Shy Camel

[IMG]http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s30/Hyram_Hare/IMGP1018-1.jpg[/IMG]

I like it, but wonder how it would look in B&W.
Highlighted chin, mouth and nose. High contrast, shape and form.
Ideal ingredients, but it's already great as it is.

One little thing though. For a ISO 400 shot, taken with the K20D I am a bit disappointed about the levels of noise in the dark area.
Or did you do some radical PP ,to pull detail out the dark area, were there isn't any : ::

Martin.

Here is a b & w version.

[IMG]http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s30/Hyram_Hare/IMGP1018-2.jpg[/IMG]

I can never decide how to approach black & white conversions so all comments are welcome

Well, I......obviously like the B&W better
But there are some highlight seriously blown out. While there was enough detail left in the first picture. I really like the cleaner blacks on the right.Compared to the noisy colour version. If you like, I have a go with it tomorrow, and post it here.

Martin.

Martin, that would be fine

I think that I should stick to tinkering with images at the weekend when I am not tired after a day at work

I had the impression it was a bit of a quicky
Show you the results, with step by step explanation tomorrow.

Martin.

OK, as promised.




First opened the picture in LR, to see if some highlights could be retrieved from the jpeg. Luckily it did. After that I converted it to black and white with the greyscale tool in LR. Then I duo-toned it, to warm up the lights, and cool down the shadows.

After that I exported it to Elements 6.0 and duplicated the layer.
using an adjustment layer, I darkened the wood on the left, using levels.
The camel's head was masked off. A new layer was created and a high pass filter with blending mode soft ligt was used to show a bit more detail in the wood. Again the camel head was masked off. That's it.

Martin.

Martin,

Many, many thanks.

That is infinitely superior to my effort.

Was there a particular reason for starting off with Lightroom and then going on with Elements :

Hi,
I am glad you like it. I use LR 1.4 (the upgrade 2.0 is to massive for my needs), mainly because it is capable of working on jpeg's and pef files.
And right up till now, I have not found a B&W conversion tool like LR's grayscale tool, that does a better job. It's capability of changing all the existing colour channels gives you so much control, all combined with a very intuitive user interface. Plus...., it has a fantastic tool for split toning. Which I use on 90 % of all my mono work. Warming up the highlights and cooling down shadow areas just gives a bit of extra, IMO.
Elements is just there to do those little things LR 1.4 can't.Things like dodging/burning, high pass sharpening and layer blending.

good light to you,
Martin.

Nice job Martin (and a great shot Hyram)

One suggestion... I wonder if it looks fractionally better as a square crop loosing a little off the top? Or have I been using my old TLR too much lately?

Best wishes, Kris.