How was this "Explore" picture processed?

[Vikkki]

Hello,

I was looking at today's "Explore" and came across this picture:

Drivers Wanted on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I love how the photographer has got a movie still feel to the picture. I am sure the widescreen crop and the black borders help accentuate that effect. However, the general feel of the picture makes it appear as though it was a still from a movie. How do I get this effect in PS?

-Vikram

[dakwegmo]

The only thing I see is that it's underexposed.

[OsmosisStudios]

Ask. So many people are simply afraid to ask someone how they did something. Send the flickr user a message and ask them.

[kjonnnn]

Its just a movie dimension crop, resized to fit on a black canvas no biggie. Crop a photo to 16x9 dimensions, drag onto a new black layer, say 8x 10, and viola. And yea, the photo IS kinda underexposed too.

[sybren]

There's more going on than just a crop. Often movies have a main character, and this photo has one too - the man crossing the street.

The photo was shot from an angle often used in movies, and show a scene where a man walks into the frame from behind a bus, also something you could see in a movie. Film makers often think about how someone should enter the frame, and walking from behind some object is often found to be more interesting than just walking in. The lines of the bus, and the fact that it "looks at" the main character strengthen the focus on the man.

Yet another thing he did was turn his blacks into a dark grey. This reminds me of a badly shown PAL movie on a computer screen, where the PAL signal normalizes to the 16-235 RGB range and the video player forgot to scale it up to the full RGB scale of 0-255. Often movies don't show full black, but you won't notice in the cinema anyway.