Monochrome photography

Ok thought I'd bring all the discussion about monochrome photography
into one thread.

John #8...

______________________

Great post, Faolan. Sent it off to my son Tom. He will
appreciate the contents of your post. It takes quite an
effort to pass on information that requires a lot of text.
Photos were artistic. Well done & thank you.

Tyke...

A very eloquent post Faolan.
Mothy's reply in one of the threads was also interesting.

I love to see b&w photography used with architechure of portraiture.

There is several methods of monochrome conversion, some are more
flexible than others. I am Photoshop centric as that's what I use and
most of the methods here are that way inclined, though probably can be
adapted to other packages.

How to capture a monochrome image, should I use the camera or should I
use a paint package? The answer is you should use a paint package unless:

1) You to output direct to printer from camera (event photographer, no
computer or printing at a lab are some examples.
2) Don't have a suitable paint package

Shooting colour images gives you a wide selection of choices:

1) Selective colouring for focus points
2) Emulate filters using channels
3) More colour data to give a finer graduation of tones.

Number 3 is the most important of this, why limit your pixel data to
just shades of grey? Monochrome photography is all about evoking
emotion, using light to achieve the depth that the absence of colour
brings on.

Methods:

1) Desaturation is the worst, it just pulls out all the colour and gives
you no control over the tonality of the image.
2) LAB mode, is probably the easiest to master, though requires
additional tweaking to give contrast.
3) Channels, This one gives you the most flexibility but can be the
hardest to master.
4) RAW - Similar to using Channels but instead doing the conversion in
the RAW converter.

One of my best monochromes is of Rum, this was created using Channels.
The technique I used for this image is best suited for blue skies and
where you want Drama. You can see this shot on my personal website
layer to achieve the effect preserving the colour layer beneath.

However for most of my work I use the LAB mode. With the lightness
channel preserving luminosity it gives me the option to play with
toning. Something very important to me some examples of toned images
using this method are here:

All these images have one thing in common, they started life as a colour
image and converted to monochrome. You have a wide selection of images
above to give an idea of what can be achieved with a monochrome image
some are more complex than others (9205 took over 6 hours work and 12
layers in the final image (discounting any merged)!).

There is hundreds of tweaks you can do, the Greg Gorman method (high
pass filter/fill layer), use channels and so on. There is no *right*
way, only the artists way.

Further reading:

These links covers the main methods. Also this is important to create
interest in a shot:

Also don't limited to monochrome images duplicate your image, convert to
monochrome and apply some filters (such as median or Gaussian blur) and
use that to create a 'glamour glow' to your colour image by changing the
blend modes (Overlay and Soft Light the two most used ones) and opacity.

Or drag a processed colour image across to overlay the monochrome and
play with the blend modes/opacity.

Possibilities are endless, the only real limit is your imagination and
willingness to learn!

Foxy at w**k...

Lovely photos