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Post by Irish Stu on Oct 25, 2009 15:25:34 GMT -6
Well, I thought it was time to suggest another theme. The Facebook photography competition group that I belong to has set their theme this week as 'Monochromes with a twist' so I thought I'd steal the spirit of their idea to see how creative we here on this fine board can be with our choice of pictures to convert to black and white, and sepia. And also perhaps in selective use of colour. I thought I'd get the ball rolling with a couple of pictures that I posted a few days ago from my recent trip into London : Traffic on the River ThamesThe original I previously postedSt Paul's Cathedral from the Millennium BridgeAnd again the originalSimon
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Post by Chicago Jake on Oct 25, 2009 15:52:43 GMT -6
Very nice work, Simon. And great idea for a theme. Here's one I did around Halloween a few years ago. I was originally planning to desaturate the entire picture, and then spot-color the pumpkins a bright, garish orange. But instead, I decided to remove all colors except orange. This accomplished almost the same thing, but left a bit of color in the leaves, etc. This next image I took of "The Kiss," the sculpture by Rodin, at the Rodin museum in Paris. I converted it to Black & White, and I posterized it to five shades of gray.
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Post by Irish Stu on Oct 25, 2009 16:28:55 GMT -6
Love the pumpkins Jake, and the orange hue in the leaves and the brickwork at the bottom of the steps is a nice touch. This is a picture I took last summer of some beach huts at Holkham Bay on the North Norfolk coast. After removing some people in the middle distance I converted to it sepia then added some noise to try to age the picture by giving it a hint of a grainy feel. The last step was to add varying degrees of shading to the bottom left and top corners to try to create the feeling that the passing of the years hadn't been kind to the 'original' photo : Simon
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Post by Irish Stu on Oct 26, 2009 17:25:51 GMT -6
A couple more that I found in the folder where I put my earlier efforts when I was experimenting with B&W and sepia. A lightship and anchor on the River Colne in ColchesterThe lightship, which is now home to the local sea scoutsSimon
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Post by Chicago Jake on Oct 26, 2009 18:40:20 GMT -6
Very nice toning! You can feel the age.
By the by, Simon, what technique do you use to convert to B&W? I use a variety and see what works best on an individual image, but I still haven't found the perfect method yet.
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Post by Irish Stu on Oct 27, 2009 2:22:28 GMT -6
Jake, in Photoshop I usually just go to 'Image' > 'Adjustments' > 'Hue/Saturation' and reduce the saturation to -100, or sometimes somewhere between -99 and -95 to leave the tiniest amount of colour to improve the tone in the B&W image.
Simon
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Post by Chicago Jake on Oct 27, 2009 9:45:30 GMT -6
Interesting technique; thanks for the tip. I'd never tried that before. It also gives interesting results if you BOOST the saturation.
I usually go to Image > Mode > Grayscale for a first try and see how that looks. Then I'll cancel that and try Image > Adjust > Desaturate (which is probably the same as your method, with 100%).
Then I'll try Image > Adjust > Channel Mixer. This is my favorite approach. You click on "monochrome" at the bottom, and then you can add and subtract values from all three color channels to affect the image. This is analogous to using colored filters on a film camera with B&W film. I've seen lists of values for each channel with will emulate various film formulations, such as Tri-X, Ilford, etc.
Sometimes I'll do one last experiment: Go to Image > Mode > Lab Color, and select only the Lightness channel. Sometimes this looks pretty much the same as Desaturate, but sometimes you can get some very surreal images.
I'm still searching for the perfect "Ansel Adams" effect, but it probably requires one to actually be Ansel Adams to get that actual effect.
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