Is Changing My Photo Editing Program Taking Me Back To Color?

Last year, when I became a member of SEC4P (the Southeast Center for Photography) I was the lucky winner of a prize draw the gallery did for new members. The treasure to take home was a copy of the photo editing program ON1. 

I played a bit with it, imported some photos, made some changes, but since I have a subscription to the Adobe suite I found changing to ON1 too cumbersome. And I did not want to invest the time to learn a new software package.

Since then, however, a couple of things have changed:

• ON1 just released a new version of their program, ON1 Photo Raw 2019.5, with quite some improvements in user interface and functionality;

• I also realized that from the Adobe suite I actually only use Lightroom, and not Photoshop or any of the other tools included in the package;

• There are quite substantial rumors that Adobe is going to increase the monthly subscription cost for the suite;

• Even without an increase in pricing, the Adobe suite costs about $120 annually. And since I didn't have to pay for my 2018 version of ON1, the only cost I had was for the upgrade.

So, I made the plunge.

First I culled all my pictures in Lightroom (discovering I had more duplicates than I cared for), and then imported everything into ON1. This was quite a smooth process, with just some minor challenges that were easy to overcome. This also learned that ON1's customer service is very responsive, providing answers and solutions.

Since I was busy migrating anyhow, I also took the time to rename all my image folders and images to ensure that going forward I had easy and consistent naming conventions in place.

And then was when it happened...

Going through all these images made me appreciate color again. Especially film color images.

If you are a regular visitor of this blog and my website, you will have noticed that over the last couple of months I gradually changed all my portfolio pages to contain black and white images only. And while I kept the color images in older blog posts, new posts only contain black and white images.

I just love black and white: it provides a different feeling to images and helps to focus more on the actual subject and on forms and structures without distracting colorful elements.

But then I looked at the film color images I rediscovered while culling and renaming my photos. They have a certain quality and feel to them that really adds a different dimension.

Do I, after all, like color images?

Do I like them!

Seeing, and liking, these colorful impressions of the world again created some anxiety: what am I going to do with my website; what am I going to do with my blog; should I bring all my color images 'back'?

To see if I really, really like color, I went to one of my trusted sources of information: YouTube. I watched a couple of photography documentaries, and two photographers and their work really stood out for me: Saul Leiter and Joel Meyerowitz. Seeing their work and the quality of their color images really made me fall in love again with color photography.

But not all color photography.

Back I went, into my own collection on my laptop. And I realized that it is the film color images that I really like. I compared several color film images with color digital images. And there is a difference. Even when applying some very good in-camera film simulations when using the Fujifilm X100F, the feel of those images does not match the feel, the 'quality' of film.

Just look at the examples in this article.

I do not know what it is. Maybe the quality of the grain, maybe the quality of the colors. Both probably impacted by the older lenses I have on my film cameras.

I wonder if others experience this same difference in feeling about digital color versus film color.

Whatever the case; I really like my film color images.

This conclusion has not decreased my anxiety. On the contrary: now I am even more unsure what to actually do on the blog and portfolio pages. I really need to think this through, before making changes that I might regret later. The regret most likely coming from the fact that I then would have to redesign parts of this website (again).

On an interesting side note: for some reason, I do not experience a similar big difference between film images and digital images when working in black and white. Although there definitely is a difference, it somehow doesn't seem that big, or maybe it doesn't seem to matter that much for me as with color images. The 'why' of which I might need to explore in the future.

Now, of course, I would like to first explore that color 'feeling' a bit more. This will be a challenge since I do not have any of my film photo cameras with me here in South Africa (but wait, maybe that would be a reason... Oh no, no more GAS please...).

So what to do now? Adding color, or not adding color?

Yes, something strange happened on my way to ON1. Something that possibly will have a big impact, not only for this site but for my journey in photography as a whole.