A little test of black and white photography.
Printable View
A little test of black and white photography.
Too grainy, object is too centered. If the house would be cutoff on the right site of the picture and you would see more from the left...that would have been better IMO...unless of course I'm missing something special about that picture, in that case I'm sorry. ^^
Yea it was a test... though yea I should have taken the pic a bit more to the left caught the top of an apple tree.
If I wanted it a bit better I would have NoiseNinja'd it.
A second attempt. The clouds weren't as nice as they were earlier... but the technical issues are fixed. Would have bloomed the hedges a bit more except that would cause the tree to clip.
The first one was fine. It was actually better than fine, but not up to great. It has some great use of visual weight and the house is positioned perfectly to allow a balance to be formed with the sky. Patrick is crazy to say the house is "too centered". Any more to the right and you'd lose your balance in the sky. Any more to the left and it would be centered. The only thing of concern would be the point on the roof being close to the exact center. Some people might see it for what it is instead of looking at the movement in the roof as a whole. Dont listen to those people if they say anything about that point, btw.
I feel the second attempt is terrible. There's soo much undefined noise in the leaves with nothing to balance it out. Are you photoshopping these (not including levels) or are they just straight from the camera?
Needs more contrast (then again, I prefer high-contrast b&w). Also, I think you chose a pretty boring subject to photograph.
Yea, I'll try again on a better-cloud day. The second one I noise ninja'd which caused a bit of over-sharpening in the leaves. (And bloom on the roof making it look almost like it was cut/pasted XD)
This is just to learn the basics... it's actually just a place near my house... the "house" actually is a chiropractor.
The contrast was kinda at the limit... actually a bit beyond... which is why the leaves are blooming a bit.
I actually like the richness in the black.
Yea that was accomplished using Photoshop CS3's black'n'white filter, shadow/highlight filter, and the local contrast curve... in that order. (Also tweaking with the RAW file if UFRaw worked...)
Black'n'White filter allows you dial up/down each colour individually. Say you want blues dark and rich but greens bloomed. Turn blue to the left, green to the right.
Shadow-Highlight lets you tweak the detail in the shadows and highlights. It flattens the image a bit, but it restores a lot of detail that otherwise would be missed.
Curves finally lets you restore the depth by boosting the lights and damping the darks... making it look less flat.
Ray Maxwell Had that as one of his tutorials when he appeared on TechTV.
I know Phopo :P
