Tag Archives: colour

Learning to See in Black and White

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Hi Folks:

This is the sixth of the YouTube videos we’ve done for the Victoria Photography Meetup Group. Since the videos are out in the wild anyway, we thought maybe we should put them up here as well. The last talk was on the basics of colour so this one is on making black and white (grayscale) images. For most people, the best way to make grayscale images is to shoot in colour and then convert the images into grayscale on the computer. We explore the reasons for that and a few ways to maximize that colour information…even when all you can see on your screen are shades of gray.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below or fill out our contact form.

Two versions of an image of the Koksilah River: the top in colour and the bottom in black and white. This image is the link to the tutorial video.

Learning to See in Black and White

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re closing in on a hundred now, I think.
P.S. II, the sequel. Harvey Stearn has an excellent post: Black & White Image-Making In the Digital Age. Well worth reading.

Playing With Colour

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Hi folks:

This is the fifth of the YouTube videos we’ve done for the Victoria Photography Meetup Group. Since the videos are out in the wild anyway, we thought maybe we should put them up here as well. As I mention in the introduction, colour is a topic on which one could easily earn several PhDs. I’m not much above the Kindergarten level of understanding myself, but understanding the basics of light and colour is essential to photography – even if one only shoots black and white (grayscale) images.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below or fill out our comment form.

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re closing in on a hundred now, I think.

P.S. II, the sequel. A couple of links:
This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person
Online Simulator Shows You What Photos Look Like to People With Color Blindness

Affinity Photo Panoramas: A Quick Tip

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Hi Folks:

A little while back we did a post on Affinity Photo, HDR and Panoramas; this is a follow-up of sorts to that.

Marcia and I were out at Rithet’s Bog recently and among the images made that day I took six images that were made into a panorama. When one creates a panorama in Affinity Photo (or any other panorama program), the software uses control points (matching features in two or more images) to bend, stretch, twist and manipulate the individual images into something resembling one image. In the film days this was called a photo-mosaic and its completion was much more complicated. In any event, the result inevitably ends up with having some ragged edges, depending on how well one lines up the base images. An example:

Continue Reading →

Colour Manipulation in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

We haven’t put out a Lightroom post for a while; this one is an attempt to answer a question that we were asked recently on one of the social media sites. Before we get started, if you have Photoshop, PSE, Corel Photopaint, Gimp or some other pixel-editing software, you’ll more likely find doing colour manipulation easier there. However, if Lightroom is what you have, all is not lost! Continue Reading →

A Quick Tip: Lightroom Colour Picker

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Hi Folks:

The following isn’t my idea, but something I picked up from watching a video by Matt Kloskowski over at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.  The only difference is that he was working in Photoshop, and I thought it must be transferable to Lightroom; so it is.

The colour picker tool in Lightroom’s Develop module is used mostly with Split-toning, although it’s also available with the Gradient tool and the Brush tool.  As can be seen in the image below, one can either use the sliders to set the hue and saturation levels for the Highlights and Shadows, or, by clicking on the colour box, one can bring out the colour picker tool. Continue Reading →

Photography and Colour Management

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UPDATE: September 2, 2013  A month or so ago I did a Powerpoint presentation for our photo meetup group on the Essentials of Digital Photography as a starting point for a talk on Lightroom, and I created a video of that presentation.  This is complementary to but different from the post below.
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Hi Folks:

This started out as a quick response to a friend from a local photography meetup group on how to profile her scanner, but some 5000 characters later I thought maybe I should simply post it here instead.  As I mention (several times) below, I’m far from being a colour expert, so at best this is a layman’s explanation.  Any errors are wholly mine, and if you want to add corrections in the comments below, feel free to do so.  Just remember that this is targeted toward the average reader! Continue Reading →