Experiment: Redscale

I tried using redscale film the other day (made it by putting the film into another canister backwards pssch why would I bother buying it when I had a spare roll lying around?). 

The problem was that I've never used redscale before and I didn't expose it properly and got confused about it. I expected them to come out red-y/orange-y/yellow-y as many examples I'd seen.

As I said before I'm not sure if I should have under or over exposed and because i'm an idiot I didn't write down my exposures/what ISO I shot at etc I'm going to have to do another trial to get it right. Amy you're a pleb...

These three images are all the same just edited slightly differently in photoshop. unsure if I should bother with them or just put them in a folder called 'failures' 

So this one is the original redscale image, as you can see the red came through as expected but clearly the exposure wasn't right as you can't see much detail.

I went and turned the image black and white and lo and behold a lot more detail was revealed, I guess the colour distracts you eyes from the tone of an image so you miss detail for colour (actually I remember learning about that in biology in your eye you have cone cells and rod cells cone cells are more sensitive to colour you have ones that are sensitive red, green and blue light and you need a lot more light to enter your eye to see in colour, and rod cells are more sensitive to any kind of light and work in low light to distinguish between light and dark I think. did that even make any sense?)

and this last image was just a bit of fun, playing around to see if i could get detail out but with colours, it worked(ish) but I lost the distinctive redness and there was a lot more noticeable noise than the black and white version.

©Amy Scott-Pillow all rights reserved

I have a Strange Habit

See the top image, I found it on deviant art and I thought, wow, this is an awesomely composed photo. Why oh why is it so orange?

so, it upsets me when i see an image that looks fantastic compositionally but then hasen’t been edited at all (it may just need some minor tweaking to show it's strengths) Often I see images like these print screen them and edit them to my liking, satisfied i'll then just delete them since it's not my own work.

My point is editing photographs is as old as photography, why do people just leave images like this? Basically I thought this person could have edited this image to get the 'true' colours out, rather than just leaving it, so with permission I edited it to get the colours back. (I assumed this was taken at night time lit by street lights from the orange hue and with no flash they used a high ISO hence the colours and the noise on the image)

I don’t know it just upsets me when there are great images not or badly edited.


My weird online habit, and now you all know.


original image credit [(X)]