I promised Cat I would do this a long time ago. Mostly because we both agreed that iconing Lost is a thing of hell, because whether you noticed or not the light.. "it's strange out here, isn't it? It's kind of like, it doesn't, it doesn't scatter quite right." Which is, after all... true.
The light on Hawaii seems to be far too warm and something about it tints the screencaps a redish tone that makes it very hard to color if you're not sure what you're looking for.
At first, I tried to counter the red by lessening it and upping the greens. Didn't work. Because it's not red, red. I fooled around for weeks before I stumbled upon this - by total accident. It took a couple of tries to figure it out but here goes....
NOTE:
I have never before made a tutorial. I'm not even sure this qualifies as one, I think it's more of a guide with a few ideas, rather than steps... But here goes regardles...
Coloring Lost in (believe it or not) 3 simple steps.
Your screencap of choice, from the glorious
Lost-Media, of course, cropped and resized:
STEP ONE
Reproduce the layer and set it to Screen:
STEP TWO
This is the magical part. Use the Variations tool. You can find this tool by going to Image > Adjustments > Variations
This tool isn't only a thing made in heaven, it is also a more comprehensive way of doing the dreadfully popular Selective Coloring. Why, I could easily do this on Selective Coloring, but it would not be as fast and most importantly - it would not work every time. Copy/Pasting a few numbers on the Selective Coloring window does not teach you what's going on, and Variations *does*.
Here the issue I discovered by accident - the tint in the images is not red, it's purple - or for graphic effects, magenta. By using the variations tool, we can countermeasure the purple by leveling up it's opposite color - yellow.
We adjust the strength to level 2, and click the yellow square. Depending on the lightness of the image, once or twice. Here I only clicked once. Some images *will* require two clicks.
The other main difference between using Selective Coloring and Variations is that Variations is comprehensive. This means that it adapts to every image, and therefore, does the calculation that Selective Coloring requires you to do, by itself. This is important because a great deal of people don't know how to calculate chromatic values on an image - I mean, I took a class on the subject and I don't dare say I know.
That is the great flaw in Selective Coloring, that copy/paste of numbers does not teach you how to calculate and does not work on every image because the values for every image are different, even if similar.
Ok rant over. Click OK and let's continue:
SPECIAL NOTE: Variations saves the last values that you ok'd. That means you must not click the value each time you use it on a new image, because the last one would still be there. By clicking the original image all values are resetted.
STEP THREE
Create a Levels adjustment layer.
What one of my teachers once told us was; try to make the dark, dark and the light, light. This is supposed to be achieved when you drag the dark arrow to the first high point on the left, and the light arrow to the first high point on the right. Use common sense to rationalize that higher =/= better.
Optional Step
Set the second layer, the one we screened and adjusted, to 60% of opacity: