solarizing

[octopoli]

Hi roger , or anyone.
I am working on a small artist 35mm b&w project and we wanted to test the old photo technique or solarizing . Any idea if this is possible in moving image? thanks

[Roger]

That is quite possible on moving images. You might take a look at some of the day for night in 'Deliverance', for instance. It's not exactly Man Ray but it used a similar technique.

[Captain_Celluloid]

I always liked the solarized day-for-night in DELIVERANCE altho Zsigmond says that he doesn't.

It appears that the solarizing was an artifact that he didn't want -- he just wanted to darken the skies
and some of the highlights.

He tested at Technicolor using registered printers [ optical and contact ] -- I think it was a color inter pos [ sky area clearer ]
and BW dupe neg [ sky area dark ] at various densities printed together [ not sure if it was Bi Pack
or burn in. ] He liked the results and so did the director and producers so they committed to day for night.

Unfortunately, when it came time to release print the picture the powers that be [ or were ]
opted to save money and went with unregistered contact printers. This caused the mis alignment
of the sky "matte" and resulted in the solarization effect.

Interesting how stuff happens . . . and frequently seems to have to do with the relatively small savings of money
at the expense of quality.

Long story short; alignment would not be much of an issue in the digital domain.

-30-

[jeclark2006]

The specifics of 'solaration' when one is talking about old, like really old film materials, was due to the overexposure of the negative, to the point where rather than increasing density, density is reduced.

The technique used by Man Ray in the 30's involved exposing the print during processing to light, to induce the effect. I would imagine that the process for movie film would be similar to 'preflashing' the film, but during the processing... I only did this for a couple of still photo class exercises, as it is not 'my kind of technique'...

For digital images, one can get the dark outlines by a process of converting to B&W, then using a 'find edges' filter and adjusting the contrast to yield a 'high constrast' image, giving the image a 'lith' look, then layer that image on top of the continuous tone B&W, and everything being in registration, use the 'multply' mode on the high contrast layer, to cause the dark outlines to be seen, and because the non-edge area of the high contrast image is 'white' the multiply operation will allow the continuous tone image to be seen.

One can also apply a filter to the continuous tone image, to get the washed out effect, as desire.

This can be done for color images as well, but I'd tend to have the edge image a B&W high contrast image, and then the edges will be 'black' rather than some sort of rainbow color...

Additional filter on the continuous tone image such as Gaussian Blur would eliminate detail, and give sort of a surreal 'smooth' look.

Experimentation is in order...