How To Get A Timeless Color Look, Circa 1998
Get Instant Pop And Beautiful Skin Tones With This Quick Photoshop Hack
For many years, I was primarily known as a black and white photographer, mostly because my color work just didn’t have the same kind of timeless quality to it. I don’t know how to describe my old color work other than it just seemed a little bland. Then I learned how to get timeless looking color imagery, and today I do more color work than I do black and white. The secret in getting better color for me didn’t have to do with my post-processing, but in finding a far better starting place.
Grading color is a whole other ballgame than black and white. With BW, it’s all about how you convert and you can define a look primarily with two elements of your grade: contrast and dynamic range. With color, there’s quite a bit more going on, because of the complexity of color profiles. Color profiles were once a very very big deal. I was a retoucher in the mid-nineties and I had to deal with it constantly. Today, you can play with various color profile looks before ever touching a slider. This “bakes in” a look by looking at the entire color spectrum with a different “opinion.” This is fun to play with now, but once upon a time, the entire goal was to try to create one ubiquitous profile that worked everywhere.
