Velvia from Digital

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My workshop students often ask me how they can get their digital images to have the look and saturation that Fujichrome Velvia transparency film produces. With this tip I am going to give you a quick glimpse of my image workflow, along with how I get my image files to look like the once beloved film I used to use. This whole process takes me 10 minutes or less depending on the image.

I have to say that I have not been a digital photographer for that long. May of 2009 will mark three years. I was extremely reluctant to drop the colors of a film that I had used for 13 years prior. What I discovered though, was that using film for all of those years gave me the experience to correctly process digital files to look like what I was leaving behind. And once I jumped into the digital arena, I have never looked back.

Since this tip is really only about getting good color from a digital image, I am not going to dive into my workflow from start to finish. We are going to begin from the point just after the capture has been downloaded into my computer. The image below shows the file in Lightroom 2 were I begin to work on it. As you can see the raw file brought into the program is fairly flat, with little color saturation. Many have asked me why this is, and the answer is simple, Adobe wants all files to enter Lightroom in the middle of their range, not too flat or not to saturated. This allows everyone to adjust to their own specific shooting style. If I were a wedding photographer shooting skin tones, I would not be looking for Velvia saturation on my subjects.

I begin by making adjustments in the Develop component of Lightroom. I work from the top down in the adjustment menu at the right of my screen, starting with my white balance, then exposure, then saturation, and etc. This gives me an image much closer to what I saw in the field, but the image is still not exactly what I am looking for.

My next step is to open the image in Photoshop through Lightroom. On a Mac press command-E/control-E on a PC or by picking the Photo menu, then Edit In, then Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS3…This creates a new image file in the folder that the original raw already exists in.

I then clean any dust off of the image using the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Once this is complete I start to adjust my image with the adjustment layers functionality of Photoshop. This creates non-destructive adjustments to the Photoshop file of the original raw image. The new Curves layer in CS3 allows me to adjust my levels directly from with in it by clicking show clipping and dragging the black and white triangle sliders just above until I see the highlights and/or shadows show up in my image.

Once my contrast has been taken care of and any other exposure type adjustments that I feel Photoshop might handle a bit better than Lightroom, I work on my saturation. This is the point where you can kill an image by adding too much color, so I use a little trick that I learned when I was adjusting scanned film images. Under the View menu I choose and click View Gamut Warning on (command-shift-Y). This warning feature adds a gray mask to those colors which exceed the gamut of your color space, in other words colors that are too saturated. Now, I only use this as a way to access where my colors are headed, there are many times when a majority of the image can turn gray before I get the image looking the way that I want it. You can always print your image with the colors out of gamut, but that is another article all together.

As you can see, pumping up the saturation to +58 shows a bunch of gray around the eye of the sandhill crane, in addition, the image looks garish and way too saturated. Pulling the saturation back to +33 lessens the effect and lessens the gray mask of your gamut warning, but still adds the color that I am looking for that represents the scene as I saw it when I pressed the shutter release.

I then save the image, and close it. This brings me back into Lightroom where the new image loads right next to the original raw in my image library, the only difference is that the new image has the .psd extension of a photoshop image and all of my Photoshop adjustments attached to it. I then stack this image and the original raw in Lightroom by clicking the Photo menu, then rollover Stacking, then choosing Group Into Stack or command-G on my Mac. I then collapse the stack with the Photoshop mastered file on top and label the image with the color green so that I know it has been completely mastered. From this point I can open the file at any time and size it for printing, the web, or publication.

The beauty of all of this is that the files reside in Lightroom where I can search for them by keyword, location, lens, time of year, etc., with the click of my mouse. Here is the final image as I want it to be seen by the public. A sunrise shot of sandhill cranes flying through the air playing follow the leader.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 11:07 pm. It is filed under articles, photography tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.