Okay. I've been beating myself and my laptop with a virtual sledge hammer
trying to find a way of applying classical Wratten filters to digitl B&W
photography. It seemed simple enough at first, but I overlooked the dweeb
factor which makes everything far more complicated than it needs to be.
Using presets in LR seemed like a great idea, but then came the problem of
determining what the various sliders should be set to to emulate a given
Wratten filter. Taking a photo of a white field through a glass filter
provided no help whatsoever as LR does NOT give you a colour-by-colour
analysis. Mousing over the image will tell you what the RBG levels are, but
they to not correlate to the eight or so sliders that need to be set.
Many yeara ago (back when there were dragons and varlets) I used an
interesting feature in Corel Photo-Paint where you can blend two images
together. You open the two images, determine which one is on top, copy that
one, and then paste it over the other one. Using the opacity control on the
tool bar you can adjust the blend of the two to get the desired effect. I've
done this for years to illustrate component layout on printed circuit boards
for electronics assemblies.
I took RAW colour photos of a sheet of paper through two Wratten filters,
$15 deep orange and #25 red. Converted those the JPEG images and saved them.
I then opened the test photo of the house across the street as the lower image
and one of the Wratten photos as the upper image. Copied the Wratten photo
over the test photo and adjusted to opacity control to 25%. Then converted the
resulting image to 8-bit grayscale.
Came out just great after going back and forth a couple of times to do a
little tweaking of the brightness and contrast sliders.
It may seem crude, but it works and it actually duplicates the
photographic process of the subject seen through the glass filter and recorded
on the film.
I'm going to see if I can emulate the various B&W films in Exposure 6 and
somehow add them as additional overlays to simulate the inconsistencies of B&W
films.
I'm happy. Damned happy. I made this work and I didn't spend a dime.
Victor Papanek would be proud of me.
Or, as Howard Cossell used to say: "We keep making things better, not more
expensive."
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
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