making vhs great again | that custom magnetic aesthetic | all original content captured, edited or created by bradleywhite aka rotomangler
making vhs great again | that custom magnetic aesthetic | all original content captured, edited or created by bradleywhite aka rotomangler
Your photos are excellent. how do you do it with this alienation effect? please tell me
Thank you!
I’ll explain what I do and you can use this info as you see fit. This technique tends to look best on bright subjects against dark backgrounds like stars or galaxies against black space.
CAPTURE
I have a couple of techniques. One is I capture VHS footage when I can get my hands on decent tapes via a small device I bought which is connected to the VCR. Two is I download VHS footage from online sources like youtube, the internet archive, and some places on Reddit. Three is I download or capture footage from DVD or Bluray.
STYLE
Once i have footage I like, I load it into Adobe Premiere where I tweak the look to suit my tastes. If the footage already looks like VHS, then usually I increase the saturation and shift the tint towards more blue and more red. This gives the whites in the footage a purple hue, which is very cool. I usually also lighten the blacks slightly which is very VHS.
NOISE
The I apply the Red Giant Software VHS plugin. This plugin can apply the VHS analog noise and blurriness to the image if needed (meaning if not captured from a VHS tape). I then, for all images, also blur the blue channel using this tool and offset it and the red channel by several pixels if not more. Together these two settings gives my images the blue-blur effect where a bright subject will have a blur halo extending from it onto the dark background. I usually add some more saturation to the image here.
Each image or sequence is different and is tweaked to taste, but in general this is what I do.
enjoy!
bradley
