Wednesday, January 7, 2009

More B&W Conversions



In the days of film we had to either carry an extra camera loaded with black and white film or waste rolls of film swapping back and forth. Today with the digital cameras we can take all of our photos in full color then convert them later in the “digital darkroom” (computer). You may also see a feature on your digital camera for in camera conversions ... though this seems like a really cool feature, my advice is don't use it. There are several reasons for this:

  1. in camera processing sucks away battery power an a very fast rate.

  2. If the photo is taken in B&W ... you are limited to B&W only, you can take the color out using software but it is very hard almost impossible to add the color in if it wasn't shot in full color

  3. unless your software is very lame the tonal quality and clarity you get from converting to B&W on the computer is much better than what the camera does for you\

As far as I am concerned any of the above reasons is enough to leave the converting and processing for the darkroom work.


Here is another photo I did some processing/conversion to ....


As you can see I have already done some tone and color/tint adjustments but other than crop, contrast and a minor saturation this is straight out of the camera.


In the next photo you can see I did the “basic” B&W conversion and have not yet tweaked the clarity or contrast/brightness from the original photo

Next I “selected” the subject using my selection tool and increased the contrast and lowered the brightness of the girl and swing chains, then I increased the brightness over the entire photo




The next photo shows that I increased the clarity and contrast of the entire photo together to bring out the cloud patterns and the silhouette more.





Finally I added sepia tone until I had the result I was after ...


a tinted B&W photo where the silhouette “pops” out of the photo almost giving it a 3-D feel


I hope this mini-tutorial has been helpful to you, I am still learning how to convey to others “how I did it” and like everyone I am definitely still learning my camera, software and photography skills and techniques.


As always if you have tips, comments or suggestions please feel free to leave them in the comment section or contact me by email at tricountyphotography@yahoo.com


Thank You!

John

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