The Dan Winters Style

[KevinCarter]

Curious, the thing I like about Winters work, is that is has certain painterly look but, not with the over-processed stuff you see that Jim Fiscus pionneered. Curious what Winters in doing. Is this in the lighting mainly or darkroom?

this from recent Rolling Stone:

[Noel_Carboni]

Tough to tell from a photo of a wrinkled magazine. My very first impression was that it was done on film, and beyond that... ? Do you know of any of his work online?

Edit: This seems to have some insights: Dan Winters [Archive] - APUG

-Noel

[David_Buzzard]

That look comes from shooting colour negative film (one of the last hold outs from the digital era is high end editorial shooters), and then under exposing it by a stop or so. That gives it a low key, washed out look. Annie Liebowitz is a big user of that technique as well. Often they'll use a large diffused light source, like one of those big florescent fixtures. Then they mess with in the darkroom, and in Photoshop.

David Buzzard's Technical Blog

[KevinCarter]

Thanks for great link Noel.
Also thanks David for great analysis.

HEre is another link, but mostly BW:
The Unpublished Dan Winters: Texas Monthly January 2008

Personally, I'm done with film, but I wonder if plug in like Alien Skin could help, is that the point of film, ie the grain? what film do you guess these folks are using, ASA wise?

YEah, I do notice Leibowitz gets this very cool low key arty look without it looking like the over-procssed goop you see out there so much.

Do you have a link to what a florescent fixure looks like? thanks

Can you expand on messing with it in PS and the Darkroom?

[Noel_Carboni]

I don't think film grain has all that much to do with the "film look", frankly. Certainly it isn't the major factor.

To me the "response curves" of film, especially in brighter areas, tend to define the look. Notice, for example in your Rolling Stone shot... First, the brightest skin tones are not all that bright - that's the underexposure part - but beyond that notice that the color saturation is maintained from dark to light quite differently than what we see with our beloved modern digitals... His skin goes almost to red in the shadows.

I believe it is possible to create a process for making a digital image look like that. A long while back I did an experiment where I took two images of the same subject, one with my Canon D30 (that tells you how long ago) and one with negative film in my Canon A1. I was actually able to make the digital image closely resemble the film one, essentially by degrading the digital image - with grain, yes - but also by fooling with color saturation, reducing the dynamic range, changing the brightness curves rather markedly... In short "artifying" the digital image, which by all accounts looked more like the real thing, into something reminiscent of what we see in film images. You aptly point out that Mr. Winters' image looks almost "painterly".

Do you think there's a need for software to make this transition at the touch of a button? I've long wondered whether a set of actions for making digital images "filmlike" would sell...

-Noel

[KevinCarter]

Neil: what does that mean, the response in brighter areas, you mean more detail?

Do you see a sort of glowish painterly thing there?

Do film filters (ie alien skin) take into account what you are talking about? Have you seen this software? it's selling well I think.

Not sure I follow on the color saturation, except with digital, everything would look crisp and bright, and not muted and pastel as we see here. But that would also occur with slide film. I even think print film is not "real" issue. Is seems more a moody thing , a glowish, painterly, soft, muted, pastel semi - blurry thing going on here. And Annie Leibowitz takes it to a more Photoshoppy look. Don't you think it's more in the lighting? Do you really think this would look that much different on slide film?
Can you post a link of your tests?

[Noel_Carboni]

I've been vague because, well, frankly I haven't put my finger on everything it takes to make a film-looking image just yet. I do know this: Where a digital would overexpose and turn skin tones wacky, film behaves way differently when it comes to the highlights.

I'll dig around and see if I can find those old images.

-Noel

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