pico wrote:
Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:
"Adam" wrote

[How do I get a 40's look in a photograph using modern
materials...]

Push, don't pull.

The 40's was a decade with three very distinct periods: Pre-WWII, WWII
and Post-WWII. Let's try for a 30's look, a 30's drugstore processing
look as I take it you aren't looking for Weston, Lange or Hurell [or
Capa].

I would try for featureless gray shadows and fogged featureless
highlights. This example was done in Photoshop and is the look I am
talking about:

Nicholas is right-on. Most of the photographic prits of that period were
horrid, and just as he cites.

I guess you had to be there. I was.


I don't know what you have been looking at but even
drugstore prints of this period were not as bad as you
describe and prints made by amateurs and pros were about as
good as modern materials, at least as far as tone rendition.
Technical data for old materials is available and does
not show the kind of limitations being described.
Too often people who want a 30's or 40's look are
getting their ideas from either poor photomechanical
reproductions in magazines or books or from badly degraded
prints, or bad scans on the Internet.
Reprints can be poorly made and all too often are.
BTW, Edward Weston made some pretty bad prints. For
instance the Huntington has a collection of overly dark,
just plain bad prints Weston made over a rather long period
of time.
Please find someone who has a collection of family
snapshots from the periods you are interested in and see
what they really look like. Photography is a very old
technology and, while it has certainly been improved in the
last seventy years, it was pretty much perfected before
that. Even in the 1880s photos with good tone reproduction
were being made.