The analogue film look as in photos of Monaris is a widespread look that is relatively easy to achieve.
The most important two elements are:
- Attenuation of high frequency contrasts especially in midtones and highlights. Various methods can be used for this. The easiest way is with a contrast equaliser.
- As far as colours are concerned, roughly speaking rotation of blue towards cyan and red towards orange - very popular teal and orange look. This is practically channel mixing and can be done with channel mixer or RGB primaris.
To take Steven’s example photo, you always start with white balance:
You can then use a contrast equalizer to calm down the texture:
This means you lose a little of the global contrasts, which can be enhanced again with the color balance module. For example, in this case with global offset and highlights gain:
Now you can turn your attention to colour grading. For teal and orange, one instance of the rgb primaries module is sufficient. I will first move it over the tone-mapper (Sigmoid in this case) because I want to avoid “distorting” the colour settings in Sigmoid. I’m practically working on a fully formed photo whose colour mood I want to change additionally.
Now I move the blue primary in the direction of cyan, which also shifts red in the direction of magenta. This also makes the yellow tones a little more orange. And that is more or less the basis for teal and orange:
Now it’s all about creating the greenish-bluish colour mood that Monaris’ photos have. So the entire colour composition must be shifted in this direction.
Accordingly, we select a colour with hue tint slider and move the white point in that direction using the tint purity slider:
You can refine it and adapt it to motifs. In this case, I could make the shadows a little bit more bluish to create an even colder impression and so on:
