Creating Looks - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 403

Cross-Processing Visualizing Tutorial
The cross-processed images provide an excellent resource for an important tutorial exer-
cise. Look closely at the base images and the cross-processed looks and try to describe
the differences in the images. Be specific about how different things are affected by the
process. How is contrast affected? What about highlights? Do the blacks or highlights
become cooler or warmer? Do the highlights or blacks clip or lift? What color shifts
happen in the warmer colors? What color shifts happen in the cooler colors? What color
shifts happen in the midtones? What would you name this look if you didn't know if had
a name already?
All of these exercises in describing the image help you become better at commu-
nicating looks with DPs and directors. It also helps develop your eye for observing the
changes in images. A lot of being able to recreate a specific look that you see in a
magazine, TV ad, or movie is dependent on your ability to simply describe the image and
how it's different from “reality.” If you can't describe it, it will be very hard to recreate.
Another exercise comes from Festa's description of his Brazilian Silver look at the
beginning of the chapter. New looks can be created by combining looks. His Brazilian
Silver was the combination of a hi-con black and white with a bleach bypass. Why not
combine a saturated hi-con look with glowed blacks? Mix and match and see what
works. And if a look doesn't work, try it on an image with a radically different “base”
colorimetry. Sometimes an interesting look works only on images with—for example—
small areas of deep blacks, but if the image has a lot of deep blacks, then the look fails.
So before you give up on a preset look that you're trying to create, test it on several shots
that are radically different—cool, warm, contrasty, flat, dark, light, saturated, desat . . .
you may find the perfect combination. See Figures 10.6 - 10.10 .
Skip bleach and bleach bypass are processes in which the film is
either not bleached at all to remove silver or is partially bleached, leav-
ing various amounts of silver. The remaining silver increases the con-
trast of the film. Wherever there is more developed dye, there is more
silver, so you get higher-contrast, blacker blacks and less saturation
( Figures 10.13 - 10.15 ).