About four years ago I stumbled across lomography.com.
I became somewhat obsessed with their gallery section.
I kept asking myself: “How are these people getting their colors to pop so much?! What’s their secret?!”

After some inquiries, I learned the secret was two-fold.

Firstly, these people were shooting with slide film and not the standard 35mm print film, giving them much sharper “negatives” (I put that in quotes because slide “negatives” are actually positives). And secondly, rather than having the slide film developed with the standard E-6 process, they would intentionally run it through C41 chemicals, which is meant for print film. This effect is known as “cross processing” (sometimes known as xpro).

While I was glad to discover this, its not like I can just waltz down to the local

one hour photo and get them to cross process my film.

Thus began walk down the path of the faux-xpro. One of the great things about Cross Processing is that there isn’t one right way to do it. Essentially you’re blowing out the colors by slightly oversaturating them and increasing the contrast of the image overall. Some of my earlier experiementations excelled at this, but never seemed to come off as good as I wanted them to be. Case in point:

Classic example of pushing the colors too far. I’m aiming to enhance what’s already there, not overpower it. After much experimenting, I believe I’ve gotten a better grasp on how to achieve the right level of color manipulation.

Here are some of my more recent works in which I’ve attempted to apply the faux-xpro effect:

So… more about my process!
Now with real film, each brand of slide film reacts differently to the process. I mention this to reiterate that there is no one way to go about it.
Let’s take a photo I took recently of my friend Heather (heretofore known as “the HP”)

It’s already a pretty good photo to start with (IMHO).. but if we just up the blacks (I’m using Adobe Lightroom FYI)…

BAM! It’s already looking a hell of a lot better. Now at this point, I would usually be tweaking both the contrast and the Fill Light levels as well.. but I think this photo already has enough range. It also has true blacks and whites and that always puts a sparkle in my heart, my day, my mind.
Let’s get into color manipulation! Vibrance! Vibrance! Vibrance! This is where I push it (in the Salt N Pepa sense) right up until the breaking point.
The breaking point being where the colors become obnoxious and semi-pixelated.

This is +65 Vibrance. I like it. Let’s move on to messing with the actual colors. One thing that took me awhile to learn was that trying to push green in a photo that’s full of reds will not work in your favor. I try to utilize the colors that are already within the photo and push and pull them as i see fit. Yellow, Blue, and Red are the three colors that stick out the most to me. Let’s start with Yellow.

I punched the Hue of Yellow +40 to make it brighter and +40 to the saturation to blow it out a little.

The reds are coming! THE REDS ARE COMING! Ok. Hue -61 & Sat +71 for the Cherry Kool-Aid effect that clashes oh so nice with the slit of blue sky above. Speaking of blues…

Even though I went Hue -100 & Sat +100 on the “Aqua” color, it is an extremely subtle adjustment to the image. At this point.. I could stop and call it quits.. We have a pretty decent faux-xpro’d image.. but lemme tweak some of the subtleties of the hand a bit more by messing with Orange a bit.

Ah HA! It was close to the edge… but now we’ve pushed it to the SylvesterStalloneJanineTurnerCliffhanger/AnthonyHopkinsAlecBaldwin EDGE!

Let’s COMPARE start to finish!

(for some reason ALR won’t switch the before/after txt.. so just ignore it)

Anyhow, I hope you have enjoyed this transmission.
Dr. Salvatron broadcasting live from Alcatraz.
OUT!