I've been learning about cinematic colour casting, which I am hoping to use on my Zombie Shoot photos.
I found a great tutorial via Google: https://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/cinematic-color-grading/. I watched the video and followed along using one of my old photos as practice.
Here's the original:
For an image straight out the camera, it's ok.
For the first part of the edit, I created 2 Curves Adjustment Layers in Photoshop. One of these I changed the blending mode to Luminosity, and the other to Colour, and after messing around with them I ended up with this:
Now this looks better! The contrast is better, and it doesn't look so orange. I don't think the original looked orange, but next to this it does. The point of cinematic colour casting is to use complimentary tones to make the image pop. Often in films, blueish tones are used for shadow detail, while warmer reds are used for highlights and skin tones.
There was one last step I tried for this edit. I added one more adjustment layer, this time for Hue/Saturation. I went on each colour option and had a go at adding and subtracting the hues. This is what my final image looked like:
This one has much more exaggerated blue tones. It was amusing to compare the images by hiding layers - from the original to the first edit, the jump seemed very obvious, and again between edit 1 and edit 2. Yet, when I hid the Hue/Saturation layer and looked at edit 1 again it looks very tame!
I'm not sure the full on blue works for this image, but with my Zombie photoshoot I want the colour cast to be very obvious to give the images a defined feeling. I think blue would probably work best as it is bleak, cold, and a little evil. Purple and green may also work as they are slightly unusual and sickly colours.
