I am getting more and more fascinated by black and white. Unfortunately also a bit frustrated because I don’t yet get the results that I want, but I am slowly getting better!
Here is a conversion that I did last night. I started with this extremely nice image taken by a friend of mine. It was hard to give up the pretty fall colors, but I decided to go looking for contrast and patterns instead.
First I straightened the verticals, then cropped to 4:3 and converted to black and white in the channel mixer. I then added several layers: increase of the overall contrast, increase of the contrast of the apples even more, then lighten the wooden table a bit. All three layers have masks for limiting the effects to portions of the image only. Finally I added a dodge and burn layer where I did some final adjustments. A bit of lens blur across the top and in the lower right corner and some sharpening of the rest, and the image was done.
Well, done for now. Who knows what I think of tomorrow…
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[...] Storm is Approaching 23 09 2007 A few friends have commented on my recent post with the apple images. Apparently I was so excited about experimenting with black and white that I didn’t notice [...]