Posted by Michael on Jul 8, 2011 | 0 comments
For the photo below, I had found a high vantage point that allowed me a downward view of the concrete staircase. This was important to the composition because it allowed me to exclude many other background elements along the grassy hillside, such as trees and other people. This greatly simplified the composition, but it still contained no real center of interest. So I waited with my camera poised until this guy came along. I took a few shots as he passed through the scene, but this is the one I liked best. So now my photograph contains a subject, somewhere for the viewer’s eye to rest.
Once I opened the photo in Lightroom, I decided to brighten up a little, then crop it down to enhance its symmetry. This was a good start, but I thought I would experiment with a black & white conversion.
Tapping ‘v’ in Lightroom desaturated the photo. I could have done this simply by dragging down the saturation slider in virtually any editing software. The problem with this simple method is that it most often leaves a photo looking drab and lifeless, without much contrast at all. This is because, while the color differences in the original photo created pleasing contrast, the tonal differences were not great enough to be rendered with much contrast once the color was removed.
One solution to this would be to simply bump up the ‘contrast’ slider. But I can take more control by manipulating the way the colors are rendered to black & white. I used the B&W panel in Lightroom to adjust the brightness levels of the different color ranges in the photo.
With this method, Lightroom actually uses the color information in the photo to create a black & white. It’s very much like using color filters over the lens to control the rendering of different color ranges into b&w. These adjustments allowed me to get much more contrast in the grasses, darkening them down to help the concrete stairs and the subject stand out to the viewer. This is basic ‘figure and ground’ theory – helping the subject to stand out against its background aids the viewer in interpreting the photograph. Remember that the brighter areas of an image tend to draw more attention.
I added a few more subtle touches and a little bit of film grain to finish it off. Now help me out a bit: Who is this guy and where do you think he’s going?
