B&W Landscape Skeletal

[Ralph Turner]

Looking west towards Black Crag from Wray Castle in the Lake District.

(Canon 6D, Sigma 24-105 f4 A)

 

[Stevenson Gawen]

Wow... kinda sunny and threatening at the same time. Great shot

 

[Ralph Turner]

Wow... kinda sunny and threatening at the same time. Great shot

@Stevenson Gawen thank you

 

[Brian Moore]

What a very pretty landscape.

 

[Ralph Turner]

@Brian Moore thank you.

 

[Chris Bennett]

This is great Ralph.
That poor tree, a Sycamore, I think, is just about hanging on!

 

[Ralph Turner]

@Chris Bennett thank you! I’d assumed it was ivy growth, but upon closer inspection of the original file I think you’re right (I probably didn’t pay sufficient attention at the time lol). In looking at my original jpeg, which would have been converted from raw in lightroom, I noticed quite a lot of noise and smeared detail in the b+w version, so out of curiosity I tried a mono conversion through Raw Therapee…. wow, what a difference. Virtually all that noise gone and much better detail retrieval. Not sure where I went wrong first time round.. still, it was a while ago

 

[Dave Farnes]

Great picture. The black clouds and skeletal tree make for a ominous scene, could be Mordor.

 

[Ralph Turner]

Great picture. The black clouds and skeletal tree make for a ominous scene, could be Mordor.

Thanks, @Dave Farnes. Luckily I didn’t encounter any orcs in the making of this picture

 

[Chris Bennett]

@Chris Bennett thank you! I’d assumed it was ivy growth, but upon closer inspection of the original file I think you’re right (I probably didn’t pay sufficient attention at the time lol). In looking at my original jpeg, which would have been converted from raw in lightroom, I noticed quite a lot of noise and smeared detail in the b+w version, so out of curiosity I tried a mono conversion through Raw Therapee…. wow, what a difference. Virtually all that noise gone and much better detail retrieval. Not sure where I went wrong first time round.. still, it was a while ago

It paid off in the end.

 

[Pete Askew]

You have created a very striking and quite dramatic image there Ralph and it was certainly worth playing with. I like the darkening of the clouds. Did you use some red filtration to darken that area and lighten the grass?

 

[Ralph Turner]

@Pete Askew thank you. No filters, just a b+w conversion from a full colour raw file using the tools available in lightroom and probably then a little dodging/burning in pse6. It was taken a while ago, though, so I’m not 100% on exactly what I did. This is a small version of the original conversion rather than my latest version that I tried out of curiosity, as mentioned above, converting the raw file in Raw Therapee. It’s not exactly the easiest software to get your head around (and my understanding of it is quite basic, although I need to use for converting raw files from my Fuji scanning camera), but it can give superb results.