'Light Snow' ... in a digital darkroom.

[Wild Wassa]

I converted the main image to a square format and separated it to the Blue, Green and Red channels. The square format is compositionally static. It implies no directional push and pull, that is seen when employing a rectangular format.





I chose the Green channel to work with. It has the best overall tonal range with the best highlight detail. At this stage I'm not interested in a good or correct contrast range. The original Blue and Red channels were deleted. The green layer, was then recombined to become the new RBG channels. Using 3 channels allows colour manipulation and employing effects like toning and colour balancing of the b/w image at a later time, that may not be possible when working with one channel only.

The black and white was then layered with the colour tile image. The tile photo was adjusted to give a minimum textural detail in the snow. If you compare the snow's shadow detail in the above image to the detail within the red rings ... a marked difference is visible. This new detail symbolizes the footprints of the small mammals that have gone extinct. Australia has the greatest rate of mammal extinction of any continent. This detail although just visible is important to me. When I was a kid I would see many footprints in the snow from the different native animals ... now I mostly see footprints of ferals ... foxes, cats and pigs and the occassional domestic dog that's gone wild.





With a smudge tool, I then started to melt the snow below the cairn. This took some time balancing the degree of transparency, the brush width and the correct look that I was after paying attention to not disturb the cairn too much.





Corrections were then made to the cairn using a lassoo tool and I simplified the image by removing a few if the distracting bits of untidy detail, seen in the red rings below.





The area selected by the lassoo tool allowed the resharpening of the cairn, and changes to the tonal and density values of the rocks without affecting other parts of the image. Parts of rocks that I disturbed were cloned from another photo to help rebuild the cairn. The image below shows slight tonal changes throughout the print, as I balanced the details in the trees and grasses ... prior to sending it to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.





I give images the heavy hammer of lightroom. I like blacks to be D Max and I like to vignette the images which adds a bit of tonal drama. Some of the settings can be seen on the right, where as many of the repeated adjustments can be seen recorded on the left.





The final vartiation was toned by making changes to the colour balance by adding tints of Magenta, Yellow and Cyan (which increased the blacks slightly and gave a touch of warmth) and finally linked through Photobucket. Photobucket is disappointing with the loss of fine detail and tonality.


'Over The Edge'.





The final image can be seen on my dA site, just click on the thumbnail and an intermediate image will appear, then click on that image and that will bring up the final image showing good detail ... http://wildwassa.deviantart.com/

Warren.