How to Capture the Retro Flavor of Summer in Photos

Lazy afternoons, faint clouds, and the glaringly bright streets. Summer scenes are always full of memories, like old photos.

These unique summer flavors are very suitable to be expressed in a retro and nostalgic style. So today, let's share with you how to capture the retro flavor of summer.

1. Grasp the retro elements

When some elements appear in the picture, our minds will unconsciously think of the summer more than ten years ago, such as old black and white TV sets, old fans, and cattail fans on rocking chairs, etc.

These items with a sense of memory are very suitable to appear in summer retro style photos, and the flavor of the photos also comes out all at once.

Indoor shooting with these elements, combined with the soft light at dusk, as if returning to the childhood summer all at once.

2. Tones

Each color has its own characteristics and meanings. If you want to combine summer and retro, yellow is very representative.

Yellow itself has a sense of retro and memory. The yellow scene will give people a soft and warm feeling. Therefore, when we shoot summer retro style photos, we can make good use of this color.

For example, when choosing the shooting scene, you can choose the evening with soft light, or use warm light.

In the later stage, the color temperature of the picture can be appropriately increased to enhance the expressiveness of the orange-yellow.

3. Brightness

For the retro style, the performance of shadows is particularly important.

There is almost no dead black area in many retro film-like photos. The shadow part has a feeling of hazy and grayish, which also brings a kind of air feeling to the whole picture.

This effect can be achieved in the later stage through the curve tool. The leftmost side of the curve controls the dead black area of the picture. We can appropriately raise it, and the shadow part in the picture will also be brightened accordingly.

In addition, the uniform high short tone also has a unique summer retro feeling, just like the style of photos below:

Except that the colors are mainly warm colors, the characteristics of these photos also lie in that the picture is mainly in the middle and high tone, and there is almost no dead black area, looking very uniform and soft, and also has a taste of summer.

4. Noise

In normal shooting, we will generally try our best to avoid the appearance of noise to prevent it from affecting the photo quality. But noise is not useless. Sometimes its appearance can bring some interesting textures.

For example, in some film photos, we can vaguely see the existence of noise. The roughness of these noises will shape some sense of the age and strengthen the air feeling of the picture, thereby enhancing the retro flavor.

In shooting, it is difficult for us to accurately control the performance of noise. However, it can be accurately adjusted in the later stage.

For example, in the Lightroom tool, there is a grain option in the effect column. We can simulate the performance of noise by adjusting the size, quantity, and distribution of grain to bring some retro flavor to the photo and make the summer photo look different in texture.

This article comes from WeChat public account: Play Some Photography (ID: wakexiao), author: AGER