Mind Blowing Processing

HeatherTheVet

Top Veteran
Location
Scotland
Name
Heather
I was trawling the serious compacts Flickr group and cam across Tadhg Mac's photostream. And somewhere in the middle my head exploded.

The Brave Wee Pine of Strathconon | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Can anybody explain the PP to me? It's surely not just straight BW conversion then tweaking, the sky is black! I'd love to understand this better, it would be phenomenal to even attempt this kind of thing. Hopefully come the summer I'll be hitting the hills with dog and full camera kit so I'll get more chances for trying out landscape stuff. I'm beginning to wonder if I need to investigate filters.
 
I usually just play with the sliders, but I think to get this look, one turns down (or up, I forget) the Luminosity of the blue channel.

The sky is blown out in my example here, but you can see what it does to blue jeans...the jeans are standard semi-faded blue....not dark and definitely not black. I'll look around for the sooc example if you need it.
6328393341_0153c5548b.jpg

P1030945-HDR by Lukinosity, on Flickr
 
I'd be guessing, here... the water is smoothed out, so we have a very slow shutter, which would normally overexpose... seems when looking at the clouds that its still daylight. I'd say for starters, he's used a neutral density filter (or two or three) to allow for a slow shutter in daylight, possibly an ND400 and maybe more, and then processing in silver efex pro or even just in PS, with very high contrast, would likely take care of the rest. If I was going to do that shot, thats where I would start, I think.

Then again, I am just guessing. Have you tried sending him a message on flickr, to ask how he did it?
 
Thanks guys, no I haven't asked him, I wasn't sure if that counted as being a fan or being rude! My other half is a writer, he got an email one night from somebody who said their homework was on one of his books, so if he would just tell them about it so they didn't have to bother reading it...

It looks like the blue slider thing is going to be a good start, I'll try it out on a few pictures I have from India where the sky is always blue! I can't wait to try and emulate that guy, maybe I could stalk him through the hills like a stag?
 
It's standard conversion procedure. Every professional B&W conversion software offers full control over the resulting brightness/darkness of at least six color channels: red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. In addition to that, such software allows the use of virtual color filters of ANY color in ANY intensity. The combination of both technologies often leads to quite impressive results, especially if you add detail, adaptive exposure and local contrast.

Personally, I often take it a step further and use this B&W conversion technique to create new color photographs, or shall I say recolored shots? It's also an interesting feature for color-key effects, as using these sliders will result in a different hue to be recovered than the one found in the original color photograph.
 
I was trawling the serious compacts Flickr group and cam across Tadhg Mac's photostream. And somewhere in the middle my head exploded.

The Brave Wee Pine of Strathconon | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Can anybody explain the PP to me? It's surely not just straight BW conversion then tweaking, the sky is black! I'd love to understand this better, it would be phenomenal to even attempt this kind of thing. Hopefully come the summer I'll be hitting the hills with dog and full camera kit so I'll get more chances for trying out landscape stuff. I'm beginning to wonder if I need to investigate filters.

I've just posted something similar in another thread:- https://www.photographerslounge.org...ements-basic-b-w-development-5525/index4.html

here are a couple of samples of what I posted.

6627270363_8ff6d8f15d_z.jpg


6627273583_7be8550626_z.jpg



Relatively simple in Photoshop. These are from colour images and Photoshop lets you adjust the lightness and darkness of each colour, plus there are presets to simulate various black and white filtering, as in the examples above. A high contrast red filter is simulated, which darkens blue skies and lightens reds.
 
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