Exercise 17 - colours into tones

I selected a red lily for this exercise because of its striking colours. In Photoshop, I added a channel mixer layer and then saved a version of the image with each of the presets so that I could compare them side-by-side. In addition I also saved a greyscale version.

Rather just selecting 2 contrasting images, as per the exercise, I included all of the images in my blog because I thought the subtle change of tone across the sequence was interesting.

Ø       The blue filter is the least affective conversion for this particular image.

Ø       The greyscale and orange filters I put together in the sequence because of them being the 'standard' methods for creating b&w in digital and film photography, respectively. Both filters produce an acceptable b&w version, with the greyscale image having more contrast.

Ø       The red filter, unsurprisingly, produces an image least like the original - the red leaves turning white.

Ø       The yellowed filtered version I like the best - it has good tonal separation and makes a nice photograph.

Ø       The green and infrared filters are very stark b&w, quite limited in the tones represented and the IR is really just too dark.

       As shot

           Blue filter

          Greyscale

             Orange filter

        Red filter

             Yellow filter

            Green filter

               Infrared filter

Finally in terms of selecting a contrasting pair of images I would go for those with the red and green filters.

Exercise 16 - strength of interpretation

Part 1 - increased contrast using a pronounced S-curve

Trees - as shot

Trees - high contrast (pronounced S-curve)

The strong S-curve made the image look gaudy and very over processed. Taking the above image and converting it to b&w transformed it into something interesting.


Trees - b&w conversion

I added a futher curves layer and adjusted the red and green channels to create this 'lith' version.


Part 2 - high key treatment

Tulips - as shot

Tulips - high key colour

This image was created by slightly increasing the exposure in RAW. Once in Photoshop I added two adjustment layers - the first set to overlay and the second set to colour dodge. To convert the image to b&w I added a hue/saturation layer and set saturation to -100. After that I added a black & white adjustment layer leaving it with the default settings.


Tulips - b&w conversion

Finally I added a 2mm grey border to the image to anchor the flowers.