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| Coastal rocks at Crystal Cove |
I don't create a lot of black and white images. There I said it. And if you want proof, take a look at my Just Black & White gallery. (I know, I need to work on the title for that one. It's not very imaginative is it?) There's only 6 images in there. And while there may be a few others floating around my site that need to be included in this gallery, that only works out to 8 or 9 images out of the nearly 500 up for public viewing!
The reason? I'm still trying to figure out how to do it. "But black & white imagery has been around forever! What are you trying to figure out?!" I hear you asking. Well, even though black & white is where photography started, that doesn't mean it's easy and it all boils down to color theory and the contrast between different colors. What shade of gray should this blue be? How about that blue? And this red over here, what should that look like? It's all subjective and entirely up to me to decide when making the conversion.
Photoshop offers a myriad of tools for creating monochrome magic (new gallery title?!) and each allows you to precisely control what shade of gray individual colors should be. And that's part of the problem for me. There are just too many options and I would much rather be out taking photos on a nice day then experimenting in Photoshop.
This image is the result of a fairly quick and easy method I recently invented (and by invented I mean, I thought about trying it only to discover it's been around and on the internet for quite some time now). After checking the various color channels, I found the red channel in the RGB spectrum held the best looking image and deleted the green and blue channels, resulting in a monochrome representation of the information held in the red channel. A contrast adjustment, some sharpening and a little dodging to further improve contrast and the image was done. For such a simple process, the results are rather nice, if I do say so myself!
Sorry to bore you all with the technical talk, more information about the location will be in my next update.
The reason? I'm still trying to figure out how to do it. "But black & white imagery has been around forever! What are you trying to figure out?!" I hear you asking. Well, even though black & white is where photography started, that doesn't mean it's easy and it all boils down to color theory and the contrast between different colors. What shade of gray should this blue be? How about that blue? And this red over here, what should that look like? It's all subjective and entirely up to me to decide when making the conversion.
Photoshop offers a myriad of tools for creating monochrome magic (new gallery title?!) and each allows you to precisely control what shade of gray individual colors should be. And that's part of the problem for me. There are just too many options and I would much rather be out taking photos on a nice day then experimenting in Photoshop.
This image is the result of a fairly quick and easy method I recently invented (and by invented I mean, I thought about trying it only to discover it's been around and on the internet for quite some time now). After checking the various color channels, I found the red channel in the RGB spectrum held the best looking image and deleted the green and blue channels, resulting in a monochrome representation of the information held in the red channel. A contrast adjustment, some sharpening and a little dodging to further improve contrast and the image was done. For such a simple process, the results are rather nice, if I do say so myself!
Sorry to bore you all with the technical talk, more information about the location will be in my next update.
