A New Color Grade For An Old Image

With all this downtime, I’ve been going back through my archives and reworking some images. Sometimes I’m using new tools that I didn’t have, along with new skills I may have developed since I made the first image. Other times, I’m reimagining the image, often through a new color grade, like I did here. The original image had a warmer and brighter color scheme. This time I wanted to go with a muted, slightly vintage look and a more melancholy feel. Because I shot this with an older camera that didn’t handle low light very well, there was some horrible looking grain and artifacts present as well. Since this is just an exercise, I gave myself a two-minute limit to see how much I could clean up using a few new tools/skills. I spent some time on the new color grade, since I’d like to save it as a recipe I can apply to other images. Continued thanks to the lovely Misty who was so often willing to model when I was testing some new idea, equipment, or skill.