I learned this concept from using film. But it alone is not a film look. Yry it in some real film looks, grab my FREE Filmist 2 presets min pack here... seimeffects.com/filmist

If you read a an oil painting color theory book (Munsell Student Guide) this is a principle that is important for painting. I call it the 80/20 rule. What that means is, an artist needs to identify the most prominent color they want the viewer to see. That color is higher in chroma (intensity) and can make up NO MORE than 20% of the surface area. The other colors are all lower chroma, or more neutralized because they are acting in support of the main color. Those neutrals are to make up the 80% of the surface area. This is what drives the viewers eye to what the artist wants them to look at. This is almost exactly what you did here and you can make it work for almost any visual medium. It just takes a little bit of observation and thought to determine WHAT you want your work to portray to your viewer. It can be used with any color combination as well. Learn the color wheel, identify main color, subjugate the rest of them.

Must admit I clicked on this video thinking,, 'oh lets see what the latest opinion on improving photos is....' sceptically, actually very very good advice, refreshingly so, and coincidentally there was a photo I've not developed in post since taking it because it just looked 'wrong' this advice set me on the right path and I'm happy with the result. thanks.

Oh man…I work as a large format printer, and our best looking output is when digitally shot pics have greens turned WAAAAAY down. CMOS Camera sensors have more green receptors for chroma/luma detail but they never print right-unless it’s dialed back. I’m constantly adjusting customer supplied images…

This video just gained you a new subscriber because instead of click bait it's actually great advice. Thanks

After watching 1000 irrelevant videos on editing photos, I've found this gem. Thank you!

I’m an independent filmmaker - I just subscribed to you after seeing this video - thank you for the great advice.

HSL has a huge problem: it doesn't know how to mix colors, it is so selective with green that if you have an out-of-focus background where green grass and cyan water mix, HSL will break the transition zone, generating two perfectly defined blocks of color. It is extremely unnatural and ruins the whole point of the tool. They are like Clarity halos, but with color instead of light.

Oranges and greens are problem for anything going to commercial print, because oranges and greens can't be printed well using a standard 4colour process print. Oranges often turn into muddy browns, greens into mushy greys, especially tiny foliage. That is why there was a fad to over-saturate them, and that fad still remains in many generic digital colour profiles, including RAW, and people are puppy trained to that ARTIFICIAL look of oranges and greens. With the invention of hexachrome print, they could be kept at a subdued level in original photographs, because two extra colour rasters (orange and green) in hexachrome print will push them enough in print, clarify them where needed by reducing interfering C and K rasters that make them dirty. But the hexachrome is very expensive. However, the damage is already done and it keeps repeating because they are *deliberately boosted* in digital colour profiles.

I literally discovered this by accident this morning colour correcting a digital render of people in a forest. I took down the orange a little and the green a lot and suddenly it looked real. It’s brilliant.

I’d consider myself still an amateur and I’m red-green colorblind but I’ve been addressing my oranges and greens like this for a couple years now so thank you for this much needed ego boost haha

I have to admit, I really like the over-saturation of greens that you get from modern digital sensors. Bright, vivid greens (and blue) just scream "joy" to me. But the surreal electric colours are definitely overdone. I know I overdo them. The result is that I usually end up with 3 very different drafts of my photos: Surreal colour explosion, muted, and surreal moody, and I can never tell which version I think is my favourite. Depends on my mood, probably.

Having a BA in commercial photography and communications, I come at KZfaq like I approach sitcoms on TV.

Very elegant in it's simple method! This was one of the issues they had to solve with the Technicolor system - they piddled around with the dyes in the transfer process to drop the green and red/orange that the dyes in the negative emulsion (essentially panchromatic B&W film) responded to a given wavelength band. Hence, you altered the color by changing the base points of CYMK dyes in the dye transfer process to match color test shots.

I can’t believe this came up on my recommended videos. I’ve just started with learning to adjust digital photos, as well as getting into film photography. I have been editing photos of bees on bushes. I kept thinking that there’s too much green, that it’s overpowering! Thank you for this, I’m going to go back and redo those pictures tomorrow with your suggestions. 🙏

Brilliant, Gav. I love how these videos combine the artistic with the technical. Great stuff.

There is a colorist/cinematographer whose work that I like named Tom Bolles. He's very good at what he does and isn't afraid of saturation. In his work it doesn't bother me like it does in the intentionally oversaturated example photo you showed. Obviously he is working with larger budgets than a portrait photographer so lighting is a big part of it, but he isn't afraid of hard light and saturation and that is what I love about his work. I think the reason that it works is because there is more hard light in his work and there is more of a "dense," "rich" feeling to the color palette. Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

You are sooo right about this. I actually hate shooting with anything green when shooting. Good info.

The "green pixels" on the Bayer filter double those of the other colors because the "green cone cells' in the retina cover almost all the visible spectrum. Yes it is for a lot of circumstances advisable to reduce the background when you want to stress the foreground subject, independent of colors, structures or what so ever. But if you have e.g. a person yellingly red dressed there could not be too much green and that green must not be reduced or an orange admidst green leaves... Look at paintings of Cezanne or van Gogh or Nolde...

On Trump portraits you also have to dial down the orange by 30 😂

This is really fascinating. I dialed down the green in a test photo and it did look more natural. I Googled an image of a Canon camera sensor diagram and it showed a block of pixels: Red - 9 pixels, Blue - 4 pixels, Green - 12 pixels! No wonder green is so prominent.

Bravo! It's a good lesson: 15 days ago I took some portraits in a private condition of the President of the Italian Republic, in a meadow with some plants where there was a strong green dominant. I shot with a Canon 6d helped by a flash and ISO 160. To obtain the tone closest to the Kodak Portra I desaturated the green and attenuated the orange as you advised without other adjustments

I actually did this just instinctually, it’s nice to have it explained in a video 😁 it always just looked nice to me

This is very true. I was looking at some landscape shots I had taken and noticed that certain colors (like greens) were quite saturated in comparison to most other colors (and this is without any editing just importing into LR with a Neutral or flat profile) and it's something I'm now looking for (really just colors that are more saturated than the others coming out of camera )and dealing with those first and then going on with my edits.

I've been learning myself that if you want a color to stand out more, increasing saturation isn't always thr move. Sometimes it will actually look more impactful if you tweak something else like reducing the luminance

I cannot thank you enough for this. I had completely unrelated problem with interior lighting and this solved it (just in yellow department).

The voice of common sense; so many photographers in post-process cannot delineate between a Digital & Analogue Film - & therein lies the lack of understanding in the characteristics of both; I shoot mostly monochrome, but this advice still applies - one has to recognise tonal & shade rendition to appreciate this dynamic. Short & sweet (solid) advice.

It's always nice to be reminded of subjectivity, like I was while watching this. I really don't like the look of the images you used as examples, I would personally never edit a photo to look like any of the ones you showed in the first 3min. Does that mean they're bad pictures, or that you're a bad photographer? Nope, but it definitely reinforces the fact that opinions and tastes very by a lot. The advice itself is good, just thought it's interesting how wildly different the end product can be while using the same advice.

I see many Nikon/Sony photographers struggling with those crazy orange skin tones... it's something what the image processor of those cameras do.. so the orange ("sepia") skin comes from that, I guess. Besides that, I do actually tone down the saturation of oranges at times, but when I use Classic Chrome sim, I don't actually need to... same goes with greens, but when I use Provia or Reala Ace, I would move down saturation, and lighten the oranges a bit

Kodachrome 25- late 1970s- celebrated film. Strongly saturated brilliant and deep reds and yellows, less saturated aqua blues, flat , dark murky greens.

Very interesting. Some weeks ago I was experimenting with desaturating green.

This is most evident in cinematography, which is often shot and lit in just two colours. Totally unnaturalistic, but highly credible as a storytelling tool.

Well it's look digital because it is digital. Both photos looks great imo.

Finally, some actual good editing advice. Thanks for the video man!

This is a great tip and will be super helpful for newer photographers. Good stuff! Personally, I've shot film and digital and don't see one as better than the other. I don't do the appeal to tradition thing. It's just a different look and style. In fact, the other day I was watching Moonrise Kingdom which is a movie by Wes Anderson that's shot on film. There's a number of shots where skin tones are in the Cheetos dust territory like the example you show in the video. It all comes down to what you want to express with the photo... the story.

When you apply color theory from classical painting, to photography, you can think in terms of depth, yellows and greens, blues and oranges, how and why we perceive things the way we do from a distance. The more information you pile on,, the more cluttered and 2D it will appear. The color wheel applies to photo images too when editing. In the sense that, color influences composition and vice versa, And how you can create more depth without making something look fake. You have to also take into account the character of your camera sensor and color science (I do) some cameras have nice blues with some magentas, some have terrible greens etc,,(I have different camera's for different type of images) but indeed, you build up from less to more, from background to foreground ... I do alot using luminescence, exposure, contrast, highlights, whites, curve (and perhaps a dial or two in the camera itself) to get a workflow going. ... now for B&W if do use presets or film styles,, because I'm not very good at consistently tuning and being aware, of what to look for, and to get the most out of each image, it's hard, the way information presents itself in tone values and contrast , I always doubt myself ,,, I can apply basic correction of course, but to get a consistent style and workflow and shoot beautiful images (you need a camera also with nice transition and microgradation) ,, anyway :-)

Yep. When you have a multidisciplinary background, photography is a totally different experience. I cant imagine not knowing how to compose an image both for structure and colour without really having to think about it.

Often when we think of a “raw image” we’re actually thinking of an image with color correction and gamma applied in accordance to some factory profile that has nothing really to do with what was captured, but rather what the manufacturer considers accurate and appealing. If you look at digital raw files without any color correction applied at all it is overwhelmingly green - to the point it visually appears monochrome. This is because color temperature (and gamma, which is linear directly off the sensor) are applied post-exposure. The green bias is because green is in the center of the visual color spectrum, so by biasing toward green you have the greatest range of color sensitivity regardless of lighting. Likewise the sensor itself (behind the mask) is naturally more sensitive to red and infrared. As a result reds tend to get more exposure. It’s for these reasons I don’t even trust exposure warnings or histograms in camera. They’re wildly inaccurate often pointing to over exposure a solid 1-2 stops under.

I almost never leave comments. Thanks for the incredible advice, I made that simple change to two of "my best" works and the tone is completely changed. I might have to go back and edit every raw I've ever shared ahaha. Cheers mate, 1+ for me

Great idea! I've been editing and outputting images for decades and today the lack of investment in decent displays, a controlled working environment and the lousy pads, laptops and phones makes it a devolution in tge end result.

I do a lot of cosplay photography and my job is to oversaturate a lot in Red, Blue and green, and a little bit in orange, but its also important to add luminance. There is a very thin balance between vivid and oversaturated. Most people in this genre add way too much orange and they dont guard their white balance. Resulting photos are gold-yellowish with unnatural colors on people. When its done wrong, orange or purple leaks all around into whites. But i did a lot of fantasy photos in forest and keeping green in check as you do is a usual thing to do. If you still want vivid look, play add a little bit of saturation on yellows.

Great stuff!!! Going to try it!

I...ive been doing this for years. I didn't understand what i what doing, only that adding by subtracting seemed yo help me emulate more filmic look of my peers using, well, film. I especially do it with greens. When i learned to "not get too crazy with it" i noticed i was getting results I liked a lot more.

Olympus gets this. The white balance fine tune is two colours, amber and green.

So true! Greens are luminous in so many landscape images from the so called pros! Great advice man! New UK sub!

This was amazing! Tried with some model photos and also with some mushroom photos and the result was really good! Thank you

Thank you. Worth a suscribe!

Yeah I’ve noticed this Nikon and Sony have loads of green, Fujifilm X-Trans sensors do have very subdued greens, very close t how loads of film stocks work.

and if you have fuji camera with x-trans sensor, Capture one is better, and I even found that for my liking is better when editing film scans as well

Best damn advice ever. I used to work in a little schlocky portrait studio. One day we went digital, horrifying. There too. But. There is still film.

Boom… I agree 100%. Maybe you could show a good way to correct color cast? (Green and Red)?????

Hysterical. I do the same general thing. The sats are just a bit too high by default, esp with turning off LR trying to bump up sat. It will be interesting as photo tools build in AI whether we will see sat turn down for non-essential objects.

Maybe i would be handy to just shoot digital in the first place, showing analog foto`s in a completely digital environment is kind of silly in my opinion. Kind of defeats the purpose, I think this kind of prooves the insanity behind the new anolog craze.

Thanks my D800 so green

I'm gonnna be honest: I'm like what @jergoes said up top. I was not expecting anything. I thought, Oh well. It'll be entertaining." But when I saw what you did, I went "ohhhhhhh," opened up lightroom, and uh, yeah. That's pretty much it. Too much green. Got it. ;)

This is the best! 🎉 Love it, this is what I was looking for!

Been using Nikons for years and they always bumped up reds/oranges. In skin yes, bu the worse are clothing/fabrics.

I can't stand the over saturation of all the in camera picture styles so created my own with 2 of the 3 custom spots with one for landscape and the other for portraits and both are as far negative as can go(-3) and for the most part after a lot of experimenting believe it or not ended up dialed in to a very good starting point and yes I'm aware what you see on the rear is a jpeg but thats what i save images as anyway once fully edited

Excellent method. Thank you!

Those four sliders indeed do a lot. However, digital sensors per se are a whole lot more true to real life now than any film ever was, especially negative. Any distortion can be dealt with a profile now that's made in a matter of minutes. Screens have become heaps and bounds more capable than any sort of printing ever was, except resolution. What you describe are all physical constraints (non-linear highlight rolloff and halation, e.g.) and technical limitations of the past - not some intentional quality. Sure, if one prefers the look, by all means, go for it. I just don't see it objectively superior and the whole film simulation trend is probably just another fad that will go by. I prefer to see images and movies that embrace what's possible today, not whatever inferior methods we've been used to in the past.

Is this "cinematic", "cinematographic", manually focused lens/camera, ... - talk not just a distraction? Why should I care if someone took a photo with a film camera? Is that supposed to be an excuse for bad pictures, lack of composition, etc.? And why should I pretend that I used a film camera, when I used a digital camera?

Ah, someone who knows what he's talking about! Subbed.

There seems to be two trains of thought in this video. One being that separation between your prominent colors is important. Which is true, understanding that makes a huge difference when approaching a photo. The other is that this is somehow more accurate to film. Which is questionable. Which stock? What processes used to develop? There are plenty of film stocks that do highly saturate colors, greens, reds, yellows, etc. Tonal compression in film is important. But this is seemingly misrepresented here.

Why are people chasing after the "filmic look" all of a sudden? Where does that fad come from? I agree people oversature too much. We all did that in the beginning.

You are basically emulating color-density with the luminance slider on green, which is a good thing... I'm actually editing my photos in a very cumbersome process in resolve, with a lot of tricks I learned from grading, including color density :)

Thanks so much for this man, really cool tip!🙏

How do I do this on Capture One? Over there there is no color sliders but a color selection. And if I remember correctly that doesn't change the color channel but the color you see. I might be wrong, please help.

I know that CMOS bayer pattern has RGGB photosites and all that. But could it not be that in reality. It's the film that gets it wrong. But we just prefer the wrongness of film because it enhances skin tones?

Amazing advice! Appreciate you!

dude this is awesome thank you so much !! 🙏

Thank you!

So I guess the Capture One default takes care of this... default is 35mm film negative... No extra orange or greens...

Not necessary if you shoot Fuji digital cameras …just use one their film simulations tweaked for pleasing skin tones.

Absolutely right! Thank you!

Wow. Excellent. Thanks so much.

The hardest feedback to give is feedback that's not quick or instant to implement. People typically don't want to hear that they need to learn to see colour, and prefer things like set it to 5600k, use a pro mist, use my presets/recipe. You're fighting an uphill battle in those forums, man. God speed. 🙏

Had a question since you were using Olympus cameras and you can dial down the green and the control panel. Can you do that? Have you tried that and is that better than having to bring it in to Lightroom or any other program where you can just do it in camera?

Anyone else get the audio error at 5:25 ?

i've noticed this issue for a long while now, why can't they use red green blue white?

What I do when I photograph people is I lower contrast about 10% and I desaturate the color.

Awesome tip. ❤ thank you

Thank you for your advice ❤

There's some useful information here but it is too simplified and generalized. The "color drop method" is just one of many techniques to edit color but it will not "Improve ALL photos" as the title claims. What about landscapes? If I take digital photos in Redwood National Park, can I improve my capture by darkening the greens and dialing back the oranges? Not likely. That might resemble a "film look" but what film? Not one that most photographers would want. De-saturated redwood bark and ferns buried further into the shadows isn't what we're after. Back in the film days, I might have chosen a landscape chrome to do exactly the opposite. Velvia for example, was hugely popular with professionals. When I took special photos of my kids or a wedding, I learned to choose a pro portrait film optimized for skin tones (Caucasian tones more specifically). With film, you had 24-36 shots on a roll and a single ISO. If you didn't know about different professional film types, you probably shot an all-purpose Kodacolor or Fujicolor variant which also were prone to over-saturated skin tones. And unless you shot and viewed slides, the final product--the print--had a look potentially more dependent on the paper it was printed on and the quality of the chemistry the lab used than the negative film. Modern RAW captures offer a huge color gamut never available on film. So, good point here--how do you optimally edit that for a good image? There's no single answer. Most software gives you options to start off with a certain look. In Lightroom, one of the first UI controls in the Basic Develop panel is the Profile drop-down. There, you can choose portrait, landscape, and other options as a STARTING point, then go to the color mixer and other panels for fine tuning.

5:44 that's why film looks so good: I will argue that. Film look so good because we were looking at film for generations, 100 years. It's hard-coded in our subconscious. It is the look that is with us for generations it is passed by our genes from our ancestors. But why film is like that? Because the white chemistry works. They could not saturate colors more than it could. But some color on film are way more saturated than digital. That is why making film look out from a digital is always worse than having a film. We are truncating things. The same goes when we are shooting film in 2024 but then from the film moment we are truncating that the digital. In the end we are emulating some emotions. And with digital we have 100%: we can't go beyond that. So if you want that particular color stand out, we must subdue all others. In particular red color is very hard to reproduce in digital the same way as in film because of chemistry. When sunlight hits the paper the red color shines completely different way than when we observe the red color on a screen. We will maybe achieve the same effect when we will have artificial light that will be close to what the Sun is. For now the most screens are lit by LED dead are faking white color.

How many times can you introduce a video in the first few minutes?

Reminds me of when people use those photo booths in cvs tonprint thier digital pictures. Everyone looks like they're sunburnt to hell and the greens and blues have been squashed. It upsets my stomach.

Still can't figure out why people want to have the film look back. It was a horrible material falling short on nearly everything and people want the look back?

And there's Fuji, that has 10% more green photosites than Bayer sensor

Very helpful

How do you do this in Gimp ?

I thought all the heavy greens were that way because I read years ago that was how Japanese (Nikon) normally see. I have been fixing foliage for years. Leica seems to be a more true green but still needs.

I have fuji xt3 and never had this proplem

Eh, well there's been so many different types of film over the years, seems like you're going for an Agfa look with this but that's not a universal thing for film. Kodak Gold is a good example of a film that over-saturates orange in skin. I do agree that digital cameras way over saturate green though. One thing that people seem to forget is that some films were much better at capturing subtle gradation differences in colours which digital isn't great at but depending on your film stock, it could also push slightly different shades to be similar or completely off. My point being, there's no "film look", there's been hundreds of different films that react to colour and light in very different ways and none are what anyone would consider correct, it's just a matter of taste. Frankly though, you can edit the colours of that portrait till the cows come home, it's still a poor composition and an awkward pose.

And when you reduce green you add magenta without making magenta excessive. What's the difference between Filmist 1.9 which I have and 2?

Very interesting advice. Is this for portraits or can it be use on landscapes too.

Very cool.

Dig the crazy " The color out of space" tint to your studio footage. Is this ironic, considering the subject?

10-4 cool trick viva Mexico 🇲🇽

At around the 7:00 minute mark, it sounds like you are talking about luminance but adjusting the saturation slider. Can you clarify?

so why not to just shoot film instead? most are struggling with getting that 'film' look but they shoot digital instead huh. good vid tho