My work with B&W over the past year has led me to new revelations about the subtleties of color and tone and how these can play any number of complementary or even destructive roles within an image. Today's image, for example, was not working for me in B&W in the way I intended it too. The color version worked better, but I didn't like it either. Neither conveyed the sense of reaching into the forest that I felt was essential for this image.
I tried various desaturation techniques and in the end I decided to try switching to lab mode and abducting the a channel with a fill of 50% grey. This gave me a range of color that was much more in keeping with what I was looking for in the final image. Specifically, it altered the role of the tufted green grasses and converted them to shades of yellow and gold, which more closely matches the leaf litter present on the forest floor. This makes the forest floor more homogeneous, and I believe it helps lead the viewer through the image with less distraction. Also, it preserved much of the blue that I enjoyed in the full color version.
This image was shot with the mini-view setup, of course, and it represents to a "T" the kinds of focal plane voodoo I plan to explore in the future. I know it's gimmicky, and I know it will not be everyones cup of tea. That's ok. I like the effect and am hoping to capture some unique images.
3 comments:
May … or can… gender be reassigned through surgery? Can color be reassigned through LAB conversion. OR, in each case, is there still a gap between the expectation and the result?
Sometimes the question reveals a lot about the questioner, eh? Or at least about the intended answer.
I have not yet seen a LAB color conversion which fails to de-sparkle things chromatic. Now all of this is astonishingly subjective, perhaps on the level of comparing one’s mother’s cooking to one’s wife’s? Yet to my eye, and to whatever of my cerebral nodes which interpret flickerings between dendrites and neurons – the results of LAB look like the hues which the Turner Network applied to “Colorize” the great pre-Technicolor classics. A sort of chromo-lite which I find satisfying as “near” beer - or Brahms executed on a Moog.
There was a reason that castle makers dug moats. And I find LAB color as equally effective a barrier in defending against my reviewing an image. It keeps me from getting into it. Now not to overdo this. I mean LAB lacks the inexplicable impact of the fingernails-upon-blackboard effect upon my senses, but it’s not far away.
Okay, this is a very personal reaction, and I’m sure there is some aesthetically significant importance for the existence of LAB color. But then again, there is probably an argument for creamed lima beans… in both cases, they cause me to mildly rattle and shudder. Perhaps both are an acquired taste?
Hey, I never got to your image… Over there… Across the cold, impenetrable moat of color reassignment surgery.
Sorry…. It’s a problem I guess I own and I shall have to work on un-narrowing my mind. Note to self… do that starting perhaps in early 2010…
Thanks for sharing MIchael,
Ted
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You know, it really doesn't matter what you have to say about an image... like it, love it, leave it, oh my! It's all great fun to read because your responses are so doggone genuine.
Thanks for looking.
-Michael
Michael,
I think I know what Ted means by likening some Lab techniques with movie colorization. I work in Lab most of the time, no, almost exclusively, and there is the danger to overdo it, but in the end it is just another tool, and if you use a hammer, you could still end up hitting your head, right?
In the case of your image, well, I guess I'm on your side of the moat. It does look colorized, correct, but here there is nothing wrong with it.
Andreas
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