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FISH AND CHIPS ON STEWART ISLAND
Let’s look at a hands-on example. On a recent Stewart Island workshop, I made this photograph of a rainbow over a fish and chips shop sign (this is pronounced ‘fush in chups’ in New Zealand) and then decided to see how it would look when converting the raw file into a jpeg by using the black and white converter in Capture One.
This process also works the same when con- verting raw to jpeg or tiff in Lightroom, or in Photoshop by using Image/Adjustments/Black and White and then changing the colour sliders.
When converting your file in this way, you can change the exposure of each independent colour channel without changing others. Doing this means you also have much more control over all the different tones in your image, even before you start playing with the contrast, levels, or curves.
To illustrate, I’ll show the change each channel
makes when converting to black and white in this 1
manner in quite an extreme fashion by increas- ing each channel 100%. I’ve done this in Capture One for this tutorial, but the same steps can also be found on the right panel in the Develop mod- ule in Lightroom under ‘Black and White Mix’ once you convert the image to black and white.
PHOTO TIPS: BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY
STEP
THE STARTING POINT
This is the ‘as captured’ shot from Stewart island.
S2TEP
BASIC BW CONVERSION
The same image with a basic black and white conversion. Note how it lacks a dynamic range of tones and is quite flat. To illustrate the difference adjusting the individual channels can make, I’ll increase them all 100%.
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