The day started out windy with clouds scudding across a sun that put in brief but repetitive appearances. Despite being an unseasonable 8-10 degrees C, it felt a whole heap colder standing around in the wind.
As the morning progressed so the weather deteriorated – but as always it was a lot of fun winding up my mates!
Dull weather almost always forces me to think in terms of black and white.
An interesting topic to explore, having been reading on one of the well known forums that digital and monochrome don’t mix. So what’s my recipe for success? It goes like this…
Step 1: Use heavy graduated filters. Don’t mess about with a two stop grad and hope it’ll work. It won’t. On dull days there’s usually at least a five stop difference between the sky and the rest of the frame. That leads to over-exposure of the sky and under-exposure of the subject. In the example below I used a three stop grad down to about the top of the loco; a further two stop on the clouds at the top of the frame; and then a one stop the other way up holding back the foreground. Yes – THREE filters in use. And people wonder why I use a tripod!
Step 2: Now at home in the warm, in Photoshop start by adding a Channel Mixer Layer. Click ‘Monochrome’, and then play with the sliders. Remember in the ‘good old days’ of black & white film? You used to use yellow, orange and red filters to get a dramatic sky, didn’t you? The yellow a gentle effect, the orange more pronounced, and the red very dramatic. To get a similar effect, try bringing the blue slider back to about -50%, and then making the red and green sliders about +75%. Note the total should always add up to about 100%.
Step 3: Add a vignette. Now there’s lots of ways of doing this, my preferred being to drag an oval selection around the primary subject using eliptical marquee tool with feather set at its maximum of 250 px. With the selection made, select ‘Inverse’ and then add a Levels layer to the resulting selection. Try about -80 on the middle slider.
Step 4: Using either a further Levels layer or a Curves layer if you prefer, boost the contrast. People like monochrome pics with deep blacks and crisp highlights – so don’t disappoint them!
Step 5: Warm it up a bit. Add a Colour Balance layer to the top of the layer stack – I use something like +3 red and +3 yellow – and then play with layer’s opacity to get the effect I want.
All the major work is done – now do whatever other tickling you fancy to the pic.
Printing can be bit of a challenge – often your lovely mono print will pick up a colour cast when it emerges from your printer. The only solution is to profile your screen and profile your printer – but then if you’re getting colour casts on your mono prints, you’re getting them on your colour prints as well so it a job definitely worth doing.
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