COLD GLASS WINDOW

Creating Monochrome Photographs from your Colour Images

BY JANE EVANS MA

I found what I thought to be an excellent tutorial online.
Called 'Creating Fabulous Black and White Photographs from your Color Images' HYPERLINK the tutorial guides you through converting your colour images into monochrome. From personal experience, online tutorials can vary from being absolute life savers to complete time wasters. So I thought before I let you try this that I should gain some hands on experience with my own images.

My learning outcome was to achieve the transformation of a colour photograph into an equally exciting monochrome image. I thought I'd put my most recent stuff to the test because, ironically, the colour image seemed all the more vibrant and saturated with the snow covering most flat horizontal surfaces. The work is themed around windows and catching external reflections rather than seeing what's inside. It had snowed last week and everything around me looked different. I didn't actually take pictures of the snow at all, I just felt inspired by the opportunity... though it definitely was there and pretty cold too. The duality of the cut up glass/mirrored/reflected imagery made everything appear hyper-real.

Baudrillard's basic definition of hyper-reality is the simulation of something that never really existed. Eco's definition is the "Authentic Fake." So it is a sign, a symbol, a representation that only stands for itself. They seem to be saying that by its very existence, the hyper-real eradicates the real. That if a simulation can be that convincing, with no origin in reality, then how do you distinguish the two? And if you can't distinguish them, then how can you define reality at all? It's quite a circular logic really, quite dependent on itself for its own existence.

For those interested in capturing the winter season, go to HYPERLINK

When taking the pictures, apart from the seeing of things graphically and being pulled by the intensity of colour, technically my concerns were that of exposure and light balance. Setting up the exposure, it certainly helped to edit material on the fly. Looking at the LDC view-finder, I bracketed shots too that I felt in doubt about. I had no intention of these images being monochrome, in fact, I manually adjusted the light balance for every shot. The sky being so dramatic depending to what angle I composed the shot. My reason for manually measuring the white balance was simply because the colour was defiantly impactful and exciting and I wanted to get that right.

White Balance: Normally our eyes compensate for lighting conditions with different colour temperatures. A digital camera needs to find a reference point which represents white. It will then calculate all the other colours based on this white point HYPERLINK

By utilizing my past experience of Photoshop, I did a series of tests of converting a colour image to monochrome. Yes, they were easy and fast to do, but I thought having done that it was time to move onwards to doing the tutorial so that I could thus compare the results. Taking factors into account, such as the image quality, time taken to achieve results, and adaptability, as always with Photoshop there is more than one way to achieve a result. I found four methods:

Changing the mode to greyscale; Changing the mode to lab color using the channel pallet to close the coloured layers. The saved file then had to be converted to grayscale; Using a new adjustment layer and the channel mixer. Then selecting the mono option, but not using the sliders at all; Using hue saturation and dropping the saturation slider from the default 0 to -100.

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My conclusion is that I can personally recommend doing this tutorial. After working on three different images I was so encouraged by my first attempt that I found the techniques easier to follow and master, memorize and adapt. Although I must admit, for those not so familiar with Photoshop, it may be best first to work alongside someone else who is.

Although I set out keenly to see the images in monochrome by duplicating the background layer, I did allow up to 3% of colour through. The benefit with using the tutorial methods, apart from image quality, is that there is a far greater potential with each layer for experimentation and optimization and refinement. For example, you may decide on a de-saturated soft look by using the duplicate image set to about 20% opacity or create a sense of drama to a scene with a 100% gradient.

Check out my images. Feedback is most welcome and I'd be interested to see your experimentations, thoughts and advice.

Research:
http://studio.adobe.com
http://isa.sensoryengineering.net
http://www.dpreview.com/learn

Please send any comments to Jane