DPR Forum

Welcome to the Friendly Aisles!
DPRF is a photography forum with people from all over the world freely sharing their knowledge and love of photography. Everybody is welcome, from beginners to the experienced professional. Whether it is Medium Format, fullframe, APS-C, MFT or smaller formats. Digital or film. DPRF is a forum for everybody and for every format.
Enjoy this modern, easy to use software. Look also at our Reviews & Gallery!

BW or Color Landscape - Oh the choices

Steaphany,

Thank you for the link, it is a very compelling presentation.

The bw conversion of Klaus looks epic!!

Robert
 
Back to the original question, BOTH photos are striking. To my eyes, the BW photo is more about the tree. The color photo is more about the broad patches of complimentary colors.

Meanwhile, I've been using Nik's Viveza software for some retouching. The control point technology is fascinating and allows for some fast and exciting corrections.

Jesse
 
B&W or Color?

Hi Robert

It is hard to decide afterwards.
To me the approach to B&W and Color photography is fundamentally different.

If I want to do B&W I go out with that in mind. I try to observe the motive as I imagine it will look in B&W. I try to figure out what shades of grey the various colors will make out, and how they fit together. How the light and dark parts of the picture play together and how I can create repetition in shape. With digital, doing B&W, I will then refrain form looking at the preview (from a fear of "resetting" the brain).
Keeping the door open for both possibilities is a limitation. IMHO
I only convert if a client absolutely want it.

knd regards
Øyvind Strøm
 
Thank you Jesse, at composure time the intent was for a BW exposure. The detail of the two large trees contrasting with the small white cloud, dominating the contour lines of the landscape seemed like a fine subject. When I posted my group of landscape BW's, all of the BW versions were most appealing over their respective color counter parts. However, these two photos left me indecisive. So I was curious as to what preference, if any, other people would have. We both seem to like each version equally. This photo was processed exclusively in SPP.

Recently, after the raw conversion in SPP, I have started using Bibblelabs and Andy plug in by Sean Pucket for the BW's.

I will be starting a new thread in the BW section.

good luck with your pictures,

Robert
 
Hi Øyvind,

Thank you for your opinion, I approach BW similarly, with the intent to look for striking textures, patterns, shapes or repetitions that will inspire when transformed. With this photo, it seemed like both versions had an equal number of strong points. Which to say the least, is just short of rare.

Contrastingly to your method, I am not able to see colors as different shades of gray, however, I tend to see textures as shapes of different shades of gray. Therefore, the next time I am out to shoot BW, it is my intent to try to see colors and forecast into shades of gray, that just might be the inspiration to something different.

I am going to start a new thread in the BW section.

Once again, thanks to all for sharing your opinions!! :)

good luck with your pictures,

Robert
 
Klaus,

Since your image was only 200x300, I first had to load it into Qimage to bring the resolution up to 533x800. Silver Efex Pro could easily work with the original resolution, but the antique grain caused a loss in detail. I then opened the 533x800 image in Photoshop, Called up the Silver Efex Pro filter, and this is the result:

View attachment 1454

Perfect work! :)

Sorry for the late answer (due to holidays). But ..... better late than never! :D

See you with nice pictures

Klaus
 
I shoot all my pictures in RAW and then I can work in color or BW. I have a Rangefinder background of shooting BW so I quite often will print a majority of my exposures in BW.

Leo
 
Back
Top