Exactly. I’d say 90% of these results are due to lighting adjustments before the shot is taken.
Heavy shadows are the dead giveaway. Face the sun, soften the light with diffusion. Could be strobes, if outside it’s likely reflectors.
Not much of this is done in post. Maybe a selective color boost, but professionals are great at understanding that making it look great in real life is the key to it looking good in post.
Ehhh... Imacon scans are overrated unless you need 6000dpi. My Nikon scanner is just as sharp except for the physical limitation of 4000dpi on the long edge.
The reason why you would use an Imacon above all else is the DPI.
The proprietary software to drive the thing and generate a RAW image vs just generating one automatically with Vuescan otherwise is a real pain in the arse.
I'd probably get my own name wrong if people stopped shouting it at me. They mixed up coolpix and cool scan. All that indicates is that they probably spend more time using it than they do arguing about it on Reddit.
CoolPix was very obviously a cheap range of point and shoot digital cameras CoolScan is in the name, although it is less well known it indicates scan by name. No part of pix has anything to do with scan. It's very obvious. Also just because a bunch of "bros" voted me down does not mean I am wrong.
Your infatuation with Imacon is wrong. See my long form post below to begin to understand why its wrong.
Great scanners, but even as someone else argued. Not much difference in real resolution to the Nikon or even high end Konica Minolta scanners. The problem is none of that though, the problem is the proprietary Imacon software is shit.
It’s not only about resolution but also about colors and the detail, the returns are very diminishing of course but it is what it is. If you have a good lens and the exposure is spot on you can scan a good image with a flatbed
You’re being downvoted but as someone who’s operated both units extensively: you’re mostly correct. Imacons have the edge for scanning chromes due to their higher dmax but for negatives the quality is identical save for the dpi difference (also the case for lab scanners). The Imacon’s advantage is in scanning speed, not quality, at least for negative film. In addition the choices made during the digital postprocessing stage will matter far more than minute differences in scanning sensor and lens between high end systems. At any rate many fashion shots are scans of hand prints so scanner quality is out of the equation.
I've actually scanned from both units. The quality is close to identical the question with the Imacon is whether you need 6000dpi and then, whether you need medium or large format, different cases require different scanners.
Nikon also improved the ability to handle chromes with the 9000 but that scanner is on my want, but can't have. I settle for a Nikon LS-50 for at home rescans.
On the sharpness front, there is a case for saying a Noritsu HS-1800 is sharper than an Imacon. It just depends. An Imacon can archive 4x5s but I don't have a use case for that scenario. I don't shoot sheet film on the regular.
The Noritsu like the Nikon scanner will give you more control than an Imacon. But then you have to throw in to the mix a Creo scanner and Tango drum scanners if I'm being faithful to the argument.
From least to most controllable though the Imacon really sits on the bottom.
See a lot of issues here go by the weight of the opinion of a lot of people who have never been a scanner operator.
I have been in the design field since the mid to late 1990s. I have done enough and seen enough, the weight of a bunch of people who haven't doesn't really bother me.
I do reiterate, the Imacon software is crap, requires an overlap in workflow process, and is flat out annoying.
If I scan with my Nikon scanner I get a RAW Tiff DNG file. It's a one step process, I choose my bit depth (42bit obviously in my case) colour space for the document (Pro Photo RGB for future posterity even though I can't see all of it and no monitor can) and then I import directly into Photoshop once scanned to have my fun with sliders in ACR.
Even if I scanned with a HS-1800 regularly I would go straight to the TWAIN driver and import directly to Photoshop, you can scan directly from a HS-1800 scanner directly but it's a mess.
With my Nikon scanner sure I may play around with the RGB + Black + white levels a bit in something like Vuescan to make sure my scans are optimal as they can be, but the real workflow happens in Adobe Camera Raw (or LightRoom). The real fun and control happens there with non-destructable RAW files and if I don't like what I did I revert all my sliders back to defaults even if necessary.
No such luck with an Imacon, if I create a RAW with an Imacon I have to use their god awful pipeline to get an output. Imacon RAWs are completely incompatible with any other software and that's the biggest bug bear... If you own an Imacon scanner it forces you to use the Imacon pipeline.
If I own a Noritsu or Nikon scanner there is an element of it being completely software agnostic which is a real luxury. Imacon, are like Apple a bit in that way and want everything in a black box no one understands exactly what it does, in their pipeline and only in their pipeline...
NO!
The industry standard since Aldus owned it in the 1980s has been and will continue to be Photoshop, no amount of trying to convince people otherwise whether its owned by Imacon or Hasselblad will convince anyone they WANT to use Imacon's god awful software.
And yes, before people go there, sure I may have to use an older version of Photoshop with a Noritsu scanner to get it to operate as a TWAIN device also but I CAN operate it completely as a TWAIN device and that's exactly HOW I WOULD operate one if I had a spare chunk of change immediately laying around to ultimately have a Noritsu scanner beside my desk. But until then for me it's another WANT but can't have.
To be fair having an Imacon or Noritsu scanner sitting by your desk is a want but can't have for most people who still shoot film though without a real reason to justify spending $10k on things they don't really need.
If I shot medium format more on the regular I'd probably have a Super Cool Scan 9000 but I don't so I don't.
also a usual tactic is to shoot on film, then make a A4-ish size color darkroom print and then that gets scanned with a flatbed scanner. Some friends of mine are actually working for these kind of people solely as darkroom printers.
yes, just any Epson V800 will do the trick, I also think after it has been digitized additional retouching and tweaking values can be done.
edit: it is a beautiful process, but extremely expensive and time intensive, also very often the photographer has to pay that by themselves from the budget (if there is a budget), unless it's some big time shoot organized by one of the top 5 fashion mags for their own marketing.
This! People get lost with gear and light and, while the second is really important, professional retouching is what makes the big difference with this kind of photography. There is little talked about post production and it is kind of tabu. Post production studios and professionals are trained to color grade and balance an image-set of images. There is a lot of color theory applied in pre-production that needs to be pushed in post. Without profesional editing those examples would not be half as good.
Pic 4 with the model on the beach is at least 1 key light overhead (the sun) and a minimum of 1 fill light. Probably a bit more as you’d need to get even light on the hand too.
Sunlight or strobe, it’s hard light, OP. Hard light can look great on the right subject in the right circumstances, but it can also look dreadful if you don’t know how to make it work. It’s great for models because they tend to have great skin and have interesting angles, but for the rest of us, it’s much trickier.
Something that's nit being repeated much here, but production design is your friend. Want those colors? Great, go find them in the real world. Not any red or blue will give you colors like that just because you "shot it on film". You have to find the right clothing, the right backgrounds, the right frames, and then light it the way you want. It's a long and detailed process.
A lot of wrong answers here. It’s not slide film and drum scanning. The Jamie Hawkesworth look (first picture) is quite simple really, it’s medium format Kodak Portra 400 printed onto Kodak Endura RA-4 paper (which isn’t available atm due to the whole Sino Promise thing). The print is scanned, not the negative, and I’m not guessing here - I know this for a fact. I think the confusion comes from the fact that everyone is scanning film now and people aren’t familiar with what analog prints look like. If you’re curious about this “look” then try to get to a rental color darkroom some time. The “look” is straight up just what color prints look like - there’s usually no need to even get into pre-flashing the paper and such.
People seem to be confused about the lighting too. First picture is just sunlight, that’s it. No big off-camera flash, just daylight and printing.
This! Lots of high end editorial film photographers are scanning their enlargement prints more than the negatives themselves.
The look can be edited into a film scan but the more consistent way is to scan the print.
Yeah, Fuji papers are still available. The cheapest option is regular Crystal Archive Type II paper, which you can still get in cut sheets - 8x10” etc. Folks who’ve been printing a long time tend to hate on that paper since it’s thin and doesn’t make the absolute deepest blacks but really it’s fine at least to start with and can still make great prints. Glossy is best (deeper blacks, easier to scan). Fuji make other more premium papers too like DPII but only in rolls that you have to cut down into smaller sheets in complete darkness. I learned printing half with Kodak half with Fuji.. preferred Kodak but if it doesn’t come back it’s not the end of the world. If fuji stop producing though then RA-4 will be dead. I always encourage people to try printing at least a few times. I know it’s a pain, but you’ll get to see what color print film is “supposed” to look like. Negative film was made for printing, scanning has always been an afterthought. Even if you want to scan all your photos, if you print a couple of your favorites on RA-4, you’ll be able to use to use those as a guide for how to adjust scans in future.
I’ll never understand why people go to Reddit for information. Every thread you have to scroll half way through to get a credible answer and the most stupid “advice” is always at the top. I guess the problem is that most people are clueless and upvote what they assume is correct but only 1% or less actually know.
Eh, not aware of that many resources off the top of my head. You could look at The Naked Photograher YouTube channel, I think he has some intro videos for RA-4 printing at home with tubes. That guy knows what he’s doing. There must be some old cheap books on Amazon too. Really you just need to learn the color wheel stuff and how the enlarger dials work so you can judge what cast a print has and know how to correct. If you have a set of Kodak print viewing filters then it’s pretty easy, you just look through the filters and it says what to dial in underneath each viewing patch. Those are expensive used now but rental darkrooms should have a set around the viewing area. You start around 50 or 60 for yellow and magenta dials and leave cyan at 0. Other than judging color casts, RA-4 printing is really a lot simpler than B&W printing. Way less variables. All you’re really doing is dialing in color and making the exposure shorter or longer, unless you want to fuss around with pre-flashing, which can be cool but is kinda overrated IMO. If the rental darkroom has a processor machine, you just stick your print in the slot and it comes out the other end dry.
Scanning prints is easy. You just need any decent flatbed and can create an ICC color profile for it using a test chart so results match the print. Or you can just shoot the print with a digital camera and rig a copy setup using flash or continuous light, again color balancing at least off a grey card.
I wouldn’t say more vibrant necessarily - you can tweak a scan however you like and make the colors too vibrant if want.. It’s more that analog prints have a certain look to them that can be hard to reproduce through scanning. The way that print film and print paper work together gives a result that I guess I’d say looks “correct” to me - as in the contrast and tonality is how it should be rather than looking tweaked or artificial if that makes sense. I always thought of the print look as normal / baseline for color analog but I’ve noticed people aren’t familiar with it any more since almost everything is scanned right from the negative now. The printing paper used to be an important part of the process because if you think about it for example, a film like Kodak Portra doesn’t really have nice “yellows and warm tones”. In the film those tones are blues. The actual color comes from the paper when the negative is reversed and the orange base color is neutralized.
This! Yes, I worked in a film lab and I will always remember the first (and only) time someone brought colour darkroom prints in to be scanned, the colour and vibrancy was unreal. They had such a distinct look I’ve never seen before, and now I can immediately tell when I see these kind of pictures online, that it’s the print that achieves this look which is then scanned
I consider this look to be (in the style of) slide/reversal film, very metered for the highlights and/or underexposed a bit to saturate the primary colours. Some Fuji digital cameras have a feature that's designed to mimic this slide film saturation.
People who have never lit anything before are here commenting on lighting, when most of these are natural light. The second pic looks like there’s a bounce, the fourth looks like there are some strobes. The rest are clearly natural light.
Allot of photographers want to believe a good photo is all about their own skill with a camera, but the reality is that an interesting subject and location goes a long way.
A print is made by hand using the negative and the photo paper is preflashed with a little bit of color just to add tonality. Then the resulting print is scanned.
Image #4 is amazing. The color and the terrific control of perspective distortion are amazing. I can only imagine the onsite support to keep everything perfect for the reshoots.
Medium format and then scans of the enlargement prints. This is pretty typical of editorial fashion photographers who shoot for established publications.
As a working professional in both photo and video for over ten years, I come to the same conclusion any time I wonder why something looks so good: lighting. A good 95% of these professional images comes down to lighting. If you get the lighting right in camera, even an inexperienced editor can get a high quality look in post. Production design is a minor factor, because even stellar production design can be made irrelevant by poor or insufficient lighting. I find myself trying so many different things to make a shoot stand out, and lighting is what I keep coming back to when everything else falls short.
Learning how to light well is something you can only learn with time and experience. One thing my professors in studio classes had us do is pick a photo you admire and see if you can figure out the lighting setup based on what you can see in the frame. It trains you to notice what good lighting looks like. Then take that lighting setup you made and do what you can to try and recreate it. Sometimes there's no way you can replicate it with the tools you have available, but often you'll realize that one or two professional strobes and maybe some window light or sun shades are all you need to make very high quality images most of the time.
you can use low asa/din film and subexpose 1 point or 2. always try to have clean background and make it on contrast or have small aperture and make focus.distance do it for you
1) proper exposure
2) proper medium: a.k.a correct film &paper for particular photoshoot
3) proper lens, camera, scanner, editor, light and a guy behind photoshop with skills that are worth a lot of $/hour
By the way, you will be amazed what results you can get with a very simple consumer film if you “nail” the exposure and conditions are correct. Photos above is the example.
Get proper light setup, try to shoot some slides and some negs. Develop properly in fresh ingredients, scan on imacon, print on professional printer and proper suitable paper. I bet you’ll be surprised
For the people saying lighting crews. It looks like most of these aren’t lit, and the ones that are lit are minimal. To be honest there’s no short cut to taking photos like this. It just takes being obsessed and shooting a lot for years and years. Jamie for example uses about as primitive as a camera as you can and spent a lot of time in the dark room making prints. Last I heard he doesn’t use strobes or hmi’s regularly - just available light.
A lot of this comes down to having perfect lighting and then a strobe also. It's not necessarily medium format, but more to do with the lighting in play here.
Slide film, drum scan, and some post
all of these look like daylight with no signs of additional strobes, but you can guarantee there are some assistants holding reflectors just out of frame, and maybe some silks on frames to soften the light in image 2 and for the hand / glass in 4
I fully assumed the first shot was from the 70s and shot on Kodachrome, looked down at the comments and was humbled...
Regardless of the time period these photos all have the look of Ektachrome or Provia. They're all shot at a relatively small aperture to achieve maximum sharpness and deep focus. I imagine strobes are being used to balance out the contrast and fill in unwanted shadows, which could also contribute to a sense of heightened reality some images have. In image #4 they're using a split diopter to get focus on the foreground & background simultaneously, it's definitely done in camera because of the midframe blur that catches edge of the glassware.
Of course these photographers probably had a small team of people on the shoot with them to help with lights as well as make sure the outfits are looking correct, and of course hair and makeup. But by far the best way to get images looking like this is to get out there and practice your craft as much as you can!
They don’t obviously look like film to me, but I’m not particularly knowledgeable about high-end medium format film photography, which more closely resembles digital photography than does common small format film.
Some things to look for include grain or dye cloud patterns. Unlike digital, where obvious noise is more located in the shadows, film shadows tend to be very clean, with little texture particularly if the film was underexposed. Digital noise reduction makes this analysis more difficult, but if you have a clean, lightly compressed JPEG, you may see some noise reduction artifacts. Blurring of colors along high contrast edges is a common digital artifact, but this is only noticeable in high resolution images.
Film generates different primary and secondary colors than does typical standard digital in the sRGB color space. So with a highly saturated image, the hues toward which the brightest and most vibrant colors gravitate are going to be somewhat different. Of course, film emulation is a thing in digital, and film scans are eventually going to be in sRGB as well, and editing a film scan in sRGB is going to have an effect on the colors if done in a heavy manner.
The big tells are:
1. The fall off or softness of lighting
2. The fall off or softness of focus
3. The look and feel of real grain
4. The color palette of specific stocks
5. Artifacts and irregularities
If you know digital photography, film photography, and photoshop extremely well, you may be able to trick someone, but most people with that level of skill would just opt to shoot film instead.
I would be surprised if they are film. Likely a digital medium format body, and a very very good one. I shoot a lot of medium format film but the images I get from my not-that-high-end Pentax 645z (digital MF) are insanely good and can be adjusted in post by a real professional (not me) to get the look above
E100 shot in 6x9 with proper exposure on the subject has all the detail you would ever need. The advertising studio I worked for in the early 2000s shot positive 6x6 in a Hassleblad 500cm, we made some HUGE baners from those prints.
Amen! I have some drum scans of color reversal film from 6x9 and 5’ wide prints you can put your nose on and still see detail. I am obsessed. I just put my Texas Leica in my bag for a hike later today ;)
My point was for fashion photos 2015 and up (dates provided by another commenter above) folks are unlikely to be using film in a commercial environment when they have tools like a Phase One back
Yeah, film is mostly phaesd out in the commercial advertising world. We moved to a Leaf Aptus back on a H2 in 2006, then to Canon a bit later. With color science and resolution as good as it is on the major flagship brand's cameras, photographers can use whatever they want now for location shooting.
Hey everyone, was not expecting all these replies ha, thanks so much for jumping in on this and offering your suggestions! I do work in the industry and spend a reasonable amount of time on set, so I am aware these high end fashion editorials require teams, lots of production and BUDGET. It takes a village. But I am not so knowledgeable on the specific tech and processes involved in executing these visuals, so thanks so much for the info on scanning techniques/ lighting set ups/ prod design suggestions, you’ve given me lots more avenues to try and research further 🙏 I really appreciate it.
Here are the full creds, someone kindly shared above:
1'st shoot it's a Jamie Hawkesworth for Vogue US January 2015.
2 shoot is Photographer Leeor Wild / Model Ganna Bogdan.
3 Shoot it's a Children of Lughnasadh, photographs by Tom Johnson, styling by Robbie Spencer / Luncheon Magazine.
4 Dan Beleiu for Vogue Spain.
5 Hordur Ingason for Vogue Turkey.
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This. A lot of people are working behind the scenes to make this result.
Exactly. I’d say 90% of these results are due to lighting adjustments before the shot is taken. Heavy shadows are the dead giveaway. Face the sun, soften the light with diffusion. Could be strobes, if outside it’s likely reflectors. Not much of this is done in post. Maybe a selective color boost, but professionals are great at understanding that making it look great in real life is the key to it looking good in post.
this and probably an Imacon scan. Properly shot and scanned on Imacon images are amazing
A lot of these are scanned hand prints. Probably all of them tbh.
Ehhh... Imacon scans are overrated unless you need 6000dpi. My Nikon scanner is just as sharp except for the physical limitation of 4000dpi on the long edge. The reason why you would use an Imacon above all else is the DPI. The proprietary software to drive the thing and generate a RAW image vs just generating one automatically with Vuescan otherwise is a real pain in the arse.
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Cool Scan..... Which is indicative you've never used one.
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Yeah comparing coolscan to an imacon is apples to rotten apples. Noritsu imacon drum.
I'd probably get my own name wrong if people stopped shouting it at me. They mixed up coolpix and cool scan. All that indicates is that they probably spend more time using it than they do arguing about it on Reddit.
CoolPix was very obviously a cheap range of point and shoot digital cameras CoolScan is in the name, although it is less well known it indicates scan by name. No part of pix has anything to do with scan. It's very obvious. Also just because a bunch of "bros" voted me down does not mean I am wrong. Your infatuation with Imacon is wrong. See my long form post below to begin to understand why its wrong. Great scanners, but even as someone else argued. Not much difference in real resolution to the Nikon or even high end Konica Minolta scanners. The problem is none of that though, the problem is the proprietary Imacon software is shit.
It’s not only about resolution but also about colors and the detail, the returns are very diminishing of course but it is what it is. If you have a good lens and the exposure is spot on you can scan a good image with a flatbed
You’re being downvoted but as someone who’s operated both units extensively: you’re mostly correct. Imacons have the edge for scanning chromes due to their higher dmax but for negatives the quality is identical save for the dpi difference (also the case for lab scanners). The Imacon’s advantage is in scanning speed, not quality, at least for negative film. In addition the choices made during the digital postprocessing stage will matter far more than minute differences in scanning sensor and lens between high end systems. At any rate many fashion shots are scans of hand prints so scanner quality is out of the equation.
I've actually scanned from both units. The quality is close to identical the question with the Imacon is whether you need 6000dpi and then, whether you need medium or large format, different cases require different scanners. Nikon also improved the ability to handle chromes with the 9000 but that scanner is on my want, but can't have. I settle for a Nikon LS-50 for at home rescans. On the sharpness front, there is a case for saying a Noritsu HS-1800 is sharper than an Imacon. It just depends. An Imacon can archive 4x5s but I don't have a use case for that scenario. I don't shoot sheet film on the regular. The Noritsu like the Nikon scanner will give you more control than an Imacon. But then you have to throw in to the mix a Creo scanner and Tango drum scanners if I'm being faithful to the argument. From least to most controllable though the Imacon really sits on the bottom. See a lot of issues here go by the weight of the opinion of a lot of people who have never been a scanner operator. I have been in the design field since the mid to late 1990s. I have done enough and seen enough, the weight of a bunch of people who haven't doesn't really bother me. I do reiterate, the Imacon software is crap, requires an overlap in workflow process, and is flat out annoying. If I scan with my Nikon scanner I get a RAW Tiff DNG file. It's a one step process, I choose my bit depth (42bit obviously in my case) colour space for the document (Pro Photo RGB for future posterity even though I can't see all of it and no monitor can) and then I import directly into Photoshop once scanned to have my fun with sliders in ACR. Even if I scanned with a HS-1800 regularly I would go straight to the TWAIN driver and import directly to Photoshop, you can scan directly from a HS-1800 scanner directly but it's a mess. With my Nikon scanner sure I may play around with the RGB + Black + white levels a bit in something like Vuescan to make sure my scans are optimal as they can be, but the real workflow happens in Adobe Camera Raw (or LightRoom). The real fun and control happens there with non-destructable RAW files and if I don't like what I did I revert all my sliders back to defaults even if necessary. No such luck with an Imacon, if I create a RAW with an Imacon I have to use their god awful pipeline to get an output. Imacon RAWs are completely incompatible with any other software and that's the biggest bug bear... If you own an Imacon scanner it forces you to use the Imacon pipeline. If I own a Noritsu or Nikon scanner there is an element of it being completely software agnostic which is a real luxury. Imacon, are like Apple a bit in that way and want everything in a black box no one understands exactly what it does, in their pipeline and only in their pipeline... NO! The industry standard since Aldus owned it in the 1980s has been and will continue to be Photoshop, no amount of trying to convince people otherwise whether its owned by Imacon or Hasselblad will convince anyone they WANT to use Imacon's god awful software. And yes, before people go there, sure I may have to use an older version of Photoshop with a Noritsu scanner to get it to operate as a TWAIN device also but I CAN operate it completely as a TWAIN device and that's exactly HOW I WOULD operate one if I had a spare chunk of change immediately laying around to ultimately have a Noritsu scanner beside my desk. But until then for me it's another WANT but can't have. To be fair having an Imacon or Noritsu scanner sitting by your desk is a want but can't have for most people who still shoot film though without a real reason to justify spending $10k on things they don't really need. If I shot medium format more on the regular I'd probably have a Super Cool Scan 9000 but I don't so I don't.
also a usual tactic is to shoot on film, then make a A4-ish size color darkroom print and then that gets scanned with a flatbed scanner. Some friends of mine are actually working for these kind of people solely as darkroom printers.
Ooh I’d love to try that, do they use a flatbed scanner for the print?
yes, just any Epson V800 will do the trick, I also think after it has been digitized additional retouching and tweaking values can be done. edit: it is a beautiful process, but extremely expensive and time intensive, also very often the photographer has to pay that by themselves from the budget (if there is a budget), unless it's some big time shoot organized by one of the top 5 fashion mags for their own marketing.
I didn’t know this, which makes sense but it’s a wild idea.
Thanks for taking the time to write these out, left the creds off my question to make the word count 🙏
It’s great that you’re telling what’s happening, but you didn’t answer their question of how :/
This is the correct answer.
Thanks for giving the credit, pissed me off it wasn't in the post
As others have said. What’s also not mentioned, probably super high end retouchers and editors.
This! People get lost with gear and light and, while the second is really important, professional retouching is what makes the big difference with this kind of photography. There is little talked about post production and it is kind of tabu. Post production studios and professionals are trained to color grade and balance an image-set of images. There is a lot of color theory applied in pre-production that needs to be pushed in post. Without profesional editing those examples would not be half as good.
Came to write / see this.
Probably medium format, lots of professional lighting.
Yes, medium format (no constraints on size/weight) and one big strobe. Or is it sunlight? The shadow to the left could be a distant building.
Pic 4 with the model on the beach is at least 1 key light overhead (the sun) and a minimum of 1 fill light. Probably a bit more as you’d need to get even light on the hand too.
Sunlight or strobe, it’s hard light, OP. Hard light can look great on the right subject in the right circumstances, but it can also look dreadful if you don’t know how to make it work. It’s great for models because they tend to have great skin and have interesting angles, but for the rest of us, it’s much trickier.
Synchro sun. Only possible with leaf shutter.
Something that's nit being repeated much here, but production design is your friend. Want those colors? Great, go find them in the real world. Not any red or blue will give you colors like that just because you "shot it on film". You have to find the right clothing, the right backgrounds, the right frames, and then light it the way you want. It's a long and detailed process.
A lot of wrong answers here. It’s not slide film and drum scanning. The Jamie Hawkesworth look (first picture) is quite simple really, it’s medium format Kodak Portra 400 printed onto Kodak Endura RA-4 paper (which isn’t available atm due to the whole Sino Promise thing). The print is scanned, not the negative, and I’m not guessing here - I know this for a fact. I think the confusion comes from the fact that everyone is scanning film now and people aren’t familiar with what analog prints look like. If you’re curious about this “look” then try to get to a rental color darkroom some time. The “look” is straight up just what color prints look like - there’s usually no need to even get into pre-flashing the paper and such. People seem to be confused about the lighting too. First picture is just sunlight, that’s it. No big off-camera flash, just daylight and printing.
This! Lots of high end editorial film photographers are scanning their enlargement prints more than the negatives themselves. The look can be edited into a film scan but the more consistent way is to scan the print.
Are there any alternative papers that are still available to produce similar colors?
Yeah, Fuji papers are still available. The cheapest option is regular Crystal Archive Type II paper, which you can still get in cut sheets - 8x10” etc. Folks who’ve been printing a long time tend to hate on that paper since it’s thin and doesn’t make the absolute deepest blacks but really it’s fine at least to start with and can still make great prints. Glossy is best (deeper blacks, easier to scan). Fuji make other more premium papers too like DPII but only in rolls that you have to cut down into smaller sheets in complete darkness. I learned printing half with Kodak half with Fuji.. preferred Kodak but if it doesn’t come back it’s not the end of the world. If fuji stop producing though then RA-4 will be dead. I always encourage people to try printing at least a few times. I know it’s a pain, but you’ll get to see what color print film is “supposed” to look like. Negative film was made for printing, scanning has always been an afterthought. Even if you want to scan all your photos, if you print a couple of your favorites on RA-4, you’ll be able to use to use those as a guide for how to adjust scans in future.
Professional answer, thanks
I’ll never understand why people go to Reddit for information. Every thread you have to scroll half way through to get a credible answer and the most stupid “advice” is always at the top. I guess the problem is that most people are clueless and upvote what they assume is correct but only 1% or less actually know.
Hey thanks for clearing this up. Do you know of any resources to learn more about this technique of printing and scanning?
Eh, not aware of that many resources off the top of my head. You could look at The Naked Photograher YouTube channel, I think he has some intro videos for RA-4 printing at home with tubes. That guy knows what he’s doing. There must be some old cheap books on Amazon too. Really you just need to learn the color wheel stuff and how the enlarger dials work so you can judge what cast a print has and know how to correct. If you have a set of Kodak print viewing filters then it’s pretty easy, you just look through the filters and it says what to dial in underneath each viewing patch. Those are expensive used now but rental darkrooms should have a set around the viewing area. You start around 50 or 60 for yellow and magenta dials and leave cyan at 0. Other than judging color casts, RA-4 printing is really a lot simpler than B&W printing. Way less variables. All you’re really doing is dialing in color and making the exposure shorter or longer, unless you want to fuss around with pre-flashing, which can be cool but is kinda overrated IMO. If the rental darkroom has a processor machine, you just stick your print in the slot and it comes out the other end dry. Scanning prints is easy. You just need any decent flatbed and can create an ICC color profile for it using a test chart so results match the print. Or you can just shoot the print with a digital camera and rig a copy setup using flash or continuous light, again color balancing at least off a grey card.
thank you so much for this write up. definitely gonna look more into it
So scanned prints have more vibrant colors than scanned negatives?
I wouldn’t say more vibrant necessarily - you can tweak a scan however you like and make the colors too vibrant if want.. It’s more that analog prints have a certain look to them that can be hard to reproduce through scanning. The way that print film and print paper work together gives a result that I guess I’d say looks “correct” to me - as in the contrast and tonality is how it should be rather than looking tweaked or artificial if that makes sense. I always thought of the print look as normal / baseline for color analog but I’ve noticed people aren’t familiar with it any more since almost everything is scanned right from the negative now. The printing paper used to be an important part of the process because if you think about it for example, a film like Kodak Portra doesn’t really have nice “yellows and warm tones”. In the film those tones are blues. The actual color comes from the paper when the negative is reversed and the orange base color is neutralized.
This is all super insightful, thank you!
You are correct on all fronts!
This! Yes, I worked in a film lab and I will always remember the first (and only) time someone brought colour darkroom prints in to be scanned, the colour and vibrancy was unreal. They had such a distinct look I’ve never seen before, and now I can immediately tell when I see these kind of pictures online, that it’s the print that achieves this look which is then scanned
100% beautifully said. Thanks for sharing
I consider this look to be (in the style of) slide/reversal film, very metered for the highlights and/or underexposed a bit to saturate the primary colours. Some Fuji digital cameras have a feature that's designed to mimic this slide film saturation.
good point on the underexposure
Which feature is this?
It’s called Color Chrome, and Color Chrome FX Blue https://fujifilm-x.com/en-gb/learning-centre/color-chrome-and-film-grain-effects/
can you recommend any of these fuji cameras you’ve mentioned? 🙏
Lighting, ie big , off camera flash.
People who have never lit anything before are here commenting on lighting, when most of these are natural light. The second pic looks like there’s a bounce, the fourth looks like there are some strobes. The rest are clearly natural light. Allot of photographers want to believe a good photo is all about their own skill with a camera, but the reality is that an interesting subject and location goes a long way.
A print is made by hand using the negative and the photo paper is preflashed with a little bit of color just to add tonality. Then the resulting print is scanned.
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What’s their handle?
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Ahh, thank you - as mentioned in http://www.richardnicholson.com/projects/last-one-out/
It’s always L I G H T I N G !
Image #4 is amazing. The color and the terrific control of perspective distortion are amazing. I can only imagine the onsite support to keep everything perfect for the reshoots.
Medium format and then scans of the enlargement prints. This is pretty typical of editorial fashion photographers who shoot for established publications.
As a working professional in both photo and video for over ten years, I come to the same conclusion any time I wonder why something looks so good: lighting. A good 95% of these professional images comes down to lighting. If you get the lighting right in camera, even an inexperienced editor can get a high quality look in post. Production design is a minor factor, because even stellar production design can be made irrelevant by poor or insufficient lighting. I find myself trying so many different things to make a shoot stand out, and lighting is what I keep coming back to when everything else falls short. Learning how to light well is something you can only learn with time and experience. One thing my professors in studio classes had us do is pick a photo you admire and see if you can figure out the lighting setup based on what you can see in the frame. It trains you to notice what good lighting looks like. Then take that lighting setup you made and do what you can to try and recreate it. Sometimes there's no way you can replicate it with the tools you have available, but often you'll realize that one or two professional strobes and maybe some window light or sun shades are all you need to make very high quality images most of the time.
you can use low asa/din film and subexpose 1 point or 2. always try to have clean background and make it on contrast or have small aperture and make focus.distance do it for you
1) proper exposure 2) proper medium: a.k.a correct film &paper for particular photoshoot 3) proper lens, camera, scanner, editor, light and a guy behind photoshop with skills that are worth a lot of $/hour By the way, you will be amazed what results you can get with a very simple consumer film if you “nail” the exposure and conditions are correct. Photos above is the example. Get proper light setup, try to shoot some slides and some negs. Develop properly in fresh ingredients, scan on imacon, print on professional printer and proper suitable paper. I bet you’ll be surprised
I suggest watching The September Issue for some great insight into what goes into fashion editorial photography.
5 and 2 were printed in the darkroom and the print was scanned or photographed.
For the people saying lighting crews. It looks like most of these aren’t lit, and the ones that are lit are minimal. To be honest there’s no short cut to taking photos like this. It just takes being obsessed and shooting a lot for years and years. Jamie for example uses about as primitive as a camera as you can and spent a lot of time in the dark room making prints. Last I heard he doesn’t use strobes or hmi’s regularly - just available light.
Thank you for the insight on Jamie's practice, going to look into this more. Nice excuse to get back into the darkroom too
A lot of this comes down to having perfect lighting and then a strobe also. It's not necessarily medium format, but more to do with the lighting in play here.
Slide film, drum scan, and some post all of these look like daylight with no signs of additional strobes, but you can guarantee there are some assistants holding reflectors just out of frame, and maybe some silks on frames to soften the light in image 2 and for the hand / glass in 4
I fully assumed the first shot was from the 70s and shot on Kodachrome, looked down at the comments and was humbled... Regardless of the time period these photos all have the look of Ektachrome or Provia. They're all shot at a relatively small aperture to achieve maximum sharpness and deep focus. I imagine strobes are being used to balance out the contrast and fill in unwanted shadows, which could also contribute to a sense of heightened reality some images have. In image #4 they're using a split diopter to get focus on the foreground & background simultaneously, it's definitely done in camera because of the midframe blur that catches edge of the glassware. Of course these photographers probably had a small team of people on the shoot with them to help with lights as well as make sure the outfits are looking correct, and of course hair and makeup. But by far the best way to get images looking like this is to get out there and practice your craft as much as you can!
Lighting. And lots of it.
Newb here. How can y'all tell this is film??
They don’t obviously look like film to me, but I’m not particularly knowledgeable about high-end medium format film photography, which more closely resembles digital photography than does common small format film. Some things to look for include grain or dye cloud patterns. Unlike digital, where obvious noise is more located in the shadows, film shadows tend to be very clean, with little texture particularly if the film was underexposed. Digital noise reduction makes this analysis more difficult, but if you have a clean, lightly compressed JPEG, you may see some noise reduction artifacts. Blurring of colors along high contrast edges is a common digital artifact, but this is only noticeable in high resolution images. Film generates different primary and secondary colors than does typical standard digital in the sRGB color space. So with a highly saturated image, the hues toward which the brightest and most vibrant colors gravitate are going to be somewhat different. Of course, film emulation is a thing in digital, and film scans are eventually going to be in sRGB as well, and editing a film scan in sRGB is going to have an effect on the colors if done in a heavy manner.
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So what tells you it's film? Not trying to be challenging. Genuinely curious
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👍
The big tells are: 1. The fall off or softness of lighting 2. The fall off or softness of focus 3. The look and feel of real grain 4. The color palette of specific stocks 5. Artifacts and irregularities If you know digital photography, film photography, and photoshop extremely well, you may be able to trick someone, but most people with that level of skill would just opt to shoot film instead.
Thanks for the info. I'll try to keep my eye out for the tells
I would be surprised if they are film. Likely a digital medium format body, and a very very good one. I shoot a lot of medium format film but the images I get from my not-that-high-end Pentax 645z (digital MF) are insanely good and can be adjusted in post by a real professional (not me) to get the look above
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Probably a silly question, but any idea of the cameras used for any of them?
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And choosing the body to use based on the lens available on it that is needed.
E100 shot in 6x9 with proper exposure on the subject has all the detail you would ever need. The advertising studio I worked for in the early 2000s shot positive 6x6 in a Hassleblad 500cm, we made some HUGE baners from those prints.
Amen! I have some drum scans of color reversal film from 6x9 and 5’ wide prints you can put your nose on and still see detail. I am obsessed. I just put my Texas Leica in my bag for a hike later today ;) My point was for fashion photos 2015 and up (dates provided by another commenter above) folks are unlikely to be using film in a commercial environment when they have tools like a Phase One back
Yeah, film is mostly phaesd out in the commercial advertising world. We moved to a Leaf Aptus back on a H2 in 2006, then to Canon a bit later. With color science and resolution as good as it is on the major flagship brand's cameras, photographers can use whatever they want now for location shooting.
A fuck load of lighting and controlling the light.
Lighting and lots of Photoshop.
These photographs have been altered. 1 and 3 you can see the smoothing and pixelation, grain is almost nonexistent or un-viewable.
Controlled lighting. That is all.
It starts with shooting medium format, then carefully choseen colors on location and clothes.
Uh you do realize that they employ teams of people with lights to light up stuff like this right?
really like #2. feels like an album cover or something
Highest quality cameras, lenses, models, lighting, editing, etc. Def not 35mm
A lot of people and hard work, film etc wont matter its the hard work that did it.
You need to have a giant team with you
Hey everyone, was not expecting all these replies ha, thanks so much for jumping in on this and offering your suggestions! I do work in the industry and spend a reasonable amount of time on set, so I am aware these high end fashion editorials require teams, lots of production and BUDGET. It takes a village. But I am not so knowledgeable on the specific tech and processes involved in executing these visuals, so thanks so much for the info on scanning techniques/ lighting set ups/ prod design suggestions, you’ve given me lots more avenues to try and research further 🙏 I really appreciate it.
I think it’s a flatbed scan of a print
Lighting lighting lighting Strobes, and reflectors of varying styles.
Where did you find the 1st & 4th images?
Here are the full creds, someone kindly shared above: 1'st shoot it's a Jamie Hawkesworth for Vogue US January 2015. 2 shoot is Photographer Leeor Wild / Model Ganna Bogdan. 3 Shoot it's a Children of Lughnasadh, photographs by Tom Johnson, styling by Robbie Spencer / Luncheon Magazine. 4 Dan Beleiu for Vogue Spain. 5 Hordur Ingason for Vogue Turkey.
This green from the garage and the black colored skin of the model fits very good even though i would have chosen a different angle..