Arteliance

Design by Fire • Santorini in black and white (scroll down to the The Rob Carr Color to B&W Conversion Technique).

While I was cleaning out Evernote I came across this method for converting photos to black and white and decided to try applying it using GIMP:

1. Convert to LAB colour: Colors » Components » Decompose… set Color model to LAB

2. Image mode will already be Grayscale

3. Highlight Lightness (L) Layer and switch to Channels tab. Ctrl-Click on thumbnail » Channel to Selection

4. Select » Invert

5. With the selection still active, convert the image to RGB color, using Image » Mode » RGB.

6. GIMP doesn’t have Adjustment Layers so what I did turn off the visibility of the A and B layers Ctrl-Click » Create New Layer from Visible

7. Edit » Fill with a rich, dark colour

8. Adjust the opacity, levels and/or curves as needed

Google has a more up-to-date image of where I live now but taken from straight overhead all the coulees appear flattened out. I enhanced the colour to make it look a bit more lively.

In short, when you look at a snapshot you took at the beach, the limitations of the camera mean that three-quarters of the scene will have been lopped off, the range of tones will be compressed tenthousandfold, and the information that remains will never be what you saw. Any appearance of realism will be an inference informed by learning and shaped by convention. It is not realism but verisimilitude.

Photographs may seem realistic but the technology of film prevents escaping photographic conventions, which are actually quite limiting. Less limiting is a paintbrush. A brush can produce every effect a camera can plus a great many more. Before photography, skilful and observant artists spent millennia working out how to represent reality on flat surfaces using this superior tool. Their work forms the most complete guide available on realistic ways to put pictures onto paper.

I’ve always felt that a painting or drawing should be more than a photo, more than a realistic representation of the surface of something or someone. This article explains that and details how to improve digital photographs by incorporating the principles of perception and art.

TidBITS: Reality and Digital Pictures via: penmachine.com

Digital Black and White

Another technique I want to remember.