Excercise: Colours into tones 2

The aim of this exercise is to make practical use of channel adjustment (sliding the coloured sliders in black and white) to achieve a specific effect. I needed to choose one of the following targets:

• a landscape in which you emphasise the depth (aerial perspective) by strengthening the visual effect of haze
• a portrait in which you light the complexion without significantly altering the tones of the rest of the image
• a picture of a garden in which the green vegetation appears light in tone

In addition to this, for comparison, I needed to prepare the default black and white conversion offered by my software (Lightroom); for example, de-saturate. Print the results in pairs (my printer is not working!) the default conversion and my own conversion.

I chose the portrait option as I'm not planning a trip that would involve an aerial perspective unfortunately. I have some recent portraits from a garden party I took the pictures for. The one I chose had some strong contrasting colours, red, blue and a back ground of green:

Original image:

Converted into basic black and white:

This was a bit of a challenge as the colours that altered the complexion were red and orange, but the red altered the tone of the dress and cardigan also, so I chose to only adjust the orange which did lighten the complexion as seen in the image below:

This exercise demonstrates the vast tools available to change how the image looks, it's not simply a case of converting to black and white, there are many options to change the image in many ways.