The big trend right now is to make your images look like they were shot with cameras from the early 2000s and late 90s. For many photographers, this is a golden era of photography before it became corrupted and too manicured to the point of there being no white to the cuticles. Because so many photographers don’t want to pay lots of money for newer cameras, they’re buying the older ones. Plus, they’re reaching for good point and shoots that have smaller sensors and more of what the engineers have been considering to be flaws. Essentially, they want organic, misshapen produce. Here’s how you give your images the retro-digital look.
Turn off Noise Reduction
Digital cameras really didn’t get good at shooting photos above ISO 400 until the mid 2000s. And it didn’t become very common until Canon and Nikon really did a whole lot to change this up. So photographers needed to use noise reduction in Photoshop and Lightroom to fix it. So, to get your camera’s output to look more like those retro digital cameras, turn off noise reduction of all types.
Add Clarity, Sharpness, Contrast, and Saturation
When you’re editing your photos, be sure to just add sharpness, contrast, clarity and saturation. For many years, this wsa all that most photographers did until they started working with curves and color channels. You can do this in-camera if you wish.
At this point, it makes a lot of sense to say that the fewer megapixels your camera has, the better and easier this will be for you.
Embrace Lens Distortions, Turn off Lens Corrections
Over the years, cameras have added a lot of lens corrections in-camera. Turn them off. And more than anything, just embrace all the things that it gives your camera. To get the most from this effect, reach for lenses that are over 20 years old or so.
Lenses not only have distortions, but chromatic aberrarations, purple fringing, and so much more. One of the lenses that I remember really giving off this effect was the older Canon RF 85mm f1.8. Essentially, earliy digital lenses were oftne from the film era with the exception of images shot on Four Thirds.
Use Single Autofocus Mode and Embrace the Blur
In the days that the retro digital cameras are from, photographers mostly used single-autofocus modes and didn’t really use continuous autofocus. To be blunt, continuous focus kind of sucked back in those days. So embrace it and realize that sometimes your scene or subject won’t be in focus.
Turn off the HDR Mode
Lastly, turn off any HDR modes. Images from this era shouldn’t have a whole lot of dynamic range or a ton of color depth. All that comes in the 2010s in droves.
