Pixiq

In my previous post, Alter Color for better B/W HDR part 1, I talked about adjusting colors so that they might have a better separation from surrounding color when transformed into black and white.

As previously mentioned: The color information contained in the image allows you to make B/W adjustments for each channel of red, green and blue as well as their compliments cyan, magenta and yellow. This option will allow you to produce separations between colored objects in your subject that will not be possible with a grayscale (B/W) image. A grayscale image is one where the color data has been eliminated.

As in the previous post, the following HDR image is the base image used in this post.

After all this, we come to the real reason I do this work. One of the final stages I go through in my recent work is a filtering process. The process I want to simulate is similar to what happens when a color filter is applied in black and white photography. At the moment, I use Silver Efex Pro to achieve the results. Of course, there are other ways to produce this effect. However, Silver Efex Pro makes it much easier to create excellent results.

Silver Efex Pro allows you to add color filtering as if you had used a filter while shooting black and white film. This is very different to the conversion process of creating a black and white image in Photoshop. Again, I need the color image to make this happen. In Silver Efex Pro, I can apply a very dramatic result by applying a color filtering using the Color Filter Adjustment in the side panel.

After altering the yellow object to a cyan the image above received a blue filtration. You can see the before and after. For the color alterations I applied, this turned out to be a reasonable attempt. The yellow text in the sign is very readable the sky looks normal due to the proximity of tone produced by the cyan/green. The blue filtration brought out  the details of the sign and produced a better contrast between the sign and the bricks.

The blue filtration in the software simulates the effect of a blue filter on black and white panchromatic film. This means that blue light will penetrate the filter and therefore expose the 'film'. As a result, the blueish tones become lighter because the simulation is pretending to be "exposing a negative". The simulation is pretending to have both a negative with a positive print outcome. The blue 'light' passes through the filter and exposes the 'film' making the blue object darker. The negative is printed to have the opposite effect and the blues end up lighter in tone. Likewise, the reds go darker because the effect is simulating the blockage of red 'light' exposure to the 'film' negative by the blue filtration effect.

A good grasp of Photographic Color Theory and Light  would be helpful to make this concept easier to comprehend for readers who may have never worked with film. Digital photography uses the same concepts as analog when it comes to light.

Not too bad but, for my liking, the sky is too light and the bricks are too dark.

Next I will try a slightly different approach.

In the image above, I altered the sky to magenta, the wall to cyan and the sign to red as shown. The main thing to consider is separation of tones that will not adjust by other means. The colors are considered based on the complimentary colors and the extent to which you want to control the contrast. The level of color saturation can also be used to enhance the effect.

After flattening the image, I bring it into Silver Efex Pro and add a very different filtration that simulates the use of a colored filter when shooting panchromatic black and white film. This time, I slide to a yellow/orange filter color which seems to give me something very close to what I want.

In the image you can also see that I have done some additional image twaeking by adding control points that allow me to dodge and burn to darken or lighten and to alter contrast locally. These adjustments are what Nik Software calls U Point technology. Each red dot controls an area of the image and is used for the purpose of localized control. Control points are very much like dodging and burning in a real darkroom. Each point is actually a scalable circular area that can be used to control parameters such as brightness and contrast.

And finally, as shown below, the image is toned using Silver Efex Pro's Stylizing palette where I added a tone to both the 'silver' and the 'paper' to provide a warmth and a richness to the image. 

The results are saved as a preset for future use, knowing that I will need to alter the settings depending on the relationships of the subject colors contained in the image and the amount of separation desired.

The final image has a much better tonal separation, nice contrast, beautiful warm tone and the HDR retained the important highlight and shadow details. The image is very convincing of a natural late afternoon summer light.

© John Neel

Read more of my posts for articles about digital and analog imaging.

THIS POSTING AS WELL AS ALL PHOTOGRAPHS AND GALLERY IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHT - © JOHN NEEL AND ARE NOT TO BE USED FOR ANY PURPOSE WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT FROM THE WRITER, THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND/OR PIXIQ.

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