Exercise: Colours into tones 1

For this exercise I needed to select an image that contains at least two strong contrasting colours such as this image with strong red and contrasting green:

This was a raw image to enable me to have direct access to the original three channels or red, green and blue. This next image shows the simple conversion with no adjustments:

The next part of the exercises was to make two versions of this basic image and change in two ways:

• lighten the greyscale tone of one of the colours and darken the tone of the contrasting colour as much as possible
• in the second version, perform the reverse

For this image I adjusted the red scale, which appears much darker than the basic black and white image, had I used the full range of the scale the black colour deepens. The other slider I altered was the green, which lightened the leaves, I kept the adjustment down for this image though as it looked too washed out. The ladies hair is also affected by this adjustment making it appear darker/shadowed.

For this image I moved the red scale slider in the opposite direction which does the complete opposite to the other end of the scale. The green slider was also altered in this image, lifting the branches and leaves out of the shadows a little.

These images demonstrate the strong difference in tonal distribution. The red and green areas are those that were altered with the other areas of the image remaining the same as the basic black and white image ie the ladies hair hasn't really changed in tone from the first image. Creatively this technique can completely change an image leaving open many opportunities to alter images and add a creative element or produce something very different.