I was using Provia 100F which is a Fujichrome Slide Film on the Yashica Mat 124G. 

I was quite excited to use this film as it comes quite strongly recommended for portrait style shoots. However, before shooting I was aware that the film stock is not very forgiving due to its relatively narrow exposure latitude. In effect, it wouldn't perform well if over exposed. 

The shoot day was quite  overcast which provided a natural softbox however you can see from the image histogram that the highlights have clipped. Alongside this, there is a slight reddish tinge to the image itself. 

Let's see how we can edit this in lightroom, the first thing would be to sort out the white balance and you can use the picker tool to select a point from the image to balance this from. 

Lightroom 2021 has new functions such as this masking tool. I am quite keen on reducing the reddish tinge to this image and bringing out the colours in the background.The image as is, is a little dull and would like it to pop a little bit more. It’s also an opportunity to see how Provia comes out with some tweaking in Lightroom 2021! 

The first step to achieve this would be to go ahead and use the masking tool in Lightroom. It’s pretty cool to see how it automates this. 

Now that Luke has been selected, let's scroll down and reduce this reddish colour by adjusting the saturation. That’s better, I don't want to go overboard on this so I’m going to move on to adjusting the graffiti backdrop. 

I’ll create a new mask and this time invert it so the adjustments only affect that graffiti. Unclick the overlay so I can see how the adjustments look. First, I’ll adjust the exposure, that looks about right. Let’s bring the highlights down a little too. I do like the ‘dehaze’ tool, you can see if you whack it right to 100% what happens but that is way too much so let’s bring that down to something more reasonable. 

Adjusting the shadows to see what it can lift out further, again just a slight adjustment here. I want those blacks to be a a little deeper in colour. The background is looking much more vibrant and richer than before. 

Let’s make a few final adjustments to Luke, bring up the exposure a little along with the shadows to get a bit more of an even look. Those reds still popping out a little so I’m going to bring that down a bit further. That looks good to me! 

Now when you look at these images side-by-side. The original image on the left looks flatter and dull where as on the right the portrait itself is looking more balanced and my goal to bring out the vibrance in the background has been achieved! Perhaps adjusting the red in the graffiti might add to it but I’m good. What are your thoughts on this edit, how would you have approached it? Do you edit your film images or not? Tell me in the comments below! Check out this video next! See you on there! 

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