The making of ‘Vision of Margaret’s Path’

I have been asked by a lot of people how I achieve some of the effects of my black and white images, while I won’t go into total detail the following images will show the evolution from capture to conversion with a brief description as to what was done. This is a brief version of what I actually go through but it will give you a general idea.

Process One

This is the initial colour photo, corrected for colour balance and initial sharpening processed in photoshop. Contrast is corrected to compensate for the flat detail that usually comes out digital cams. You can see that the horizon is slightly off and that there is a lot of extra detail not needed. The sky is washed out as I was exposing for the stairs and rocks, I knew that I converting to BW so I was not worried.






Process Two

This is the first conversion to black and white, details are flat but I have the shades and tones that I want, I usually use Channel Mixer combo 26,36,37 Constant 0 Monochrome Set. This gives me an idea of where I want to concentrate on boosting contrast.




Process Three

Evaluating the photo I concentrated boosting contrast in the areas of the ground, rocks and stairs. Popping the whites from the black and increasing darkness. I have also cropped the photo to compensate for the horizion being off center and got rid of the coffee cup on the ground. I now have decided that I want to focus attention to the stairs and the side rocks and partial ground.




Process Four
Where I want to focus back on the stairs and ground and rocks at the side I now create a curves layer and drag the white down completely on the right to create an almost night time photograph. All adjustment layers have a mask layer attached to them I now start painting in low opacity to bring back some of the details.




Process Five
This is the final process where I have painted the details back in, I now add more contrast by using an aggressive ‘S’ curves layer, and apply final sharpening. The trees were too sharp so I applied a little blur to the top portion of the photo to create a little dreamy effect.




Process Six
Now that I have done the photo, approved of all the elements and ensured that the image is very high quality. I now add a frame and titie layer to accentate the photograph. Now this photo is slightly different from the one I posted earlier in the week. I recreated the process for the purpose of this blog to show what I do If you want to see the other image that I have decided to stay with click on the blog before this one.




Final Note
If you have any questions, or want something explained in more detail please feel free to message me. I hope that this will help some understand the thought process that I go through to decide on my editing style. I hope that fellow photographers will learn a thing or two from this as well. As mentioned earlier, people have been wondering how I achieve my styling so these photos were redone to illustrate the process that I go through

Derek