#4662906 - 04/12/10 07:15 AM
Spring is here! v.2
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2000SiRacer
Post Master Supreme
Registered: 04/19/02
Posts: 42801
Loc: Colorado
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In the tradition of Kyle and his apparent disdain for spring pastels
View on Black
Great Falls was an absolute clusterfuck this weekend. All the parks get like this the first few truly gorgeous weekends.
The observation deck I was going to shoot this from was packed with people. I finally got sick of all the jostling and whatnot, so in front of ~50 people or so I hopped the railing and headed for the edge. The reactions were hilarious. Girls pointed and laughed, old women yelled about following the rules, kids shrieked haha. I found myself a good flat rock right on the edge, as close to the center of the river as you can get without taking a dive. This was a two shot pano at 29mm with the Nikon 24-70, the original is ~6,200 pixels across. Broke out my B&W #110 ND 3.0 to get 3" at ISO100 and f/13 in broad daylight.
I had no intention of this being in black and white, but I couldn't get the contrast I wanted without the colors getting all kinds of unattractive. I used a kind of interesting technique here. I imagine it's been around forever, but I haven't heard of it anywhere else and I think it worked well. I created a Black and White adjustment layer, tweaked those sliders and set the blending mode to Soft Light (or maybe Hard Light, not sure). This gave me a decent start in the conversion. Then I created two different Levels adjustment layers. One I set the black threshold up to ~50 or so (black becomes 0-50, instead of just 0) and the other I set the white threshold to ~190 or so (white becomes 190-255, instead of just 255)
I masked out both at pure black and then just went through with the brush tool set around 10% to create lots of contrast. Made the darks darker and the lights lighter and got to do it very selectively. I even created a second, even darker adjustment layer for the water because it was so much lighter in the original.
Anyway, I don't do many black and white landscapes so let me know what you think. This is another example of layer masks being so crucial Scott 
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#4663578 - 04/12/10 11:51 AM
Re: Spring is here! v.2
[Re: GB]
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PA2KFBPSI
Post Master
Registered: 08/09/01
Posts: 2893
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I like it but I would really like to see color and more light in the lower left hand corner. On my work screen the LL corner is pretty much black.
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#4663880 - 04/12/10 01:14 PM
Re: Spring is here! v.2
[Re: scootergeek]
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2000SiRacer
Post Master Supreme
Registered: 04/19/02
Posts: 42801
Loc: Colorado
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Eric, I'd crop the sky down a bit, there's absolutely nothing going on up there and on my monitor, it looks like there's some weird posterization going on in that lower left hand corner.  , scott
I think you have a point on the sky crop. I'll revisit that tonight and see what happens.
The lower left has detail, albeit pretty dark detail, on my calibrated monitor. The other two monitors I've seen it on don't show much of anything.
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#4668070 - 04/13/10 07:27 PM
Re: Spring is here! v.2
[Re: 2000SiRacer]
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2000SiRacer
Post Master Supreme
Registered: 04/19/02
Posts: 42801
Loc: Colorado
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#4668142 - 04/13/10 08:07 PM
Re: Spring is here! v.2
[Re: 2000SiRacer]
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PA2KFBPSI
Post Master
Registered: 08/09/01
Posts: 2893
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I can see the lower left hand corner now. I am at home on a better monitor and a darker room. At work with a crappy monitor and a bright window at my back I could see anything beyond the tree shadows in the river.
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