Saturday, October 07, 2006

Photography of NY by Will


This is for Will, this is what I was suggesting with your pic. Modified using Picasa.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What is the difference? What exactly did you do?

7:30 am
Lexcen said...

JP, if you go to his site, you'll see its a color photo. I've filtered it through effects in Picasa to leave only the color in the middle.

8:35 am
Will said...

Thanks Lexcen, you're definitely correct that taking the color out of a night photo can often be an improvement. I hadn't considered leaving the color in some parts the way you did here though.

Generally I find two (non-artistic) reasons to take the color out of a photo. Really white photos, like snow scenes are one. The camera will sometimes see colors where they aren't (or at least, where I don't see them).

The other is in night shots, as you've pointed out. Switching to black and white not only solves the problem of dealing with the weird yellow/red that comes from street lights, but also allows greater flexibility with the contrast. If I take a night shot that isn't very sharp, I can sometimes cheat by taking out the color and boosting the contrast. I know I've got a few of those in the archives, I'll see if I can dig one up.

Photoshop has another alternative, which is a function that reduces the color saturation by percentage. Sometimes it doesn't have to be totally black and white, just less colored.

Artistically speaking, I generally only consider black and white where there's a pattern or something particularly linear that easier to see without color as a distraction.

Of course, because with digital photography switching to black and white is a post-production step, I often forget about it.

Thanks very much for the feedback. I really appreciate it.

12:44 pm
Lexcen said...

Will, you're most welcome. It was just an idea that I thought I should share with you.

5:57 pm

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