Les moulins de Razel

[Chataignier]

Watermill on the river Vezere in Correze France. 1/10s exposure.

[Manfred M]

I usually do not question the photographer's choice of B&W versus colour, but in this shot, I wonder if this one might not have been a good candidate for colour. There are a lot of details in this image and the shades of gray so seem to run together here. Colour would likely improve separation.

[Chataignier]

I hesitated over this for quite a while. My criterion for posting b/w originally was that the colour is all in the background. The subject : the building the rocks and the water are all essentially grey. However, I agree that the shot is probably more appealing in colour. Here is the colour version :

[mugge]

The colour version is so much better David.

[billtils]

It's largely a matter of personal taste David but I prefer the mono version because the greens in the colour one just hit me in the face and draw my attention away from the other attractive elements in the image.

Just curious - how did you do the mono conversion?

[DanK]

Not a clear choice for me.

I definitely prefer color for the brook, but David, I take your point, and Bill's also, that the green in much of the image draws the eye to the background. The yellowish tinge and high saturation of the green makes this more pronounced.

I think I would try something selective. If you used regular RGB mode to increase contrast, I would switch to luminosity blend or, if you did it in Lightroom, use the slider underneath the curve tool to tone down the increased colorfulness. I'd use the color tools to reduce the saturation of green and especially yellow and perhaps reduce the luminosity of those colors as well. I'd also probably apply any increase in contrast selectively to make the stonework stand out and the background stand out less.

Hope these ideas are of some use.

Dan

[Round Tuit]

Here is a quick edit along the line suggested by Dan.

[Chataignier]

It's largely a matter of personal taste David but I prefer the mono version because the greens in the colour one just hit me in the face and draw my attention away from the other attractive elements in the image.

Just curious - how did you do the mono conversion?

In Nik Silver FX, fine art preset slightly modified after.

[Manfred M]

Let me show two different approaches to the same image; one in B&W and the other in colour... It is interesting to flip through the different edits using the Lightbox viewer.

In this edit, I (slightly) prefer the monochrome version.




In this B&W version, I was looking for better separation of the water from the trees, so I spent some time dodging the rocks and stream bed. I also used the "shadows" slider in the camera raw filter to open up those details in the rocks, but used a new layer with a layer mask to isolate that work from the rest of the image. I added a hue / saturation mask and pushed down the saturated yellows and greens in the leaves to create a more "benign" look to that part of the image (again using a layer mask). I also burned down the bright side of the cabin and dodged the darker wall.







This is essentially the same post-processing as in the B&W image. I took some of the greens out of the darker cabin wall to reduce the mossy look.

[DanK]

Manfred,

Good edits and a helpful explanation.

I'm going to use a new phrase: manual edits. By that I mean not only edits that one applies to specific areas of one's choice, but also edits one controls, e.g., by specifying how a tonality adjustment should be done. 100% of what you describe is "manual edits". My view is that filters and presents can be a useful adjunct to manual edits, but they aren't a substitute. (I rarely use any.) I do think there are some images where global but otherwise manual edits are enough, but in my work, those are pretty rare.

Dan

[Manfred M]

Manfred,

Good edits and a helpful explanation.

I'm going to use a new phrase: manual edits. By that I mean not only edits that one applies to specific areas of one's choice, but also edits one controls, e.g., by specifying how a tonality adjustment should be done. 100% of what you describe is "manual edits". My view is that filters and presents can be a useful adjunct to manual edits, but they aren't a substitute. (I rarely use any.) I do think there are some images where global but otherwise manual edits are enough, but in my work, those are pretty rare.

Dan

I use a slightly different terminology, but I do know what you mean. As a member of a couple of photo clubs, I have run into four broad categories of photographers:

1. Shooters - these people take pictures and do no post-processing work at all. They like taking pictures but would rather gouge their eyes out before sitting in front of a computer, working on their images.

2. Basic photographers - they are people from the first category that realize that some minor, global tweaks will improve their images. They tend to do fairly basic, global changes (straightening, some cropping, exposure, contrast and white balance adjustments). To a large extent, most wedding and event photographers fall into this category as they have high volume of images that they need to tweak. Lightroom was designed for this demographic of photographers.

3. Intermediate level photographers - they do all the work that the basic photographer does, plus will start making adjustments to larger areas in the image. As an example, they might tweak the sky with the linear gradient tool in Lightroom and might also apply these tools to specific larger areas of the image. This work can be done in Lightroom or Photoshop, depending on the photographer's individual preferences.

4. Advanced photographers - these are the people that look at how the great masters of the past (Ansel Adams comes to mind) who do the global and area adjustments and go beyond that to make small local adjustments to exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpening, etc. Commercially, we see this in advertising, editorial work, fashion, glamour, fine art, etc.

I have seen a very small group of advanced landscape photographers stick to Lightroom / Camera Raw / Capture One, but most will do their work in Photoshop. All of the other genres tend to stick to Photoshop and its advanced selection and editing tools. I use a combination of selection tools and freehand methods for this type of work.


As a general rule I break editing / retouching work into three categories:

1. Global edits - these generally take me less than a minute, although I will spend up to a couple of minutes doing this type of work.

2. Area edits - these take a bit longer and I spend in the order of 2 - 5 minutes doing these.

3. Local edits - I spend 90% - 95% of the time doing this type of work. In terms of time that can be from 10 or 15 minutes to hours, depending on the final use of the image. I do this in 100% of my work. For something that I only plan to show on the web, I will be at the lower end of that range (the images I posted in this thread had about 10+ minutes of work done to them). If I am making large format prints for gallery exhibitions, I will spend hours working on the images, generally over the period of several days to over a week. I find that even when I am happy with my work, I will sit on it for a few days and do some tweaking.

I have been fortunate to have trained under a number of nationally and internationally recognized photographers and retouchers and they all follow a similar work flow, consisting of the three stages I have listed. We all use different techniques in those steps, especially in the local edits. I do know of several "A-list" photographers that do all three stages of the work and will then turn there work over to highly skilled retouchers for the final tweaking and cleanup.