I’m a lab technician at a photo lab that outputs a tonne of prints per day. We’re the only store in the area that uses a silver halide process rather than dye sublimation or inkjet so a lot of the older photographers come to us for prints because the difference in quality and colour fidelity is a game changer.
All this to say, I see a lot of professional photos in a given day and I see trends happening in different communities.
When I print couples’ wedding photos in particular I see a clear difference between young photographers and older photographers.
Older photographers that probably started on film do everything in their power to get a sharp, crisp image with natural looking colour, adding in their own unique colour profiles of course (I find their finished products more elegant and timeless overall).
Younger photographers my age are talented as hell, composition and posing of the couples are fantastic, I even quite like the different deep orange/muted green colour presets that they use - it captures the feeling of the event very well.
The one thing that ruins it all is that they all add an insane amount of grain to their photos in post-processing. To the point that it totally detracts from the photo and it’s all I can see. I understand that they’re going for a “vintage” look - but not only is there is a pretty stark difference between film grain and digital grain, but wedding photogs back in the day were hell bent on having as little grain as possible. I understand that it’s a trend just as the muted greens are a trend - but at least the muted green trend is somewhat original and belongs in this day and age. The fake film grain look just feels anachronistic and unoriginal to me.
I used to work in commercial printing, not photo printing but we printed A LOT of photos on brochures and marketing booklets and things. Even yearbooks for area high schools.
The grain thing was by far the most annoying thing I had ever seen. Being the person letting that run through your printing press and out the door was hard to deal with. Like so much grain that you’d think it had to have been done on accident or they used the wrong photo file by mistake. Like so much so that you would stop the job and call the customer to make sure they wanted that. lmao.
I’m a lab technician at a photo lab that outputs a tonne of prints per day. We’re the only store in the area that uses a silver halide process rather than dye sublimation or inkjet so a lot of the older photographers come to us for prints because the difference in quality and colour fidelity is a game changer. All this to say, I see a lot of professional photos in a given day and I see trends happening in different communities. When I print couples’ wedding photos in particular I see a clear difference between young photographers and older photographers.
Older photographers that probably started on film do everything in their power to get a sharp, crisp image with natural looking colour, adding in their own unique colour profiles of course (I find their finished products more elegant and timeless overall).
Younger photographers my age are talented as hell, composition and posing of the couples are fantastic, I even quite like the different deep orange/muted green colour presets that they use - it captures the feeling of the event very well.
The one thing that ruins it all is that they all add an insane amount of grain to their photos in post-processing. To the point that it totally detracts from the photo and it’s all I can see. I understand that they’re going for a “vintage” look - but not only is there is a pretty stark difference between film grain and digital grain, but wedding photogs back in the day were hell bent on having as little grain as possible. I understand that it’s a trend just as the muted greens are a trend - but at least the muted green trend is somewhat original and belongs in this day and age. The fake film grain look just feels anachronistic and unoriginal to me.
I used to work in commercial printing, not photo printing but we printed A LOT of photos on brochures and marketing booklets and things. Even yearbooks for area high schools.
The grain thing was by far the most annoying thing I had ever seen. Being the person letting that run through your printing press and out the door was hard to deal with. Like so much grain that you’d think it had to have been done on accident or they used the wrong photo file by mistake. Like so much so that you would stop the job and call the customer to make sure they wanted that. lmao.