2011-04-29

World of Stone (after/before)

Here's a photo of our recent visit to the "Valley of the Moon" in the Jacumba Mountains Wilderness of the Sierra Juarez mountains near the Mexican border. I want to write a little more about that place in another post and just show this photo as an after/before comparison now because I'm beginning to really love what can be done with black & white conversions.

Sorry! This image has been sold exclusively and is no longer available online.

Besides tweaking the black & white mix a lot (the four sliders that have the most impact for landscape photos seem to be orange, yellow, green and blue) I used a lot of local adjustments: burning the sky in the background, dodging the mountain in the foreground and selectively applying Clarity to accent the rocks.

I can recommend "The Power of Black & White", an inexpensive ebook that describes black & white processing in the digital domain. It costs only $5 and if you're a Lightroom/Photoshop user, it's really worth the money. There are numerous set screws for black & white conversions in these programs, and while the book confirmed that I already had found a good many of them ;) it contains great tricks and techniques that I really put to use for a black & white conversion in the above photo.

6 comments:

  1. It's really an excellent work in the post processing. Bravo!

    ReplyDelete
  2. A world of difference.
    Or another world entirely.
    Welcome in the B&W addicts club Alexander.
    Develloping your Raw files especially for B&W conversion already?
    Will be soon I guess.
    I'm sorry,
    no constructive critique available here.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello Nadja, well, the b/w conversion and the raw developing go hand in hand... one is part of the other... :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I keep forgetting that...
    most people are quicker than me.
    "-))
    Especially you of course.

    ReplyDelete
  5. How'd you get the picture to change with a scroll-over? That's very handy.

    ReplyDelete
  6. That's a simple script I found somewhere on the net. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with the Fotomoto script I'm also using, so after 1 flip both images disappear. :(

    ReplyDelete