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Looking forward to this. My local photography club had Cole Thomspon present at their last meeting. He had a lot of great input, but one of the "doh" moments I had regarding his B&W tips was to put your camera in RAW mode (obviously) but set it to Monochrome. I knew you wanted to preserve the colors so you could manipulate them later, even if you planned it to be black & white. But for some reason I forgot that the camera would still record the colors in the RAW file, regardless of the camera's color settings. The advantage being that you can see the "rough" black and white view in the LCD preview, but still have the ability to manipulate it fully later. It may be obvious but I found that a useful tip as a relative newbie to shooting in RAW.
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Oct 19, 2015 21:24
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MrBlandAverage posted:Oh, hey, that guy! He presented to a camera club I was in, too. I stopped listening when he said Ayn Rand was one of his idols. http://www.colethompsonphotography.com/TheFountainhead.htm Yeah, he mentioned that particular series and Rand, but only briefly. I don't know much about the guy but it struck me as more of "thin" Rand admiration that you find in people who have read a few of her novels without going into the whole philosophy. I'm willing to give artists some leeway when it comes to personal political views. LogisticEarth fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 23:30
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huhu posted:I've been looking to improve my black and white post processing. The two tutorials I've watched on Youtube result in bad photos. Who teaches black and white conversion in Lightroom well? I don't know of any YouTube lectures, and I'm far from an expert, but one of the things that always seems key about B&W images is that you make sure you have a true black, and shoot for true whites as well. The histogram is your guiding light. Typically I'll set the images to B&W mode, kick the highlights way down, kick the shadows way up. Then, adjust the whites up until you have just reached the limit where the first pixel or two is blown out. Then drop the darks until you start to push the shadows to true black. If there is a particular feature or shape I want to be in, or close to, "true black", then I'll just hold down ALT and drop darks until I start to see that shape in the "lost" pixels. After that, I'll further tweak the contrast and levels, and often mess around with the tone curve, to make sure the image isn't muddy and has good contrast. If you're shooting in RAW and can mess with the individual colors, then that affords you a lot of flexibility. I thought the "Church and Bell" photo from the OP was a bit muddy so I gave it a quick treatment as described above. It brought out a lot more detail and texture in the dome, highlighted the clanger in the bell, and brightened the sky into a nice white negative space instead of the fuzzy grey. It could still use a bit more work, maybe to bring up some of the lighter portions of the church dome, but you get the idea. Obviously it's up to personal taste but I think this improved it a bit.  Now compare the histogram for the original photo, notice the whites are way low: 
LogisticEarth fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 03:57
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