Jul
21
2013Choices
I love processing photos. Lately, I’ve been trying to stretch beyond my comfort zone and work on processing my images in black and white. This image I was working on last night I made both a color and a black and white version.
This was taken on our recent road trip up to Portland. With the girls feeling a little sick we stopped often to give them as many breaks as they needed. Restaurants are some of my favorite places to shoot photos of my kids. The kids are in a safe contained area, are relatively calm because they know that food is coming, and restaurants almost always have great window light. Also, if you have kids that are runners, you can block them into a corner or stick them in a booth.
Here is a shot straight from the camera. I shot this backlit with the intention of having the window completely blown out and white. I wanted a lot of negative space and so I composed the shot with my daughter very close to the left side of the frame with her gaze looking through the shot.
I made some minor adjustments in Lightroom before bringing the image over to Photoshop. I removed some of the distracting color blotches from the window and cleaned up some of the more distracting stray hair on her face. I like the look of color toning in images so I added some blues and reds to the shadows and some yellow to the highlights.
While I was pretty happy with the image I also wanted to see how it would look in black and white. Taking the image through Silver Efex Pro 2 I worked and tweaked the image to take the whites and blacks in the image where I thought they looked the best.
I think both versions work but give a completely different look and feel in each one. What do you think?
Rommi
Love the BW version… I think it’s absolute keeper Joe!
Joe
Thanks man! And thank you for the read!