Giugiaro
Member
I've been looking over the years to make modern photos to look old when turned into Black and White. The simple method is to simply remove completely the saturation of the photo and maybe change the contrast a bit.
This method is... OK, but the photos still have that "depth" that good quality B&W photos and modern photos have. Skies also aren't full white unless we sort of ruin everything else on the photo.
Recently I came across the reason why development laboratories had a red light: Apparently old commercial film wasn't very sensitive to the red spectrum of colour, so this colour could be used for lighting without disturbing the exposed film.
When looking at old photos, indeed the red mostly appears black when the skies are pure white.
Source: CP
So I decided to experiment with colour curves to remove the red from the colour photo before removing the saturation.
This is the colour photo:
This is how it looks with normal B&W (No Saturation)
And this is the result with the red removed from the photo prior to removing the Saturation.
Notice how reds become dark and similar to the black painted boiler, like the original old picture above.
Since red was removed, around a third of light was removed, so exposure had to be compensated.
Also, given that full colour sensitive film could be mistakenly developed under red light, I experimented with what would happen if a photo negative got red bleached:
What do you think of the results?
This method is... OK, but the photos still have that "depth" that good quality B&W photos and modern photos have. Skies also aren't full white unless we sort of ruin everything else on the photo.
Recently I came across the reason why development laboratories had a red light: Apparently old commercial film wasn't very sensitive to the red spectrum of colour, so this colour could be used for lighting without disturbing the exposed film.
When looking at old photos, indeed the red mostly appears black when the skies are pure white.
Source: CP
So I decided to experiment with colour curves to remove the red from the colour photo before removing the saturation.
This is the colour photo:
This is how it looks with normal B&W (No Saturation)
And this is the result with the red removed from the photo prior to removing the Saturation.
Notice how reds become dark and similar to the black painted boiler, like the original old picture above.
Since red was removed, around a third of light was removed, so exposure had to be compensated.
Also, given that full colour sensitive film could be mistakenly developed under red light, I experimented with what would happen if a photo negative got red bleached:
What do you think of the results?