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I'm looking for some advice on achieving the look this photographer has:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yosigo/4670815511/
I love the style and tones of everything. Wondering what sort of thing, both on camera and with post-processing, that would produce this look.
On the surface, it looks as though he's desaturated the colors and maybe a little exposure bump. Here's an example, the first image is only white balance adjusted to daylight:
The second image is adjusted as +1.75 exposure and -52 saturation:
You can see the drop in color intensity, while retaining reasonable contrast, that the sample images you supplied seem to show. It's an interesting effect, but probably best used judiciously. Anyways, if that's what he's doing, the degree of change I described will probably vary according to the image.
Edit: A 3rd go at it using this action from Deviant Art. It looks almost cross-processed, but not quite.
Going on the rest of his stream, looks like he's shooting with film, probably a low-saturation film like Portra NC or Astia transparency film. If forced to guess (notoriously difficult) I'd pick Astia, slightly over-exposed. Going on this other photo at the same date/location, it's quite likely shot on Kodak Portra NC 800.
Lots of his other work seems to be fairly straight scans with minimal correction, and I've had similar cold tones with a lot of scans (though usually transparency film more than negative), as the scanner lightsource tends to be quite cool.
So, to mimic that, lower the saturation, lower the contrast (at least a little), slightly cool tones in the highlights. Bring the shadows up (there are no deep blacks in the photo). Also note the lighting: it's bright, but with no hard shadows; I think it'd be difficult to get this look on a day with full sunlight and hard shadows. You could add grain/noise, but a word of caution; despite it being a fast colour film, the size of medium format makes grain a lot less obvious than the same film in 35mm.
I attempted to reverse the process by trying to make the image look normal though my regular workflow in Adobe RAW.
I ended up with lowering the expose by 1.5 steps, and lowering the contrast by 20. There are no hard shadows in the image, so it was probably a bit cloudy when it was taken.
So, increasing the exposure by 1.5 steps and increasing the contrast by 20 should get you pretty close.
