Add drama to a countryside view
Wendy Evans takes to black and white to save a dreary day in the country
We’ve all been there – that day out in the country, hoping for some golden summer light only to discover it’s another cloud-lled day, enveloping your destination in a blanket of grey misery. Rather than packing up and going home, take your photos anyway, with a view to converting them to mono when you get back. In fact, for punchy mono conversions, lots of clouds is actually a good thing because they add texture and denition to the sky, as you will see with this project.
So, here we have a brick cottage, a winding pathway and a church in the background, but there is no sign of the sun and the light is completely at. We used A nity Photo for this project, but Photoshop has near-identical black and white conversion lters and similar alternatives for the tools mentioned.
De ne the sky 3
Go to the Basic tab and increase the Clarity until some de nition and drama start to appear in the sky. If this also makes the owers on the ground area too bright, adjust the yellow or green channels again. While on the Tones tab, tweak the overall contrast using Curves with an S-shape.
Initial corrections 1
This was shot with a wide-angle lens so the side of the cottage is leaning in. Clean up any aws to start with by clicking on the Develop Persona icon and then on the Lens Correction tab on the right. There are options for speci c Lens pro les so, if you used one of those listed, select it. Then move the Vertical slider to the left to correct the leaning wall.
Add the 4 nishing touches
Click on the Details tab and then on Noise Addition. Increase the Intensity to 10 per cent to give it a gritty feel. Then Duplicate the background layer to enable transformations. Select the Move tool and drag the left and right centre handles out to ll the gaps. Grab the top centre handle and drag up to retain the scale of the building. There was plenty of sky so better to lose a bit of that than the foreground scenery. Flatten and save to nish.
Convert the tones 2
Click on the Tones tab to show the six colour channels. The red channel covered the brickwork, the green and yellow were the grass and owers, and blue and cyan the blue parts of the sky. To get more impact into the bland lighting, reduce the Blue and Cyan channels to make those parts of the sky darker, without creating excessive noise.