cold comfort

[squirl033]

one of those "memorial" benches you see sometimes in parks and so forth... this one is in Kirkland, along NE 116th St in front of the old McAuliffe Nursery park... Canon 30D, 24-135 @ 31mm, 1/800 @ f/11...

 

[ejones]

This works well in B&W. I'm thinking there's a hemeroid joke in this shot too

 

[Judy N]

Yeah, like an inexpensive Tucks experience.

 

[JaniceL]

Aw, tempting as it might be, I'm going to pass on further hemorrhoid jokes because you kinda wiped them out. But in the end of day, I like this shot.

 

[BobH]

Aw, tempting as it might be, I'm going to pass on further hemorrhoid jokes because you kinda wiped them out. .

Good, because they could quickly become a pain in the butt....

Meanwhile, I like the photo, and wonder how many folks, including me, might have overlooked it.

I like the B&W treatment, it suits the subject well. How did you do the conversion?

 

[squirl033]

Good, because they could quickly become a pain in the butt....

Meanwhile, I like the photo, and wonder how many folks, including me, might have overlooked it.

I like the B&W treatment, it suits the subject well. How did you do the conversion?

thanks, Bob... actually the conversion was a two step process. first, i opened the file in Irfanview, which is my default image viewer, and selected "convert to grayscale". that seems to work better and provide truer B&W than the "desaturate" function in photoshop. then i closed the image, pulled it into photoshop, and did some tweaking with the contrast and levels till i got what i wanted.

 

[BobH]

Thanks Rocky. Just about anything will work better than "desaturate" in most cases. Converting to black and white is more than just removing all of the color information in an image. Good conversion programs do some additional processing based on the colors to get a better looking greyscale image.

If you're really serious about black and white, check out Nik's Silver FX pro. It's the best B&W conversion program I've ever seen. Of course, you can get the same effects yourself using Photoshop, if you know how. I don't, so Silver FX is really great for me.

 

[squirl033]

Thanks Rocky. Just about anything will work better than "desaturate" in most cases. Converting to black and white is more than just removing all of the color information in an image. Good conversion programs do some additional processing based on the colors to get a better looking greyscale image.

If you're really serious about black and white, check out Nik's Silver FX pro. It's the best B&W conversion program I've ever seen. Of course, you can get the same effects yourself using Photoshop, if you know how. I don't, so Silver FX is really great for me.

thanks, Bob... right now my budget won't allow for more software, so i'll have to keep doing it the old-fashioned way... besides, i don't do B&W often enough to really justify the expense.

 

[BobH]

Yes, Silver Efex Pro is expensive. If you keep an eye on Nik's website, they occasionally have sales and special deals.

Also, the entire Nik Software package, while rather expensive, saves you a lot of money over the individual components. It's not cheap by any means, but cheaper than buying them piecemeal.