Redscale is the name given to a technique in film photography where a normal roll of negative film is respooled back-to-front in film cartridge so that when it’s loaded into the camera the back of the film is exposed first. This results in the colour sensitive layers of the film being exposed in the opposite order from what is intended which results in photos that contain a lot of reds and yellows and not a lot of blues and greens like this one by PhotoDu.de.

no right turn

Before you get started you may want to familiarise yourself with the look of redscaled film photos at the Lomo redscale gallery or over at Flickr. As you’ll see, there isn’t a consistent single colour range in all redscale photos and the range of colours and saturation varies depending on the subject and the type of film used. Equally we have flexibility in recreating this look in Photoshop to apply it as much or as little as we like and with the range and saturation of colours we choose for the particular photograph we are editing. Here’s our starting image by Hamed Masoumi…

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All we have to do to give it a redscale look is add a Color Balance layer and then increase the level of red and yellow in the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights one by one.

redscale_color_balance

The amount you change the colour balance in each of the tonal ranges will depend on the particular photo and the final look you’re aiming for but generally you’ll want to boost the reds more in the shadows and avoid increasing the yellows too much in the highlights to avoid blowing them out. Here’s our image with a moderate redscale effect once the color balance has been adjusted for all three tonal ranges…

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It’s up to you how extreme you want the redscaling to be. Here’s the image again with some really bright reds and yellows…

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