https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhotography/comments/125114x/how_do_photographers_create_this_saturated_soft/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=20&utm_content=share_button
This was a surprise to see pop up on my feed - I can tell you exactly how these were made, as I'm the photographer who shot them. Few different techniques going on depending on which image you're talking about so I'll try to go through them.From the start: All the images were shot digitally. Images 1 & 4 I had a 1-stop green resin filter on the camera (in order to get more intensity out of the reds and yellows), the rest were unfiltered.
Image 1: Was flash: Large Westcott umbrella coming from behind camera to balance against the sunlight. From memory might have had an assistant with a bounce on camera right too, just to wrap the light a touch.Image 2 & 5: Mix of daylight and tungsten continuous light. As I remember it, I had a HMI through a 12x12' silk to camera right, a Aputure Lantern at a 45 degree above the model, a ARRI Redhead on a dimmer w/ diffusion that I used more-or-less intensely depending on the shot to add warmth and shape the light on her, and then lots of black polyboards camera left to deepen the shadows.Image 3: All daylight continuous. Aputure Lantern was the key light, think I had a small softbox on his lower body just to raise exposure. Medium softbox as a back/background light (spilling on both). Then black polyboards on right side to deepen shadows.Image 4: Daylight with a bit of bounce camera right
This is the biggest element for the "look" you're talking about. There's a lot of adjustments and very specific choices I make that go into the general feeling of them, so it's difficult to talk about them all. Broadly speaking, I like deep shadows, crushed highlights, bold reds and strong contrast. Blues, greens and skin tones I do more on a case-by-case basis. I use Capture One for the initial grading and export (which takes the image about 40% of the way there), then Photoshop to complete the rest of it. Almost all of my adjustments are made using "Curves", "Selective Colour" or "Hue/Saturation" and either masking it across the photo, or using "Colour Range" to apply whatever the adjustment is selectively.
Images 1/3/4 are also printed/rescanned/re-edited on. I find straight digital can feel a bit sterile at times, so I'll often print my photographs in order to soften them down and add a bit of texture. Spent years using a cheap printer and simple paper, these days I've got a more expensive one and better papers but I'm unconvinced it's objectively better - Just different. Process goes export digitally > retouch in photoshop > print > rescan > re-edit in photoshop, as the printing process moves around colours and tones, and so requires adjusting back to being "correct".
One more thing that I think is worth talking about, that often isn't mentioned very much in online discussions of photographic practice, is that all these decisions don't come from a place of "trying to achieve a certain look" - They come from a place of taste and opinion that I've built up through thinking about the kind of feeling I want to create, and the sort of story I want to tell. I've always liked the organic nature of paintings, so I started printing in order to take the images from pixels to ink. My processing is often quite chaotic, where I'll have dozens of adjustments (Image 1 had 19 in digital, and then 20 more in the print) that all do subtle different things, which I'll then "paint" across the photo, similar to how a painter might build up tones using layers of paint across areas of the canvas. Almost never do I think about my own "style" - I just think "Does this look right or wrong?", and by the time it looks "right", its invariably fallen in line with everything else I shoot... and that only comes about from making a lot of photographs.Anyway hope this helps and glad you liked the images.
Happy to answer more questions if you've got any too.
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