Lovers Beach Cabo San Lucas

[carylwithay]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I used Silver Efex to convert this to black and white. It is an amazing program. Taken with a Panasonic/Leica.

Caryl

[Max Alfy]

Hi Caryl,

 

For my personal taste, and in ordeer to use all the dynamic range of monitors and/or papers, a BW picture should have Blacks and Whites, unless of course a specific atmosphere is represented: early autumn morning mist for instance, which is not the case in your example.

 

In your Silver Efex conversion, the whitest “whites” are at 218/218/218/ and the blackest blacks are at 15/15/15. The conversion below is at 244/244/244 and 8/8/8, my default setting in PS Levels. Plus I have fixed the corner vignetting.

 

All this is a matter of taste, and indeed Silver Efex leaves room for further adjustments.

 

Max

[carylwithay]

I do like your rocks better but I prefer the sky a bit closer to mine.. I should read the instructions for Silver Efex so that I can use it better.

Caryl

[Guest WPalank]

Caryl,

You can achieve the same result as Max (and I agree,it is a big improvement in the rocks) within Silver Efex by going to the Tone Curve in the program and setting it as such:

 

Tone Curve

[ATTACH]109532[/ATTACH]

 

Basically when you make a curves adjustment like this you are setting the white and black point exactly like Levels in PS. The problem with the Tone Curve inside Silver is that you can't Control or Command click within the image to set the exact point on the curve to match the tonal values within the image. You just have to guess.

 

That being said, I prefer to import the image into PS and work with Curves there. To achieve the same image as Max, you simply do a similar Curves adjustment as within Silver, shown below:

 

Curves

[ATTACH]109533[/ATTACH]

 

Again, setting the white and black point exactly like Levels and you have the Histogram to help you as well. But the advantage to Curves over Levels is the fact that you can set up to 16 (I think) different points on the Curve to really tweak things. In Levels, 3 sliders, end of story. Now that might be enough for a lot of people. Again, within Curves you can Command/Control click (Mac/PC) to set an exact point on the curve then use the up/down arrow keys on your keyboard to control the point to the upteenth minutia.

 

Now if you want a different tone in the sky (as you mentioned). Simply convert the Layer to a Smart Object. Run Silver Efex and adjust for the rocks first (that's how I would do it). Hit OK. Now the important part. Right click next to the name of the Layer (Probably something like Layer 0 at this point) do not right click on the thumbnail. You should get the flyout menu below and select "New Smart Object via Copy":

Menu

[ATTACH]109534[/ATTACH]

 

If you instead hit Command or Control J and copy the Layer, the two Layers are connected and whatever you do to one, will effect the other.

Now make a Tone Curve Adjustment for the sky forgetting about the rest of the image in Silver and hit OK.

To me, it would be easier to paint in the sky rather than working on the rest of the image, so I would drag the lower "Smart object Layer" to the top of the Layer stack. Now make sure you click on the Layer Mask (rectangular white square) hit B for the Brush tool, then with black as your foreground color, paint in the sky on the upper layer to bring back the darker tones. I think you said you have a Wacom Tablet which makes things a lot easier.

Hope this helps.

[ChrisC]

I used Silver Efex to convert this to black and white....

 

Caryl - Whilst I do think your sky and rocks are too dense, the problem that screams at me is the halation line separating rocks and sky, I presume this happened with the conversion of the blue component of the colour original. If you open your conversion in Photoshop, and use Levels, pull the highlight pointer to the left, and play with the middle [mid-point] pointer to see extremes of the file's halation issue.

 

I hope you find this constructive, I wouldn't want to deter you in any way.

 

............... Chris

[ChrisC]

OK - I had a quick play. Hope this isn't too vulgar.

 

............... Chris

[carylwithay]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I do appreciate all of you helping me. I have been fiddling with it. Straight photography is new to me. I have been doing surrealistic and manipulated images for many years even in the darkroom. Since I got y M8, I have tried to make beautiful straight images but I do prefer manipulated. Some of my painted images have been published this year in several issues of Painter Magazine our of London.

 

Here is what I have come up with. It looks like a woodcut and changes the location to Alaska! How about that! Cabo San Lucas in Alaska!

Caryl

[tollie]

I appreciated this discussion.

 

It reminds me that with the tools in LR you can also produce spot on conversions... including the manipulation of the tone curve.