Your opinion - What is the appeal of partially-desaturated images?

<p>I enjoy the faded-colour look, especially when used to convey a feeling in the photograph. In certain cases it seems to convey emotion more so than a fully-saturated image.<br>

Apart from the subject, what is it about the fading/partial-desaturation that makes the image more appealing to many?<br>

(To me - the simplification makes your subject and intent more clear in some way by removing competing colours and "noise".)<br>

What is your opinion? Why do people seem to connect to these images?<br>

Thanks everyone for your time,</p>

<p>M.M.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Generally speaking I dislike them. There are times, rarely. when they are welcome.</p>

<p>Do you think it's a gender or age thing, or just one of the current fashions in digital photography? <br>

I assume that women connect more to these images, and possibly the 20-30 somethings, but I may be totally off base.</p>

<p>I think it's another tool that evokes a certain mood for some images. Personally, I never liked the over saturated poppy look anyway. With some landscape, still life and portrait images, the effect can be quite delicate and appealing. Nothing new however. Autochromes and hand colored images had the same soft color palette ages ago. (btw,55y/o man here). </p>

<p>Similar in some ways to the choice of watercolour rather than oil/acrylic media. It suits some subjects. The reduction in the chromatic saturation is in some ways similar to going from colour to monochrome, or to the use of high key in black and white. Black and white, like partial colour desaturation, is not reality, but reality has never been the overriding aim of good art or imaginative photography.</p>

<p>There is no tool or media that is inappropriate for art. What is unfortunate in some cases is the stubborn use of the same one for all of one's work.</p>

<p>I generally like the desaturated look as well. I'm a 27 year old man, by the by. I think it often evokes more of a feeling of time, and perhaps a place in time, than very saturated images. I don't know, though. I also think it very much depends on the subject of the photograph. It can effectively be used to give a more raw or cold edge to documentary/photojournalistic photos, where it might give an air of dreamy haziness in a landscape shot (I generally prefer more saturated landscapes, I must admit). If that at all makes any sense.</p>

<p>Personally, I find a lot of these things are cyclical and faddish. The desat color was big maybe 10+ years back in commercial work, my field, and now it has moved into the consumer/amateur market a bit more--although it has been here for awhile now as well.</p>

<p>On the other hand, hand coloring--the forebear of this technique--has been around forever and images well done can be classics, in the sense of timeless. We don't have any sample images here, which is maybe good, but so much of any of these techniques can be done over the top or just poorly and will fade away totally. Well done work will maintain its beauty, but probably move to the back as other newer looks come along.</p>

<p>As with most types of post-processing, partial desaturation has its place and uses. I still see it being used in fashion and hoi-polloi mags like Vogue and particularly Vanity Fair (my wife gets VF. No…really….honest.)</p>

<p>PNet's own Patrick Lavoie has a great tutorial on digital work flow for Fashion Photography and includes tips on a particular type of desaturation (without giving the whole "trick" away):</p>

<p><a href="http://www.photo.net/learn/digital-photography-workflow/overview/fashion-photography/">http://www.photo.net/learn/digital-photography-workflow/overview/fashion-photography/</a></p>

<p>Depending on how one does it, desaturation can be utilized to create a retro, a graphic comic, a gritty hyperreal, or a bleak apocalyptic mood (for just a few examples). You can see it in cinematography in many recent movies: "300", "Shutter Island", "The Road", etc.</p>

<p>There is a photographer (well, there's way more than one, of course) whose work I've seen links to before. Just can't recall his name at the moment. His work has a desaturated, gritty but hyperreal (not really HDR...more like a heavily pushed LR clarity slider) quality to it. Not very helpful, but maybe someone knows who I'm talking about? </p>

<p>Currently, I don't use the desaturated look very often, but I have to admit that, when it's done well, I do like it. I'm not sure if age has anything to do with it or not. Maybe it's more of a "digital age" thing, than a chronological age thing. It was the accessibility and faster learning curve of digital that helped awaken a serious interest in photography (as opposed to family and vacation snapshots with Brownies and disposable cameras -- which comprise the bulk of my film experience). Although I'm 56, I didn't cut my photographic teeth on film. In that sense, I'm photographically "growing up" alongside 20-somethings whose intro to photography was exclusively digital. This is not to ignore or discount those who use film. It's just that the OP seems digitally oriented as opposed to the hand tinting that others have mentioned. </p>

<p>I think it is easy to over do it, and mostly it is just a faddish thing. Having said that, the desaturation evokes the faded images in old photographs creating a sort of retro look, and having one color predominate draws attention to the colored object. I think it can be very stylishly used if one has true creative genius, but for most of us it is just ho-hum.</p>

<p>Nothing "wrong" with desaturated images when it suits the subject matter.<br>

What sticks in my craw are those sappy selective-color images, usually depicting young children dressed in adult formal attire , or worse, angels. Mostly monochrome images with a splash of color in a bouquet of flowers, a dress, a bonnet, .... always heavily vignetted and overdone with diffused glow. You usually find these as posters or on the desks and filing cabinets of your least favorite co-workers/secretaries. They rank just slighly below Thomas Kincade paintings on the scale of crapiness.</p>

<p>I am not a huge fan of desaturated photos, and like others have mentioned, feel it's very faddish and trendy. I find a photo here and there that I personally feel it works well with, but it has to be the 'right' photo. A lot of wedding and baby photographers excessively love this treatment. I feel that trendy wannabes use this desaturated treatment to try to make a poorly exposed and color-balanced photo look better. I personally love color or black and white.</p>

<p>I sometimes play with saturation to achieve an effect -- 50'ish and female, and been doing photography seriously since my childhood, BTW.</p>

<p>Most of my images are pretty "straight-up," perhaps aside from the fact that I really love doing B&W. (Does B&W count?) I've discussed elsewhere why I like B&W so much -- that it allows me certain freedoms in postprocessing that I wouldn't have in color.</p>

<p>But why do I do a partial desaturation? Or for that matter, why do I sometimes rather vividly saturate an image? I think it's the same reason. I want to make the image somewhat surreal, so as to make it not so much a "straight-up" thing. I often use somewhat heavy saturation for satire/parody. I've used partial desaturation on occasion to convey a feel of antiquity. Nothing original. Cinematographers do it too. I'm much more prone to do this when the image screams for B&W, but when some of the colors are also somewhat important.</p>

<p>Another reason I'll use partial desaturation is to exploit subtle colors to add clarity and definition to a photo that "wants" to be B&W but that becomes visually confusing when completely desaturated.</p>

<p>I never really considered this faddish or trendy, and I don't do it very often. It's just a once-in-a-blue-moon solution to a photo that doesn't otherwise work.</p>

<p><img src="http://www.graphic-fusion.com/phthereenactorssm.jpg" alt="" /><br>

"The Reenactors" -- just doesn't convey the anachronism if done in either B&W or color. Note the fisheye too. I use whatever tools do the job.</p>

<p>i always found those images (the one Gabor describe) cheap and old school.. i dotn mind if people like to still do that for wedding or else, but i dont like them personnaly. It is a question of taste, and im happy that me and my customer seem to have the same taste ; )</p>

<p> </p>

<p>To add my $0.02 to the discussion, selective color (eg, the only things remaining in color are the red lips and shoes) always reminds me of kitschy greeting cards, many of which are not that inexpensive.</p>

<p>Like others in this thread, I consider partial desaturation, oversaturation, and all of the cross processing, bleach bypass, and similar effects to be *special* effects which have (very) occasional uses. If I see one more TV detective or post-apocalypse show where blue-green cross processing and the electronic version of bleach bypass is used to suggest a gritty, decaying environment, I'll scream. :-). IMHO, these efx are WAAAY overused.</p>

<p>That being said, many of my customers, acquaintances and even family members seem to love these looks, almost certainly because they are novel to them.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>I normally like very saturated color. But occasionally I'll make an image that looks better with desaturated color. <a href="http://www.tedsimages.com/text/lkslaps.htm">Here is an example.</a> The original saturated version just didn't look right. Nor did monochrome. Selective desaturation gave the right feeling. But again, this is something I rarely do.</p>

<p>Being somewhat new and learning, I find some of the comments left here to be rather judgmental and snobbish, i.e., trendy and faddish; maybe some are simply trying to learn or just expressing something in their own photos. Everything depends on the image and what the photographer wanted to express; not everything appeals to all. I don't know anything of ten year ago fads or present day fads; I try to have fun with what I am doing and hopefully learn along the way.</p>

<p>i feel like it was just a few weeks ago that people were complaining about photos being over-saturated... go figure...</p>

<p>Some people prefer ketchup on their hamburgers, others like mustard.</p>

<p>Thank you everyone for your insights. I was not complaining - rather showing an interest in what the collective YOU think the actual appeal is in that type of processing - not being able to put a finger on it myself. Mainly I ask because I enjoy it, but can't see myself using it on majority of my work. Yet there are photos, that looking back, I think would be better suited to this treatment.<br>

I personally dislike selective-desaturation where only one prominent colour remains - like the "red rose" in those black & white "children in adult clothes and in love" postcards/calendars - sorry the name escapes me - but boy was that a craze for many years!<br>

I enjoy doing research and thank you guys for your opinions.<br>

Sarah - nice image. I can see how the desaturation enhances the intent of the photo.<br>

More comments are welcome...<br>

-M.M.</p>

<p>Never seen one myself. </p>

<p>Evidently you could have a color picture in which the colors clashed and desaturation might be a way of handling it. You might also want to desaturate to emphasize the tonality of your subject as opposed to its chroma, or to bring out qualities mediated by tonality, such as texture. As Marilyn points out and Sarah demonstrates, faded colors suggest the passage of time and give a sense of nostalgia.<br>

Psychologically, black-and-white suggests a dispassionate, analytic contemplation of the subject, and color evokes an emotional response. This was a feature of the old Rorschach ink-blot test: the way you managed and interpreted color in the blots was supposed to indicate how you managed your emotions. Sarah's parodic use of oversaturation gives the feeling of inappropriate emotions running out of control, and desaturation can give a feeling of depression or constriction.<br>

Many people object to the single-strong-color-in-monochrome-context effect because it's overused and generally rather contrived. We don't seem to have the same objection to a brightly colored object against a dark or shadowed background, or against a brilliant snowbank. <br>

Sarah uses saturation to emphasize the foreground objects, emphasizing their reality in the present time, as relics, but desaturates the people in the background, making them look rather spectral, like ghosts from another time. Most of us are comfortable with the use of selective brightening and darkening to achieve emphasis and subordination in our pictures, but we don't usually think of using selective saturation and desaturation in a similar way.</p>

<p>Some look okay to me and in some cases works for the particular image. But it's no different than any other kind of post processing, often times it's a fad kind of thing. Sometimes it's a way to mask an otherwise ordinary or inferior image. I think I tried to play around a bit with that too but it was more in playing around and perhaps covering up for an average, at best, image in my cases.</p>

<p>It's odd, but you can just forget things. I actually shot a feature for ForbesASAP magazine and they wanted to do the whole issue in b/w with spot color--that thing we all detest(well many of us). I didn't even think about it and shot the whole article in color and then left in color in select areas. The art director was very inquisitive as to how I did it and I have to admit that much of what was in that issue was not done well. I have had these shots in my book now for some time and never equated them to those greeting card images and don't think they are the same, so maybe it is a matter of execution or perspective!?!</p><div></div>

<p>The middle shot actually looks good. I don't get the heavy vignetting but spot color on those wall images in grey environment is nice. Maybe because it looks like a space shuttle or technical facility and I'm a geek? :D<br>

I find 99% of spot color images annoying.</p>

<p>One issue anytime one posts an older shot, and even more so a commercially done shot, is that they often reflect certain trends or techniques popular at the time or a style of presentation you have in your book and a client wants to exploit. In this case, the vignette was something I had extensively in my portfolio (lots of Holga work, including some done for a recent cover story in the Atlantic Monthly) at the time. These shots were done in 2002. Although I would have a few vignetted shots in some permutations of my portfolio today, the bulk, if not all of the work, normally would not have them--more like what you would see on my website where there might be one or two in the main portion and only one series, a holga series done at burningman, that has this look in the personal work section.</p>

<p>Personally, I don't totally hate the look for this application, but it isn't one I have used since probably shortly after that shoot. Oddly enough, yesterday I was going through my portfolio pieces--the ones not currently in the book--and saw quite a few images that I would like to keep for certain permutations of books I send out today, but the images will need to be revisited and some of these sorts of older techniques removed. The images are still current, but the techniques aren't really what I offer these days (nor should in most cases!).</p>