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Most of us who learned photography in school, learned basic black and white darkroom processing and never bothered with color. Or we tapped in and tapped out quickly. For one thing, there’s just more chemistry involved in color. But also, color processing has vastly more combinations of possibilities which, in turn, makes decision-making very complex. And it evolves in ways that black and white doesn’t — new film types equal new processing techniques. The complexity of it all made it an overly-technical endeavor that the majority of photographers were all too happy to leave to the labs. The occasional photographer, like Fred Herzog for example, broke the trend and blended the technical with the creative in highly-innovative, and defining ways. But most of us developed a gap in our understanding of color simply from not having our hands on the process. Consequently, we think in terms of film types and general overall looks, rather than with a true understanding of what’s actually happening to our photographs. And this gap has followed us into digital.
As the world of photography veered toward digital, the benefit to black and white photographers was simple: black and white becomes, first and foremost, a matter of desaturating. This takes but seconds. The rest is fine-tuning things like contrast and dynamic range. It’s not difficult, but it’s also not that different than our experience prior to digital. The leap makes sense. But with color, we knew less to begin with and so we ported over every bit as little to the digital processing of our color photography. We have the tools, but no conceptual platform that predates it to guide us. Filters, presets and profiles? Somehow, none of it feels personal to us the way “Portra 400” did. Which is probably why the industry of color grading, from VSCO to RNI, rely so heavily on the concept of film types. It’s the only way we really know how to talk about it and the closest thing we have to a foundational understanding of color photography.
