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bart

Black And Whites

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I just started playing with black and whites. Peter, got my wheels turning. I spent last week elk hunting here in Colorado and got some OK color digital photos of the fall colors. When I got back to my computer I used The Gimp to convert my color photos to black and white and quickly learned that my bright yellow aspen leaves which had a nice contrast to the dark gray clouds loose most of the contrast when you convert to black and white.

 

So here's my question: What color combinations work well for high contrast black and whites?

 

thanks

 

bart

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Hey Bart, Sure sounds interesting. I am certainly no expert at b&W photography, because I've never tried it...lol But I've read that the best results come from shooting with in b&W, not color and later removing the color. I have read where colored filters are placed over the lens to help with the contrast question you asked, even though the shot is taken in black and white. I bet Peterjay has a lot of expertise....

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LOL I don't know about the expertise, Graham, but the leaves and sky may have been closer on the tonal scale than they appeared in the original color shot. I've been trying to get a handle on Photoshop for about a week, and I'm still tripping over myself, but I've learned that the first move after desaturating the image is usually to play with the levels, which sets the approximate contrast. You can then fine tune the contrast by using the curves. I've been able to bring out the highlights in some pretty flat images that way. In my darkroom days, I would have just used a higher contrast grade of paper. Here are a couple of shots that were pretty flat to begin with, but I was able to bring up the contrast, which is the way I like it on my more abstract stuff. I apologize for the pixelation, but that's a problem I haven't been able to solve yet. Hope this helps - I've got a long way to go before this digital stuff makes sense.

 

IPB Image

 

IPB Image

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If doing it in Photoshop, it might be better to do a mode change, from RGB color to Gray Scale, instead of a desaturation. then tweek the levels, curves and contrast for the desired effect. I seem to recall there was a good article about doing this in last months issue of Outdoor Photographer magazine...

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PS - I forgot to mention that Graham was right about using filters - Ansel Adams often used yellow, orange or red filters to bring out the detail in the skies and the leaves. (And we all know how that turned out LOL) Most of my experience has been in urban landscapes and more introspective stuff, so I haven't used them much, mainly a light orange, which did lighten the leaves some. You can probably get the same effect in your editing program though. You may want to read up a little on Adams' Zone System, which is a good way to get a handle on B&W, even if you don't want to go with the system in its entirety.

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Thanks Graham - I knew there was a better way out there. That must be on page 2, which I should get to in a week or so, barring an unexpected stroke of genius. (LOL)

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Photoshop is so complex it would take years of working with it full time to know all of the in's and out's. A great book is The Photoshop Book For Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby. All of Scott's books are awesome, and Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks is another great one. Make sure to get the book version that matches your version of Photoshop. I recently upgraded to CS2 and just read in this months issue of Layers magazine that CS3 will be out next spring.

 

Maybe we should have a weekly or monthly Photoshop challenge. Like they do on Fark.com

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Thanks for the tip on the book Graham, I'll definitely look for it - you sure aren't kidding about the complexity, but it's amazing what you can do with even minimal expertise - wish it had been around 20 years ago. Guess I'll have to buy it when the free trial runs out.

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Thanks guys. You've got me moving in the right direction. It's pretty humbling to enter a new hobby like photography. I use an open source image editor named The Gimp and found a good article on turning colors into B&W's. After reading it, I was able to improve my images without much effort. B&W sure is interesting. I'll read up on the Ansel Adams zone later tonight!

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Here's the article that Graham was referring to in the Sept. 2006 Outdoor Photographer that you can download as a pdf file. It deals with how to do digital B&W. http://www.outdoorphotographer.com/content...al_blkwht.shtml There's a lot of other info on this site. If you can order their Aug. 2006 Landscape Annual, get it as there's a good article ( Master Black-&-White ) by Guy Tal along with a lot of other great articles. Have bought a subscription to the magazine.

 

Peter also got me thinking about B&W again so I went out and bought a set of 62mm screw in filters for tonal separation. I just got a basic set of red, yellow, green, and blue and will be experimenting with B&W in the upcoming months. I've also dedicated a manual camera body for nothing but B&W film. It should be a real learning curve and one I'm looking forward to taking.

 

Like many others, I've loved the works of Ansel Adams for many years. There's a couple of books by him on B&W photography that I'll be picking up after I get a light meter and another lens paid for. In those books he teaches his techniques in detail so I'll have a lot of reading to do in the future.

 

Ernie

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It's really good to see more people taking up B&W again - I recently read somewhere that the digital revolution has sparked a lot of new interest in the medium, and I can certainly understand why. What used to take days now can be done in minutes. If Ansel Adams and the other great artists had had access to the new stuff, most of them would have jumped on it in a second. Speaking of Adams, a friend of mine was doing a one-man show in Colorado and who walks in the door but Ansel himself. My friend almost passed out when he looked up and saw him standing there. Said it was all he could do to keep from stuttering when he introduced himself. Ernie, good luck with the Adams books - he's a bit difficult to read, but his insights are worth the effort. Another guy to check out is Brett Weston - he never wrote any books, but his best work is some of the finest art I've ever seen. His sand dune pictures just take your breath away.

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http://www.schneiderkreuznach.com/tipps/sw_fotografie_e.htm

 

Real basic information on using filters on camera when shooting B&W film. Using filters with B&W film you just need to know the basic color wheel and remember that a filter makes its own color lighter and its complimentary color darker. Red/Cyan Green/Magenta and Blue/Yellow are the three complimentary pairs.

 

---------------------------

 

With digital B&W this is what I do to change color photos to B&W using photoshop CS.

 

Open the layers pallette and go to the channel mixer, find the monochrome box and select it. After that just start playing with the Red Blue and Green sliders until you get what you want. The book I got that from is the Scott Kelby The Photoshop Book For Digital Photographers book that Graham mentioned earlier. The book says you should have your sliders end up when added together to equal 100%. I don't always do that. I do try to only tweak two sliders though and not all three of them. Not sure if it matters with digital, but with film using three colors just negates one or the other of them depending on the combo of colors.

 

I had two courses based on Ansel Adams gray scale so if anybody has questions about that I might be able to delve back into the reccesses of brain somewhere and come up with an answer.

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Wow, what a help you all have been. Between tying for an upcoming Bighorn trip and learning more about photography, who has time for work? I've been looking for some B&W trout photos - does anyone have any? I also took the suggestion of getting a subscription to Outdoor Photographer. Seems quite nice.

 

bart

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Between tying for an upcoming Bighorn trip and learning more about photography, who has time for work?

 

Attaboy Bart - no point in letting work interfere with the things that really matter in life. Kargen, thanks for the PS help - it's also good to know somebody who understands the zone system - I learned to speak French in less time than it took me to figure out what Ansel was talking about.

 

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Peterjay our zone system instructor told us Ansel was working on a zone system for color photography before he died, but never had time to get any real details recorded. That would have been a mathmatical nightmare I am guessing. Trying to crunch six zones of gray all down into only five zones of gray by adjusting development times was bad enough.

 

I really did like B&W printing though. I would still do some if I had a place to put a darkroom.

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