zen garden

I like how this black & white came out. When I shot it, I exposed for the rocks in the garden. The rest of the scene was very dark and muddy. So, by using the hue/saturation adjustments in ACR, I was able to pull out extra detail in the different colored leaves. The Japanese maple in the middle of the shot really punched out when I tweaked the green and yellow channels. I did a base layer for the highlight detail. Then, I reprocessed the same file at about 2/3 of stop brighter for the shadow detail. I dropped the brighter image over the darker one and by using a gradient mask and little brush dodging, I brought the shadow detail up without losing that nice highlight texture in the stones.

I had a flashback of my high school B&W photography class when I was working this. Back then, I had to cut my masks by hand with a razor blade and work in the dark around nasty chemicals. Can’t say that I miss that part, though I’m glad it’s still around and taught. It really is the best way to learn about photograph. Back to basics.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 6:23 am and is filed under Ides of May. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.