I'm currently going through some photos I took at the beach yesterday, and I rediscovered a technique I found when I was first playing with Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Picture Manager is a fine little program - all it can really do is adjust color saturation and picture brightness, and that's all I ever need it for. But by tweaking the contrast settings, you can achieve a digital version of the solarization effect, which looks like this:
A photograph is typically "solarized" by applying bright light briefly to an exposed negative in the darkroom. The solarization effect had been discovered multiple times in history by different photographers who accidentally turned on a light in a darkroom and then found that their negatives had been altered but not completely destroyed. However, it wasn't widely used as an artistic technique until it was rediscovered by Man Ray's female assistant, Lee Miller. Man Ray subsequently used the technique extensively and pretty much got all the credit for it until a few decades ago.
I first found out I could replicate the effect on digital images when I was getting used to Picture Manager and fiddling with the dials. I found that if I cranked up the contrast and brightness and turned down the midtone all the way, the contrast of the image would reverse itself (bright becomes dark and vice versa). I found out today that you can actually re-solarize the image multiple times and get some interesting results:
I'll tell you how to do the effect yourself in Microsoft Office Picture Manager, although the basic technique will probably work in any image program with contrast controls. First open an image in the program and click on the button that says 'Edit Pictures...'
This will open up a menu on the side of the screen. Click where it says 'Brightness and Contrast.' The menu will change to show three sliders:
The picture on the left is what the menu will look like at first.
1. To solarize the image once, move the sliders so they match the picture in the middle.
2. To solarize the image again, first save the image, then move the sliders so they match the picture on the right. You'll notice that they are now in the opposite position. Just toggle them back and forth, saving each time, to keep solarizing the image until you think it looks good.
(Oh, and if you want to make the image black and white, simply click the little green arrow in the top-left corner of the menu to go back, then click where it says 'Color' and set the Saturation slider to -100 (all the way to the left).
I want to make it clear that I'm not revealing some super-secret info that only I have discovered. I'm sure many people found this trick before me. I just haven't seen any of them write a guide for it, so I thought I would. That's all.
