Take a look at these two images – derived from the same photo taken at the Point Reyes Workshop last weekend:
Which one do you prefer?
After taking in the Ansel Adams exhibit with Chris yesterday, we got to talking about the use of color filters in black and white photography – something I had never really experimented with. So, when I got home, I fired up Lightroom 3 and took the color version of the barn photo and transformed it into the black and white version – using Black and White Mix panel in Lightroom’s Develop module.
I first converted the image to Black and White, then adjusted the levels for Green, Orange and Yellow grays to -100. I dropped Blue to -92 and Red to -22. Finally, I tweaked up the contrast a tad to +9 and the clarity up to +70. A final bit of sharpening and I was done.
Back in Ansel’s day, all of this was done using color filters at the time of picture creation!
[Update: 9/5/2010 – Be sure to check out two other versions of this black and white photo: take 2 and take 3.]