I’m currently on a short caravan holiday in the English Lake District national park. Today, I had an expedition to Borrowdale to photograph a photographer’s honey pot, the ‘secret watermill’. On the return walk to my car, I saw this tree, bereft of foliage. I guessed I could get a vantage point with the tree against the sky. I guessed right and also noticed the curved ditch forming a leading line into the image. I had the monochrome image in my imagination as I took the shot. The sky was very overcast but I thought I could bring some dramatic, monochrome contrast to the scene using dt.
Comments welcome.
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What lens was this shot on? I only wonder if there’s room for improvement in the handling of the edge detail and sharpness of the branches and the grass, because the image is really singing in the lower frequencies like its begging me to take a closer look.
Beautiful scene that was well seen, and has been well realised. Worthy of printing and hanging for sure, nice job.
@black_daveth Thanks for your comments. Much appreciated.
Shot with Lumix panasonic G9 MFT with OLYMPUS M.9-18mm F4.0-5.6 , 1/15th sec @ f/8.
I have further edited it, adding a touch of sharpness.
Impressive shot. I would be interesting in knowing which modules and methodology were used to convert to BW in DT. I have not invested time in BW conversions in DT yet, but this image inspires to me learn more.
@Terry Thank you for your comments. To convert to monochrome, I use the color calibration module grey tab. If you slide one of the channels to the right (i.e. value = 1) the image goes to monochrome. By right clicking the slider pointer you can type in values greater than unity or negative values. Boris Hajdukovic has done some you tube videos on conversion.
You don’t have to go to 1. Unless the sliders are all at 0, the image is converted into B&W according to the mixing defined using the sliders. (Maybe you meant ‘e.g.’? ‘i.e.’: ‘that is’; ‘e.g.’: ‘for example’.)
I think (but I’m not sure) it’s probably best to do this in a simple channel mixer instance of the module, not in the primary one (the primary one is used to get the WB right). Also, @Terry : the module provides a bunch of presets which Aurélien claimed were ‘computed from spectral sensitivities’:
You can also use those as starting points.
@kofa Actually, I did mean ‘i.e.’ (id est) in that by sliding completely to the right it sets the value to unity. Had I meant ‘e.g’ ( exempli gratia) I would have said something like ‘moving the pointer toward the right will increase the value of the channel, e.g to 0.5 or 0.75’.
I did wonder about it affecting the white balance unless you use a 2nd instance so I tested it and it does not appear to affect the WB when using the grey tab.
However, my answer was not meant to be a complete treatise on how to do monochrome conversion, merely to give an indication of how I did this which is why I suggested looking up a Boris Hajdukovic youtube.
Your suggestion to use presets is a good idea for imitating a given film look (e.g. Ilford FP4 ) I prefer to make my own mix though.
In any case, thank you for your comment.
OK, sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I still don’t understand why you wrote: ‘If you slide one of the channels to the right (i.e. value = 1) the image goes to monochrome’, but I’ll just chalk that up to me not being a native speaker.
moving the pointer toward the right will increase the value of the channel, e.g to 0.5 or 0.75
It sets the contribution (weight) of the channel.
What the channel is, actually, rather vague (though you don’t see it on the UI), because the output R = G = B values are not necessarily mixed from the input R, G, B (despite the labels on the gray tab).
The input data, the channels to be mixed to produce grey, depend on the adaptation method chosen on the CAT page:
For none (bypass), the input of the grey mixer is in the working RGB space (e.g. Rec2020); for XYZ, the input will be XYZ value; for the others (CAT16 and the two Bradford variants), the data will be the corresponding LMS space (trying the imitate the cone cell responses). That is why the B&W: luminance based preset (just like the film emulation presets) uses XYZ for adaptation, and input R, G, B = 0, 1, 0 as mixer setup: what is labelled as R is the first channel, X; G means the second channel, Y (luminance), and B the third, Z. With such a setup, R = G = B will be simply set to the Y value.
I did wonder about it affecting the white balance unless you use a 2nd instance so I tested it and it does not appear to affect the WB when using the grey tab.’
Did you mean you were worried the outcome would not be shades of neutral tones (grey)? Nope, the code guarantees R = G = B (out[k] is R, out[k + 1] is G, out[k + 2] is B):
@kofa Thanks for your explanation though you seem to have completely missed the point of my reply and also misunderstood it as you have wandered into the first tab of the module which I was not really referring to.
But thanks for inputting so much technical information even though I’m not particularly interested in it.
thanks @bernyemm and @kofa for your replies. Berny, your conversion is very nice. The presets that Istvan suggested are very convenient for a conventional monochrome conversion. When I do monochrome conversions I like to simulate the color contrast correction filters from BW film days. I have worked out a simple technique using GIMP that allows me to use RGB curves to simulate the color of a correction filter such as orange for dramatic skies and yellow/green for improved foliage. With GIMP I can use multiple layers and masks to apply the orange filter to sky region and the yellow/green filter to the foreground in a landscape. Replicating this effect in DT seems impossible (or more correctly I haven’t worked out how to do it). So I will probably stick with processing images in DT, exporting 16 bit Tiff file which I will then open in GIMP for monochrome conversion.
Is it a play raw? I did a colour version, but I didn’t dare to post it.
Anyway now that you’ve made a start, here is it. Quite extreme, but I thought it has to be as dramatic as the original monochrome version:
) I prefer to make my own mix though.
