LomoChrome Purple

LomoChrome Purple rewrites one part of the spectrum and leaves the rest alone. Green foliage comes back magenta and purple, so a normal park, field or forest turns into a place that does not exist.

It is infrared adjacent, which is the useful way to think about it. The stock does to a landscape roughly what colour infrared film did: the plants change colour because of what they reflect, and everything built by people stays close to normal. That contrast between an ordinary subject and an impossible landscape is the whole effect.

Put green in the frame, and plenty of it. Trees, grass, hedges, ivy, a park, a forest. No green means no shift and no reason to name the stock.

Name the shift as a translation, not as a tint. Say green foliage renders magenta and purple, and say the blue sky shifts to pale green or gold. A purple filter over the whole frame is the wrong result.

Steer the third carrier carefully. Skin holds close to normal but goes a little pink and pale, and it can look waxy in strong sun. Say slightly pink and pale, and keep the face out of deep shade.

Use it for landscapes, gardens, parks, festivals and portraits taken in front of foliage, where the background does the work.

Leave it alone in a city of concrete and grey, and at night. There is nothing for the shift to act on and the picture comes back ordinary.

Redscale shifts the whole frame to orange and red by exposing the film through its base, so nothing is spared. LomoChrome Purple is selective: it acts on the greens and the blues and leaves the rest. Film soup produces damage that is different on every frame, while this stock produces the same shift every time.

Cinema publishes Cross Process at /techniques/cinema/, and that entry is the closest cousin: the wrong chemistry swings every colour and raises contrast. LomoChrome Purple is a normal C-41 film with the shift built into the emulsion, so the contrast stays ordinary and only the hues move.

Lomography released LomoChrome Purple in 2013 as an answer to Kodak Aerochrome, the colour infrared film Kodak stopped making in 2009 and which had been used for survey work before photographers found it. Lomography re-made the stock in 2021 with a variable rating of ISO 100 to 400, where a lower rating deepens the purple. It sits beside LomoChrome Turquoise and LomoChrome Metropolis in the same range, and all three are C-41 films that any lab can develop.

The model puts a purple wash over the whole picture. Say only the foliage changes, name the magenta and purple leaves, and say the rest of the scene keeps normal colour.

The sky comes back blue, which means the second half of the shift is missing. Say the blue sky shifts to pale green or gold.