Warrior 2

Jon Adams

This shot has a tidy composition I like, with the content carefully organised into three distinct horizontal strips of tree, mountain and sky. I also liked the way the colour image worked, but I decided to create an alternative treatment that conveyed a different mood.

I thought a toned black-andwhite treatment would work well – especially if I ramped up the contrast in the image by darkening the sky and brightening parts of the trees in the foreground.

I also wanted to apply a subtle crop to the image to make the scene look a little wider. The idea here was to create a more ‘widescreen’ view that would show off the full grandeur of the mountains.

1 Convert to mono

In Camera Raw, I ticked the two boxes under the Lens Corrections tab to reduce any fringing and distortion present, then switched to the Basic tab. After selecting Black & White in the Treatment option at the top, I clicked the Black & White Mix tab and adjusted the colour sliders to get a good balance of light and dark tones. For this image, I took Oranges to -60, Yellows to +20, Greens to +75 and Blues to -60. The other sliders had little or no effect on the image, as the colours were not present, so I left them set to zero. This gave a reasonable mono result, but I wanted to make some further local adjustments...

2 Darken sky & brighten foreground

Switching back to the Basic tab, I selected the Graduated Filter Tool. In the control panel, I set Exposure to -1.0. I did this by clicking twice on the minus icon to the left of the Exposure slider, as this sets the slider and zeroes all the others. I dragged the Graduated Filter down from the top of the image to the mountain peaks, holding down the Shift key to keep the angle perfectly horizontal.

I then selected the Adjustment Brush, and set up the controls with Exposure at +0.50, Highlights at +35, and Whites at +35. I applied the brush sparingly to the trees in the foreground, breaking up the rather uniform tones and creating the idea of patches of sunlight.

3 Add colour toning, and crop

To add a warm tonal effect to the mono image, I clicked the Split Toning tab. Under Highlights, I set Hue to 38 and Saturation to 20. This gave a gentle gold toning to the image. I wanted to enrich this with some subtle reds in the darker areas, so under Shadows, I set Hue to 0 and Saturation to 10.

To darken the edges of the frame and guide the viewer’s eye to the centre, I added a vignette in the FX tab, setting the Amount to -30 under Post Crop Vignetting.

To finish everything off, I used the Crop Tool in its Normal mode, and trimmed a little off the bottom and top to give the image a more elongated, widescreen appearance in keeping with its epic feel. It’s a simple change that makes a big difference.