> Very nice - almost has an infrared feel to it. What processing
> did you do to get such a nice b&w feel?
Thank you. The printed version has even more processing done to
it and I'm hardly finished with it yet. I have some printouts
that I'll live with for a few weeks before hacking into it
again.
The steps were as follows:
1. Shoot in RAW mode.
2. Convert to TIFF with zero sharpening and processing. Sunny WB
was used.
3. I openned the file in GIMP 2.2 as I knew I needed to work in
layers on this photo. The desire was to mimick my proven
split-grade darkroom printing techniques.
4. Adjust colors to make the sunlit grass more yellow and the
sky a little more blue. Colors at this point needn't look
pretty, in fact they were pretty skewed in preparation for
monochrome conversion.
5. Convert to monochrome using a Red filter. I experimented with
multiple colors and the Orange filter was just as good but
preserved the hillside shadows too much for the effect I wanted.
6. Dodged and burned the grass and tree to raise the sunlit
portion and darken the shadow area. (In the printed version I
have the sunspot a little lighter). Localized dodging and
burning was required on the tree. The key here is using a
dodge/burn tool with selectable highlight, midtone and shadow
control. With this type of tool I can raise just the high values
or darken just the low values. Much more work to go on the tree
as the print version is just lacking the snap I need.
7. The sky was interesting, but not killer. If I yank the
contrast of the print way up the clouds take on a life of their
own. However, it screws up the forground. I created a duplicate
layer and heavily skewed the curves of that layer. With the
background layer turned off, I took the erase tool and "deleted
to background" everything I didn't want changed. (my eraser was
a very large (250x250 elipse with 100 penundrum to make
feathering easy) Turning the background back on, I took the
remains of the edited layer and merged back in about 50% and
used the "darken only" feature. Merge (flatten) layers to
complete.
8. Repeat #7 a couple of times to selectively darken certain
clouds. It's sometimes better to work in multiple steps than one
big step. A chemical darkroom technique is to work "additive".
In otherwords, it's usually better to ADD exposure through burns
than to dodge.
9. Selective dodging and burning of the clouds was necessary to
bring out the glow and the two sunlit cumulus clouds.
The picture is as-shot. No cropping was done to the picture. The
bottom left corner has a crease in the hillside that I find
disturbing and the tree branches need pixel painting to seperate
them from the clouds better. Also, I want to make the sunlit
hillside stand out a little better from the clouds on the far
left. The fine-art prints will have other doodads done as well
as some noise reduction applied. Overall, the picture is a
little to heavy for my tastes. I like the dramatic, but yet
there is no feeling of "light". I may do another monochrome
conversion with the yellow filter to bring out the sunlit
hillside and tree better and blend that in on another layer.
> BTW: I enjoyed the commentary in the Copying Others and
> Breaking Free section. I don't agree with all of it (we have
> slightly different ideas about what art
> should be), but its very well thought out and composed. God
> job!
Thank you. I can't say I agree with everything stated either.
It's all part of the growing process. If you don't challenge
your own thinking you become stagnent. Art is a concept, not a
rule.
AG
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