B&W tabletop photography

[Dave A]

...the book itself is that William Cowper's slavery poems...is that a first edition...

Good eye Izzie. I believe it is but not sure if it is the first edition. I will check again today. If I remember correctly it was dated 1913.

Dave

[Jeff Blakemore]

Maybe that is what Jeff means when he said in his own post about "after all the colours are eliminated" thinking...then it is easier to work on the image itself.

Cheers...

Izzie, I apologize if I lead you astray with that part of my comment, and I can see now how it may be taken that way. When I said that I was referring to viewing and appreciating the final image, but not referring to the editing process at all. Quite the opposite actually. My process includes boosting the color and adjusting fine tones before I convert. After reading this thread, I may very well be including another step too!

After reading some of your posts, I am assuming that you have the Nik Collection from Google. That's what I use on 99.9% of my editing, and sometimes I include some of the Topaz collection too. Although, when I use Topaz it's mostly when I'm editing my shots for the magazine & websites we publish at work.

Maybe I can take you through my process soon.

[Mike Buckley]

My process includes boosting the color and adjusting fine tones before I convert.

I also work the color version before converting to monochrome. However, that's only because that's how I initially learned to do it and got used to doing it that way. Others very successfully go straight to monochrome without making any adjustments to the color version. Their explanations about that in past discussions intuitively make a lot of sense to me.

I've never seen any proof in the form of empirical evidence indicating that one method should be better than the other. As an example, it can be proven that two-thirds of the data is lost when desaturating. Similar proof seems not to be available about why one would choose to work the color version or not before converting to monochrome.

[Loose Canon]

Hi Dave!

Nice shot with some interesting subject matter.

A couple of thoughts? I’ll confine those to primarily the version in post #8 but the first two appear very flat. The conversion looks good to me and I won’t comment on that because you have some comments regarding that already and I don’t know if the scene (book/camera) have any color in them to begin with.

The shot in post #8 also looks a bit flat though better. If this were my shot I would be thinking about what I would consider important in the shot. For me, besides the book and camera in general, that would be the title on the spine of the book. The lettering on the front of the camera is very legible so I would want that brought out. The silver parts of the camera I would want to stand out as well.

As always I would want my background to either stay out of the way or compliment the shot. And the surface would, without negotiation, have to be clean. While its not always possible at the shoot it could be cleaned up in post. The dust specks would have to go!

The background here has some unintentional looking tonal variations, which I would either eliminate or do something else to make it look intentional. In the black BG I would just go for solid black in this case. I’m not referring to the diagonal line of demarcation.

The reflection is cool. Again looking at it the first thing I see is the dust. I would add some local contrast to the book, camera and reflection and probably further dodge the camera’s lettering/silver pieces and the book title to make those pop. Burn down the areas right around the book label and probably lightly burn in the mids in book spine as well leaving the highlights alone and see if I liked the result. I would do a slight repair around the lettering of the book to make sure they come out, but not so much as to make it loose the aged look. Especially the “C” in the first word.

To finish I think I might experiment with some vignetting which didn’t include the camera, book, or reflection along with your rotation of the image. All of this is fairly subtle.

[Jeff Blakemore]

Similar proof seems not to be available about why one would choose to work the color version or not before converting to monochrome.

Well, I also do it because I like having a nicely edited color version in the bag too... haha!

[chauncey]

FWIW, I just reprocessed my last rose...Another studio rose
Basically using this technique...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3otqqw9p--k

[mknittle]

For me, that characteristic complements the rest of the image.

I also had this thought. It gives the image a more natural feel to me.

[Dave A]

Hi Dave!

Nice shot with some interesting subject matter.

A couple of thoughts? I’ll confine those to primarily the version in post #8 but the first two appear very flat. The conversion looks good to me and I won’t comment on that because you have some comments regarding that already and I don’t know if the scene (book/camera) have any color in them to begin with.

The shot in post #8 also looks a bit flat though better. If this were my shot I would be thinking about what I would consider important in the shot. For me, besides the book and camera in general, that would be the title on the spine of the book. The lettering on the front of the camera is very legible so I would want that brought out. The silver parts of the camera I would want to stand out as well.

As always I would want my background to either stay out of the way or compliment the shot. And the surface would, without negotiation, have to be clean. While its not always possible at the shoot it could be cleaned up in post. The dust specks would have to go!

The background here has some unintentional looking tonal variations, which I would either eliminate or do something else to make it look intentional. In the black BG I would just go for solid black in this case. I’m not referring to the diagonal line of demarcation.

The reflection is cool. Again looking at it the first thing I see is the dust. I would add some local contrast to the book, camera and reflection and probably further dodge the camera’s lettering/silver pieces and the book title to make those pop. Burn down the areas right around the book label and probably lightly burn in the mids in book spine as well leaving the highlights alone and see if I liked the result. I would do a slight repair around the lettering of the book to make sure they come out, but not so much as to make it loose the aged look. Especially the “C” in the first word.

To finish I think I might experiment with some vignetting which didn’t include the camera, book, or reflection along with your rotation of the image. All of this is fairly subtle.

Thanks Terry, all good things for me to look at.

Dave