How to: Vintage 50’s color-processing and serious hairdos

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.

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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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