USING Filter for near B&W...

[John Atala]

Hey there, im shooting a scene in a dock at mid-day light conditions, and the director wants the colors almost not present, in other words, very desaturated... and a very dark sky. so, i decided to shoot it on KODAK VISION 250D - 5246 and later apply a desaturation to near B&W. here's the big question; Can i apply a yellow filter, a principle from b&w photography, in oredr to absorb the blue light, thus slightly darkening the sky? if i do so, will the color corrector be prohibited to use any color at all, thus it will be "contaminated" by yellow? Will the yellowish images differ once desaturated? or a red or even a polarizer would be of much more help?

 

thanks

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> Can i apply a yellow filter, a principle from b&w photography, in oredr to absorb > the blue light, thus slightly darkening the sky?

 

Yes. People have reported success with this technique on the forum before. 'course, it'll cost you stop. This assumes that you are not shooting some ancient formulation of non-panchromatic film, in which case it'd just get a bit dimmer (a lot dimmer if it was blue-sensitive only)

 

Edit - oh no, hang on, you're shooting colour stock. Should actually still work though but it'd be a wierd post correction. Begs a test.

 

Phil

[Michael Nash]

The near B&W part is what causes concern. If you're stripping out the color completely, then you could use a yellow filter to darken the skies just as you would in B&W photography. But if you want a just a little bit of color in there, then yes the image would be contaminated with yellow. If you starve the blue layer of the film too much, there won't be any blue information there to restore a normal color balance (or you might end up with added noise from an over-amplified blue layer). And it will probably take a pretty strong yellow filter to get the sky as dark as you want.

 

You could perhaps try an 85B filter, or even double 85B's to knock the sky down but not change the skin tones too adversely after desaturation. The only way to know for sure is to test.

 

You could try using a polarizer for the sky instead, although it's not quite the same effect. You might also have better luck controlling the sky selectively in telecine.

[John Pytlak RIP]

If you shoot the color negative film normally, and then telecine to a monochrome image, you can enhance the clouds against the cyan sky by taking all your information from the red channel, effectively equivalent to using a red filter during the photography. If you use only the green and red channels, it's akin to using a yellow filter with B&W pan film.