Dodge and Burn

[Limpopoboy]

Hi Guy

A converted colour photograph for some practice with my dodge and burn technique. Or do you guys think its better to take B&W straight out the camera? Then post edit?




Thanks

Limpopoboy

[xpatUSA]

Hi Guy

A converted colour photograph for some practice with my dodge and burn technique. Or do you guys think its better to take B&W straight out the camera? Then post edit?

[IMG][/IMG]

Thanks

Limpopoboy

Looks really nice, lotsa contrast, Tony. Not a B&W guy, others here can offer good advice for your Canon/Tamron shots.

Doesn't look like the Bahrein I remember (RAF Muharraq, 1965) . . more like a golf-course somewhere (I peeked).

[DanK]

Or do you guys think its better to take B&W straight out the camera?

Definitely not. First, if you are shooting raw, setting the camera for B&W affects the thumbnail on the LCD, not the file itself. Second, if you shoot B&W jpeg, you are letting a pre-determined algorithm to the conversion, losing a great deal of control. for example, it's common to brighten or darken by color range, which you can only do if you have the color data to start with.

[Geoff F]

As Dan said, shoot in colour and get that looking reasonable then use one of the B&W conversion techniques. Exactly how you do this will depend on your editing software.

Varying the colour tints etc with the colour version can considerably alter the amount of 'greyness' and tones of the final monochrome image. If you have software which uses layers and masks you can then do a final bit of tweaking to get the scene looking exactly how you require it to appear.

Certainly something of a specialised subject though.

[xpatUSA]

Certainly something of a specialised subject though.

Absolutely!

In case anyone thinks that "good" gray-scale images come from just tweaking a slider or two, this spells it all out quite well:

Introduction:

Black-and-white photography has not lost any of its artistic appeal despite the wide availability of color imaging processes. Accordingly, the conversion from color to grayscale is an important piece of the computational photography puzzle.
. . . etc.

http://cadik.posvete.cz/color_to_gray_overview/

The heart of the matter is here:

http://cadik.posvete.cz/color_to_gray_evaluation/

What I like are the illustrative images and the fact that, like CIE color, actual people contributed to the graphs of "better".

Also, it is made quite obvious that there is no "one size fits all" process for the conversion because the image content itself affects the potential "goodness" of the result.

[Manfred M]

As others have suggested, doing the conversion in PP give you a lot more flexibility. You can play with the individual colour channels to emphasize or de-emphasize certain aspects of the image - darken or lighten the sky or grass / leaves. The camera does not offer this level of control.

I find that your burning seems to be a bit heavy-handed. When I bring your image into Adobe Camera Raw, the blue areas of the image show where you have pushed the shadow detail to black and the red areas show where the highlights have been clipped. All that pure black can make for an uninteresting image.

[Manfred M]

Also, it is made quite obvious that there is no "one size fits all" process for the conversion because the image content itself affects the potential "goodness" of the result.

As does personal taste.

As with colour work, having the computer screen set to the appropriate brightness levels (usually 80 - 120 candela / square meter a.k.a. nits), depending on personal taste here too. I used to work at 100 nits but over the past year switched to 120 nits, but am looking at going back to a darker screen again.

[Shadowman]

Nice capture.

[LePetomane]

Tony, I use a Fujifilm that has film a film simulation mode. I can select up to three modes, turn the bracketing mode on and get the same picture with three different films.

[MrB]

Tony, if you like the mono images that your camera produces, and you are able to adjust them to your taste if necessary, then it is fine to use them. Whether the starting image is JPEG or raw, my preference is for converting to mono from colour, so I can choose how the different colour tones in the image, or in different parts of the image, are rendered as different grey tones in the mono image.

Two points regarding the image in post #1. Firstly, for my taste there is rather too much black. Secondly, there is a bright halo in the sky around the trees on the left which doesn't look quite right to me - was it like that, did the camera create it, or is it a result of processing?

Cheers.
Philip

[DanK]

I'll make my comment Manfred's concrete.

I'll post below a series of 4 photos. The first is the color version. The second is Lightroom's default B&W conversion. It won't be identical to the one in your camera, but the principle is the same: it's an algorithm that someone else cooked up without looking at my image. The third darkens the colors in the trees at the top, primarily blue and aqua, wherever they appear in the image. The fourth pulls down reds.

I didn't make these edits extreme, and I didn't do anything to make them look good. I would have enhanced contrast on all of them, but you can do that regardless of whether you shoot raw or B&W jpeg. I just wanted to illustrate that there are different appearances that are very easy to create if you shoot in color but nearly impossible to create if you shoot in B&W jpeg. Of course, if you don't want any changes from the B&W jpeg, it doesn't matter. So one option, if your camera will do it, is to shoot raw+jpeg, with jpeg set to B&W.