I just started shooting colour seriously, after playing with it off and on for the last couple of years.

I shot 3 models two nights ago at a bar, with my two metz lights and really cool, pastel clothing. The make up artist I used, while he did a great job, did nothing like I asked him (do whatever you want, I said, but use a pastel palatte). He used dark colours for everything (crimson lipstick and dark eye gunk); I was short on time, so I said to hell with it I'll shoot anyway. I was using Pro 100 film, and the first thing that entered my head was take an incident reading and open up 1 stop to place the make-up values a little higher in the scale. I am having the film processed normally. What should I expect? More importantly, when would you purposely re-place certain values if you are not putting them in their 'appropriate' zones, with colour negative and, more importantly, positive films; i.e., should I have taken a straight incident reading, and corrected in the print with underexposure and high contrast paper at the printing stage?

Thanks all.

shawn

-- shawn gibson (SeeInsideForever@yahoo.com), February 25, 2000

Answers

I don't think you are going to be able to fix this even if you spent a lot of time and effort retouching digitally. A lighter palette of makeup is applied a lot differently - which is probably why he didn't (couldn't) do it. You'd have better luck, digitally increasing the saturation of the outfits to match the makeup.

What you _should_ have done is get the makeup artist to do what you asked. (I watch while they are doing it in order to keep them on the right track.)

-- John Kantor (jkantor@mindspring.com), February 26, 2000.