Solarization

Perusing through the December 2023 edition of Digital Camera World, I came across a brief but rather interesting feature on how to solarize images through digital means. Solarization, the article pointed out, was made famous by surrealist photographers like Man Ray.

Essentially, the technique involves reversing shadows and highlights, where some black tones become white and vice versa. A true negative reverses all whites to blacks and vice versa.

For more on solarization, check out the Wikipedia article on the topic.

I’ve read about it in Andreas Feininger’s The Complete Photographer (1965), but I never pursued it since I always thought it was something one could do only by film developing and print-making in a proper darkroom. But this digital approximation seemed intriguing.

I decided to give it a shot with an image of a row of wigs at a costume shop that I shot with my Nikon F on Ilford FP4 Plus film, an image that I posted back on August 9:

Using Paint.NET, I invoked the Curves tool. I first set a control point on the dead center of the linear diagonal line (128, 128):

Next, I moved the upper right control point to the lower right (255, 0), thereby making highlights black:

To increase contrast, I then lifted that first control point I added on the dead center of the linear diagonal line almost to the top (128, 240):

I could have moved that control point to the very top (128, 255), but I’m always a little reluctant to go all the way with any change like this. I often find that a conservative application of postproduction edits is better than too much.

The final result appears like this—highlights appear black while shadows appear white:

I have to confess that I do like the original, unaltered version better. But applied to the right image, the effect can be rather interesting.

To be sure, solarization is different than a straight-up inversion of all blacks and whites, as one would see in a negative:

Here’s another instance of a solarized image. I took the original image of a local storefront window last week with my Canon EOS M50:

While I probably wouldn’t make a habit of doing this with all my black and white work, I now see that digitally solarizing an image is incredibly easy. If anything, it’s a different twist on more conventional photography.