This post also contains photos. In particular, I was experimenting with several ways of framing/cropping a shot, similar to how some of the rat photos earlier were brightness cropped (I didn't know that was what it was called, but it sounds right!).
Here's one variant of the brightness cropping that I really liked:
I think combining this with a change in brightness/contrast could be even more effective. It's also sorta neat to be able to change pictures into greyscale, as some things look a lot better that way.Here's the next effect I fiddled with, but couldn't really find a place to use it effectively. Doing this conversion (called "posterize") on only an area of an image doesn't really work well, but on a whole image it can be pretty neat:
Here we have a comparison photo. I found an option which is supposed to enhance the colors in a picture:
The left one is raw from the camera, the right is with the colors enhanced. I think the right side version is actually more accurate to what my eye saw, I also did some comparisons with pictures of myself, and the color-enhanced version actually matches my skin tones a lot better than the raw camera version.Finally, the following photo is from the set after Emily's graduation, and I haven't actually changed it, I just really like the picture and wanted to post it.
There you have it, some interesting effects, and I'm now caught up til saturday's post.
8 comments:
One neat thing one can do with grayscale photos, which I have seen used to excellent effect in newspapers and yearbooks, is the use of "warm" versus "cold" grayscale. Depending on the subject of the photo, and the emotions one wants to convey, this can really have potentially large effects on the attitudes of the reader/viewer. (I wouldn't be surprised if the yellow journalists employed this along with their phraseology.) Another remark worth making is that grayscale can often be much more effective than color if you want to manipulate emotions using photography.
P.S. Be careful with late postage or you may have trouble with your mail arriving at its intended destination!
Any idea in technical terms how to do warm/cold greyscale? IE, is it a color balance change then a saturation removal? (the way I did the grayscale there was just use a saturation change to 0 on the HSV chans).
Some programs actually use the term "warmth" as the option. It would then have some scale, say between 0 and 100, that one can adjust. (I want to say I was seeing it on Photoshop circa 1998, but I'm not 100 % sure it was that program.)
So the warm/cool colorscale thing I'm familiar with, and it *can* be applied to greyscale, but it results in something that, as far as I know, isn't quite greyscale anymore.
Or, more specifically, is 1D in colorspace, but no longer a straight line from 0x000000->0xFFFFFF (in RGB), but rather a curve, sharing only the endpoints.
The "warmth" of the spectrum typically refers to how far that line is distorted into a curve, and in what direction -- more generally, in colored images, you're curving the entire space similarly to that 1D line passing through it.
Here's what confuses me -- Mason -- are you referring to the same thing? When it comes to print, it makes little sense to do this to a greyscale image that is going to be printed in greyscale, since, usually, the transformation back to shades of gray undoes exactly (modulo fixed precision, 256 states) what you did with the first mapping.
Though perhaps, esp. when referring to grayscale, it refers to the same nonlinear map typically applied to only the red & blue channels applied to all three, resulting in the same straight line through RGB space, but parameterized unevenly?
Am I being completely obtuse in my description? I think so...
Examples: I'll use 4 bits per channel instead of 8. We start with the colors 0x000, 0x888, 0xfff.
"Warmer" (as I know it) would map those colors to, potentially, 0x000, 0x987, 0xfff, and colder would be 0x000, 0x789, 0xfff.
Does warmer/colder for grayscale, then, mean mapping to 0x000, 0x999, 0xfff and 0x000, 0x777, 0xfff?
So, I've never thought of this in terms of a mapping.
Warmth and coolness can definitely be applied to printed material in grayscale. Newspaper folks have been doing this a long time (long before computers were being used for publications).
Unfortunately, I can't actually address your comment as to why that makes senses w.r.t. a mapping such as you described.
All good. Maybe if I have some time, I'll do some digging on Wikipedia. I'm pretty sure I only know part of the story re "warm/cold" colors (really, I've only seen it addressed in the context of color).
Lemming: Maybe it's exactly the warm/cold mapping you know, translate the RGB into HSV and drop the saturation to 0? That last step converts to greyscale, but the initial warm/cold mapping will change the HV values in some reliable way, that won't be identical to the 0x888->0x999 type thing. When I get some time I'll try this and see what it looks like.
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