High Contrast B&W Toronto

[Polar01]

Printing a couple of images for Christmas gifts, did one for a friend's daughter, she has been wanting one for sometime now of the Toronto skyline as that is where she lives, but she has never taken the time to choose one. So I choose one for her, it was taken early morning, everything had just this beautiful blue tint in the sky and water like they were one and the same. Getting it ready to print and I thought what would it look like in B&W and printed on a luster stock, she does like B&W images so I thought what the heck and converted to B&W. It was good, very good so this is a sneak peak of Laura's Christmas.

Cheers:

Allan

[IShootPeople]

Goodness, what a stunning image!

[Mike Buckley]

Great composition and contrast. However, it seems quite soft, especially for such a high contrast image. Maybe my eyes are off today?

[FrankMi]

To me, Allan, the composition is outstanding and in-line it looks superb, but when I open it in Lyte Box, as Mike points out, it appears a bit soft. Depending upon the size of the print you are planning, it may not make a difference but it could affect the larger prints to the point where it is noticeable. It might be worth examining the SOOC image to see if it is sharp. If so, then the softness may have crept in during post processing and can be addressed without a reshoot.

If the original was a RAW image, did you apply any Capture Sharpening?

[Digital]

Allan, this is a very nice capture. It does not look soft to me.



Bruce

[Bobobird]

Superb image and the conversion is outstanding.

2 points - one is that it looks ever so slightly soft particularly the whiter buildings. Two - the left side building is slightly tilted to the left.

[Shadowman]

Very nice.

[Sergio M.]

Standout image.

Sergio

[Downrigger]

Striking. Special. If I understand correctly it is not HDR, which means I can't easily understand how the light and immense contrast happened - but it sure happened extremely powerfully.

[Polar01]

Thank-you every one for your comments, I looked at in Lyte Box and it does look soft. The print I made was full size at 12.5" x 2, printed on Epson Ultra Luster at 360ppi on an Epson 4900 printer. It was spot on from sharpness, now I did not apply sharpening for the web as I usually find that it is over sharpened. The original image was a 5 shot pan in portrait as to landscape which makes a very large file, I used a 35mm lens and the closest building by a half to three-quarters of a mile away, it was a sunny day and the sun had been up for about 1.5hrs, so there could be a little shimmer off the faces of the buildings. I think that is may have more to do with taking a very large file at 360ppi and reducing it to a jpeg at 100ppi and not adding any output sharpening.
All I know is the image is at the framers to be backed and matted, I like Laura but not that much to also frame it.
Again thank you all for your positive comments.

Cheers: Allan

[Mike Buckley]

How could Laura not love it?!

[chauncey]

Allan, for my education...when you send that to the printer, what are your black RGB numbers?

[Polar01]

Chauncey I am not sure how to read that so I can tell you the correct info. I will try this my whitest white is 253 and the lowest black is 0, now I am only working with 256 shades of grey or in fact 253 shades as I know that my printer will not print any detail above 253, as for black on the Epson Ultra Luster on my 4900 I know that everything below 17 will appear as black as it can not print out any details below that number. Does that help any, or let me know how to get the reading you want and I will gladly try to do it as I may well learn something and that is what life is about.

Cheers: Allan

[Wavelength]

Excellent image; i too suspect a minor tilt; rest is classic

[Mike Buckley]

Chauncey I am not sure how to read that so I can tell you the correct info.

If you were going to select a color to paint into your image using a brush or to automatically fill a selection, you would probably do that using some sort of color picker that in much software is in the form of an eye dropper. When hovering the eye dropper over a particular color, a lot of software displays the RGB values of the color that is being selected.

Pretend that you are going to select a color. Hover over your blackest black in the image and let Chauncey know what the RGB values are. Then cancel the operation because of course you have no need to actually select a color.

[chauncey]

At the risk of a hi-jack, I ask for purely selfish reasons, as I'm trying to determine how the "glow" is achieved.

[Polar01]

Thanks Mike for a way to get those numbers, never thought of that. Chauncey I used Mikes' method and these are the RGB reading that I got for most the blacks R1, G0, B0. Hope that is of some help.

Cheers: Allan