Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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How were professional photos edited in the 70s-80s (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by paint3dbird@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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was looking at some old photos of Kate bush, Stevie Nicks, and some other celebrities photoshoots from that time period and admiring the glowy affect or the purple and red colour palette on the photos wondering how I can achieve that same effect and then I realized that they did not have online editing software or even internet but the photos still look very nice and not like raw images I usually see. This may be a dumb question, I am not a photographer and do not know much about all this stuff but I am just curious.

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[–] mrfixitx@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Outside of the darkoom there were a lot of in camera techniques that could get what you are describing. Colored gels over flash heads, colored lens filters, colored reflectors, and intentionally using films with different white balance were some of the techniques used prior digital photos/editing.

Here is a great example of playing with colors by using a colored lens filter and colored gels on a flash. Resulting in a beautiful purple sky because of the lens filter but with natural skin tones because of the gel on the flash.

The details are in Joe McNally's the Moment it Click's book which I picked up years ago. A lot of photos in his book he talks about how he accomplished them and most were shot on film.