now we're trying to look at the whole process of shooting on film. And shooting like achieving this look digitally is possible if you know what the whole process is on film. So and this is why I'm trying to give you all these small details throughout the process. This is also why I'm talking about the actual printing and the actual scenario when you're shooting on film because you might run into issues and you don't have a digital camera where you can just be like, Okay, I'll just shoot this at 1600 ISO and we'll be fine, no problems. Well, it's different on firm, right? If you just push your film by two stops, urine him to much more grain than with a new digital camera these days. If you push it into an ISO territory or for a 100 or so, so back in the day, it was getting quite grainy, but these days, even shooting at 1600 is not too bad. It depends obviously, but it's definitely not as grainy as film can get. Push it especially. So just adding a bit of grain will give us a bit more flat interesting Feedly feeling. And we'll emphasize the whole situation where someone could come from if they would be shooting this on film. Now, so look in those areas. Let's find even though it's strong, it's completely, ooh, it's completely fine. Look at all these highlights. Really nice. I think how our green blends in now with the midtones being worn, maybe there can be just a bit warmer, actually. Just a little bit. Let me zoom into her face and see. We overlook on it just a little bit. Now, let's, let's, let's brilliant line. Okay? And the last thing I want to do, this is our only use this to check really, to check if maybe shift one of the colors I have decided for. So in this case, you could take out a little bit of green hue on her face of the system. Red tone, right? Helps us a little bit. And let's see actually the shadows because we have been quite dramatic with them terms of green. Now you could counterbalance that just a little bit, right? Could see maybe a plus three is fine. And the actual green. And this, I don't like taking out here because it's actually quite nice how this blends into the skin tone. And it doesn't, if you take this out, you actually realize first that there is actually green as well in here, which is nice because it just gives you the field of green, green space. So leave this at 0. And this is fine too. This is just a minor two refers to shift things around if we feel like in the end. And yeah, this is pretty much the whole thing. And this time I want to go into the curve in the end and also just check up on those colors. Can also do that in the end. Sometimes I do it in the end after I open this in Photoshop because it sort of refreshes my eyes again and so on. You can obviously also do this in here before, depends on how you like to work. And maybe we can also, before we jump into those, Carlos, just push this area just a slight bit brighter, right? So should be right around here. Okay. And let's see. What about the share? Can we push them a bit? See you guys, this is what I've talked about a lot, right? As we push the shadows, green color, we'll stick to it, right? But in this case we don't need that because we're already here as it's not black, black, greenness sticking beautifully and this is completely fine. We don't need to make this appear to green in this case anymore. It's the classical S-shape is actually something which works quite nice in here. As we don't have any issues with highlights. This, you can see it here, right? There's no, not much highlights, especially nothing really bright. So maybe this is something for you to remember that you have an image like this with lots of midtone, no matter if there's even less of shadows, but as long as there's not too many highlights, you can actually utilize the typical S, S curve quite, quite well without losing the actual feeling for the film. Look. Because in this case it will look quite nice. And this is a matter of taste, right? How contrasts you want to have this also, it's a matter of which gamma your monitors set to 2.4. Gamma 2.2 depends, right? So gamma is how deep the black will be on your screen. So this depends. And I also urge you to download the file for this so you can actually see it on your monitor without having the filter of the actual color codec on the video itself. So you can actually have a true look on this will always be more helpful for you. And this is nice, right? So maybe we can push just a little bit around here. And this gives us a blue, beautiful contrast, say syllabi by now. And also bit different from the whole philosophy compared to the last image, right? Because this image gives us our a different base to work with, as we don't have these highlights we have to be concerned about. Don't need to pull them down in order to make, give us the opportunity to work with colors and so on. This is a real nice different image to explore different opportunities in order to achieve this look. So by now, I'm happy with this. And let's just open this up through a nice crop on here, and we're done with that. So the crop is also something we can utilize in our favor if we want to be closer to that firm look, because typical formats you will have in firm, obviously of the 35 neoformans which you will have as well on your typical digital camera. But as you go into medium format or large format, you will have six by seven. For instance, you were five-by-five for Hasselblad, six by seven is Mamiya format typically. And then you have four by five, which is the large format, big sheets of films. And not being used that much anymore because it's getting quite expensive. And oops, sometimes this crop tool just makes funky things in my Photoshop. Okay. So just crop in again and yeah, so that's why you can use maybe a four by five or even six by seven. Although six by seven sometimes it gets quite wide. And you might like it. And that's completely cool. But sometimes it's just a bit wide. So you have to consider if you're really happy with that or you have always the option to go four by five, that, which is a bit longer. This is quite nice. You can also use a five-by-five, right, for Hasselblad like image. Okay. And also just smarter, maybe you know it already, but keep this unchecked delete cropped pixels because that way you can go back into your crop and we adjusted if you want, if you have this checked, it will, it will actually delete everything you have cropped out of the image. So that's, there's no reason to keep this on really for us. We'll just kick that off. So let's make a decision. Stick to four by five, maybe. Make this a bit bigger. It's not quite centric, so I don't like that too much. They're actually see the relationship here. So that's really nice, right? So I hope this helped you guys to get a full understanding of what the process on firm will be and how we can actually translate that into our digital process of altering our colors. I hope you images will greatly benefit from that. And thank you for watching.