How to: Vintage 50’s color-processing and serious hairdos
By: The Creative Control
Tags: 50s, 60s, american, bike, black hair, coca cola, coke, cola, collage, comb, comedy, cool, cute, dr. pepper, elvis, fashion, fifties, film, funny, gas station, gel, germany, grease, hairdo, hanau, indiana jones, jeans, kodachrome, model, motor bike, movie, persiflage, photoshop, postprocessing, retro, shirt, sixties, style, tankstelle, tuncay, turkish, us army, vintage, wolfgang
Category: Photo of the Day
My photoshoot today had a fifties theme with a wink to a lot of different people and movies. All in all a real potpourri of styles, time periods and objects (my props: cheeseburgers, fries, cola, milkshake, comb, knife, bike, guitar…).
This collage is inspired by a scene in the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.
More photos of todays shoot in the next few days.
Strobist: SB-28 through umbrella, high 3 o’clock; bare SB-24, far 2 o’clock; snooted SB-600 camera right.
Here are the steps I took to make the picture look like an old 50’s photo – of course there is more than one style which fits that description, but I hope this little tutorial is useful anyway:
- I combined (50/50) two differently processed images of one photo
- I reduced the contrast of one to a minimum and raised the vibrance to a maximum, so the whole picture is intense in colors but a little bland because of a yellowish tone, done with white balance.
- The other is more like a “usual processed” image: Higher contrast, less vibrance, but enough / “normal” colors – more realistic through a neutral WB.
- Next is a soft lighted gradient map with a middle-ranged brown in the shadows and a faint yellow in the highlights.
- Duplicate as what you see, in LAB-Mode add a nice, crisp, strong unsharpen mask and gradiation curve for some nice contrasts, at 60% opacity.
- Still in LAB-Mode duplicate what you see, boost the saturation to a maximum, gaussian blur and blend as “lighten” at 60% opacity.
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