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Although the universe is ablaze with more colours than the human eye can detect, we can also learn to see the world in new ways by returning to the roots of the art of photography, to the art of black and white, and other monochromes like sepia (and bi-level). This photo blog celebrates that spectrum of colours ranging from the darkest monochromes to the most brilliant whites, and everything in between.
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August
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- superfrog saves tokyo
- Dream Tryst
- The Biblicist
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- Silent Curse
- jeremy under the bridge
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- Pollution
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- Oyster Bar at Gibsons
- Liquid Marble (hue 185, saturation 3)
- jovanna
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7 comments:
I really like the austere sense of balance in this bit of Americana, absolutely centered except for the buildings in the background (which are 'on plane'). The grainary's slots give an unusual sense of depth, in a series of panels. I think sepia is right for this scene.
Thanks for the comment. I'm just learning Photoshop Elements. Here I used layers, the last layer is where I picked a solid color and used a percentage of opacity. Which route do you prefer for setting the solid color, RGB or Hue, Saturation and Brightness and do you have favorite setting for your sepias..I really like the warmth in your Oyster Bar shot.
For the Oyster Bar, I used the Photoshop Black and White layer, adjusting the intensities of the various colours, then set the Hue @ 42 degrees and the Saturation @ 8%. I then like to push things toward the dark side. I also like this combination for photos in brighter light.
The perspective effect of those boards on the wall is fabulous, and seeing the image in large size, there's a lot of wood grain effect captured. There's a lot of detail in that grain, and one way to capitalize on it is to change the balance of the red-blue-green channels in your b&w conversion. I don't know how it works in Elements, but either in Photoshop Adobe Raw or in Lightroom you'd use the HSL (hue saturation luminance) panels. For example, if you had a reddish grain running through the wood, you could cut back the luminance on the red channel (making the red grain blacker than the surrounding wood), or conversely boost the red channel luminance (which would make it lighter than the surrounding wood). Either way the goal would be to get more separation between layers of wood. Great photo to try in a major enlargement (11 x 14 or 13 x 19), on good baryta paper like Ilford Galleria Golden Silk Fibre (silly product name, but a wonderful paper for monochrome prints).
Thanks for the comments. You've given me a lot to digest, experiment with and learn from. Your encouragement has given me a real boost!
One of the great things about "digital b&w" is that you can make big changes in local contrast and texture by shifting the color balance in conversion -- just like we used to do when we used filters on our cameras shooting b&w film (yellow filter darkens a blue sky, green filter lightens foliage, red filter darkens foliage, etc.) The difference is we can wait until post-processing to do it -- we don't have to be johnny-on-the-spot with the right filter at shutter time -- and we have the equivalent of thousands of filters in our (electronic) kit!
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