Question for the unwashed masses

Fenster

I've recently seen some very striking portrait and landscape photos with what I can only call a contrasted, desaturated tungsten-y look. I've had a go at it myself, and I've picked up a fair understanding of how to get the effect on film and in a studio, which doesn't help me all that much as I entirely use digital (I'm teh poor) right now.

Would anyone have any idea how to achieve this effect without expensive tungsten lighting, filters and gel, as I can only presume the effect can be matched in Photoshop?

DaireQuinlan

Any examples to illustrate what you mean exactly ?

CraggyIslander

I'm only playing with the raw format just now, but shooting in raw and then changing the lighting setting from 'as shot' to 'tungsten' or 'fluorescent' before importing into PS would probably do it. Thats just an uneducated guess tho, but it does seem to work mu7chas better for desaturation for b/w conversion

mikeanywhere

DaireQuinlan wrote:

Any examples to illustrate what you mean exactly ?

Do give examples??

Fenster

I found a random photo on Flickr that is similar to what I want, although the photography mentioned she got the effect by randomly screwing about.

I think I'm on the right track myself. To get the look:

Create a black and white adjustment layer (if in PS3) and use the blue filter, then set it's blending to "soft light." This will give you a very striking, contrasted, dark and bleached appearance. There's more tweaking thereafter, but that's the gist of it.

If you use PS2, you need to go Channels-> Blue (while in RGB mode), select and copy the blue channel and paste it over the whole image, then set the blending to soft light.

In the Gimp, you need to decompose to RGB and pick out the blue channel as above.

EDIT: The technique is called (I just discovered) bleach bypass. I'll play around with it some more later and see what I come up with - if I get a chance I'll throw up a HOWTO on the darkroom forum.

mikeanywhere

So who's the daddy??

Fenster

Me

/smack