What Digital Can’t Do, Part One: Redscale

From the moment I learned about redscale, I was intrigued by the simple ingenuity of using the film base itself as a filter by loading it into the camera with the emulsion facing backwards. With the appropriate subject matter, the aesthetic could be quite compelling, and it seemed a wonderful reason to continue shooting with film.

But curiosity got the better of me, and when I accidentally used a Cokin Orange #A002 filter, (which I usually reserve for adding contrast to black and white images) on a color image, I noticed a similarity. So now I’m on a quest to find a way to shoot redscale with a digital camera. And the orange filter gets me in the ballpark.

Digital image captured through an orange filter; first attempt at digital redscale.

The results vary widely depending on the white balance, exposure, and the camera’s contrast, hue, and saturation settings. So, with an orange filter installed, I can get many different effects. An incandescent white balance, somewhere at the low end around 3500K, yields a shapely, “colorful’ image comprised of browns, reds, oranges and yellow-greens. A white balance towards the high end of 6,000K, such as flash, yields a saturated, relatively monochromatic image comprised of reds, oranges and yellows. The results can be quite unpredictable, not unlike redscale film, but they can also be quite controllable as well. For example, I might shoot a cityscape at 2500K to get as much shape and color variation as possible, while a sunset would look spectacular at 5500K, where it would display an intensely saturated collection of reds, oranges and yellows.

The first thing I noticed about my attempt was that it was a lot brighter and a lot cleaner. Despite using an orange filter, the neutral highlights were yellow, just like rescale film. But I also learned that using active D-Lighting was a no-no. It lightened the shadows, and forced browns to become a bright, saturated, shapeless red. So there is much work ahead to perfect the technique.

Could I make the image look like redscale using Photoshop? Pretty much. I’ve already created an action to convert a regular image to “redscale” using the channel mixer. But I really want to try to get it as close as possible without any post processing.

Do I think it will ever faithfully reproduce the effect captured on redscale film? No. Can it capture the overall feeling of a redscale film image? Maybe. Is it worth pursuing as a creative form of digital photography? Definitely.

Will I continue to roll my own redscale and perfect the technique on film?
Absolutely. And here’s why…

   

Kodak Gold 200 rated at ISO 100, redscaled.

To be fair, these images are a bit underexposed despite rating the ISO 200 film at 100. Next time I think I’ll keep the same rating, but open up a stop. The digital image on the other hand used used active D-Lighting, so it’s not a good example either. But, I think there’s potential.

Incidently, the square format image was photographed with the Nikkor 16-85mm f3.5 (a DX lens) on the N80 body. As you can see, if you crop it for a square format, it removes the vignetting and works just fine. So, it makes a nice, super-wide lens for my Nikon film body. I could also have cropped it for a 16mm x 24mm frame size, which also would have eliminated the vignetting and given me a landscape format.