What If?

Creative people ask the question, what if?  What would happen if I tried this?  Lee and I were on the Blue Ridge Parkway in heavy fog last April when the mists partially cleared and we came upon this scene.  Beautiful!

I knew when I took this photograph that I was going to convert it to B&W.

This shot was taken with my regular camera, but I also had my camera that captures infrared (IR) light that is just outside of the visible spectrum and turns it into visible red.  I usually use it in bright sunlight because the way it makes greens lighter and blues darker creates very dramatic images.  What would happen, I thought, if I tried the IR camera here to lighten the green?  Wouldn't that accentuate the ethereal feeling of the B&W image?

This is the out-of-the-camera IR photograph.  Hard to tell how well it worked.

Here it is converted to B&W.  Wow!  I really like this and will enter it into shows.

I thought I was finished with this image.  But then the question popped into my mind, what would happen if I tried colorizing it?  I played around with adding a texture and then using a rather obscure Photoshop feature, and voila, I got this image!  One of the really cool things is that Photoshop added colors based on the relative lightness and darkness of the underlying image and texture, thereby distributing them throughout the image, something good painters do to achieve balance in their paintings.

I have been trying this technique on other IR images and often don't like the results.  When it works, Wow!

You can see more examples of IR images at my website:

www.william-beuther.artistwebsites.com

Photoshop Taketh, Photoshop Giveth Back

I was new to digital photography and Photoshop when I took this picture on a misty morning.  I loved it!  Couldn't wait to get home and play with it in Photoshop.  Knowing computers, I backed it up and then backed it up again.

Over the next several months I continued playing with it until I finally decided to make a print.  It was horrible!  Then I discovered I had accidentally "dumbed" it down to a very small file size, resulting in severe posterization.  No problem, I had backups.  Wrong.  I had overwritten my backups with the new, downsized file.

I now know what I did wrong; original in JPEG rather than RAW, not saving original file in a safe place, and not understanding Photoshop.  Over the years I have mourned the loss of this image but have kept it with the hope that someday I would figure out a way to salvage it.  

Voila!  The other day I came across the image and thought of the technique that radically alters colors.  The result lacks the mystique of the original but certainly is an interesting image.  Posterization is reduced and its effects minimized by color and texture.  Photoshop has truly given back what it took away years ago.

Options

Digital has had a profound impact on photography, particularly with postproduction.  We have a multitude of options today that would have been unimaginable with film.  But that blessing comes with a price.  Sometimes all those options can be confusing.

A case in point for me is this infrared photograph I took of this young man walking down a desolate street on Cleveland's eastside with the city's skyline in the background.  I liked it but found the overhead wires to be distracting so I decided to take them out in Photoshop.  While I was doing that, I started to play around with the image and came up with these variations.

The problem is that I like all of the images and now I can't decide which one to use. I guess nobody ever told me photography would be easy.