Vintage look on film?

Im curious about something. That something would be how to go about

getting that old time vintage feel captured on film. When you watch

an old time movie, everything tends to be more pastel and has a

different color scheme than today's world. I'm curious if there is

a type of film out there that tends to be ALOT more pastel like?

 

Ive seen photographs with that feel to it, and Im wondering how it

is done. Im sure some of them have a bunch of photoshop behind it,

but I want to do it traditionally.

 

How about cross processing? I've gotten effects somewhat in that

palette, but some areas tend to be blown out.

 

Any suggestions at all would be great. Thanks :)

 

Pamela

pamelareed.com

The History of Technicolor

 

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor1.htm

 

jmp

You might give a roll of Agfa Portrait 160 a try. While it doesn't duplicate the old films, it is somewhat muted and gives a bit of a "pastelly" look. If possible, at least for your first experiment, try having developed on an Agfa D-Lab with Agfa Prestige paper, just to see the film as Agfa intended it. After that, have developed / printed wherever to experiment and see which you prefer for the long term.

You might try overexposure and pull processing to mute the colors, or underexposure and push, but not by the full amount. This latter method increases grain and can mute colors.

 

Cross processing will give you vivid color and high contrast.

 

Ron Mowrey

If you are realy ambitious, you could do your own tri-color seperation with three seperate frames of B&W film shot through red, green, and Blue filters. Combined in photoshop to produce a single color image, you would have unlimited controll and may be able to duplicate the look you are after.

Cokin makes various filters that would be suitable. I've used the Tobacco to create a sepia look on color prints - the filter is just strong enough that no amount of color correction by the lab can overcome it, but the effect is still pleasant.

 

The trick is just choosing from among the hundreds of filters in their catalog.

 

I have some photos, mostly color slides, that might fool some folks into thinking Photoshop trickery was at work. But it's all Cokin. Their weird duo-colored polarizers can be very interesting.

Tiffen & Hoya (prolly others) make Sepia filters usually 1 throught 3 strengths of effect. I have use the tobacco filter like Lex, but I like the sepia better. I like the Tiffen filter above the hoya filter, Tiffen just has the tones more correct than Hoya I think (not that I am bashing Hoya I love them too, but in this one instence).I have gotten some great old building, old person, and old dirt road shots with these filters. Just my 2 cents, their are prolly much better ways, for cheaper than a $40 dollar filter but this is where I am at right now.

 

Hope this helps

Jonathan

This is very funny..

 

different people posting oposite suggestions for the same question.

Some of you understood that he wants the technicolor look ( i have no idea why) and the others folowed what he said.

He said he wanted muted colors.

Muted colors have nothing top do with the technicolor look.

When I think of vintage films, I think of The Wizard of Oz... and the colors in that film are not muted or pastel-like, not by a long-shot.

These days is the perception of Three-Strip Technicolor is that the colors were always bright and vivid. That was not always the case. The process allowed a great deal of control over the look of the prints, and many films had a less than dazzling palette. The original prints of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Gone With The Wind" actually did have a sepia look. When reprinted from 1954 on, the latter film displayed a bit more splash with color, as was preferred by that time. "The Adventures of Robin Hood" from 1937 had an antiqued burnished look (not exactly sepia), and you'd be surprised how muted "Snow White" looked back in the 1930's. Even in the 1950's, John Huston worked with Technicolor to mute the colors in "Moby Dick".

 

It was believed back then that audiences' eyes, accustomed to monochrome films, would tire from too much vivid color, hence the muted colors. As Technicolor became more popular, the colors began to become more striking, as evidenced in the 1940's musicals from 20th Century-Fox. Using "Wizard Of Oz" as the primary example of Technicolor is misleading, because it's look is one more of production design, aided by the color technology, and not by the Technicolor process alone.

 

I love the Technicolor look, and can understand why one might want to reproduce its look. Early Technicolor used a faint black & white "key" image (from the yellow strip, if I recall correctly) to enhance sharpness. The side effect would be to dull the colors a bit. If you're working in Photoshop, somehow overlaying such an image may help you reproduce that look.

You have to realize that the <b>look</b> from older movies is due to more than just the film stock. Even on location there were tons of lights that filled shadows and gave a unique color to the scenes. There should be some reference books on cinematic lighting techniques available possibly at university libraries or at large used book stores?

 

The next best thing is to work the image in photoshop to get the desired effect but I still think good lighting techniques will help.

I think SX70 Polaroids have that look to them. I did a commercial with Peggy

Sirota a couple of years ago and it was supposed to have this old Hollywood look to it, she

used her SX70 to capture a key frame in every take and gave those to the guy doing the

post production work on the Film. It came out very nicely. And like someone just

mentioned, a lot of it has to do with the set up, styling, make up and lighting. Also those

lenses, no coatings on em, you know how light flare flattens out the colors. <p>

I don't know why, but it also seems like those old films are all laking bright green. Even in

broad daylight foliage is very dark or muted.<p>

Good Luck.

<a href="http://www.jacobcarter.co.uk/" target="_blank" >Jacob Carter Photography</a>