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I'm still post-processing images from my Uni's protest (and I've been doing it all of this late, late night) but here's one I spent a fair amount of time on:

absolute cracker of a shot... nicely done!

what's the story behind the image? Very intense thought on her face...

cheers

What xerubus said.

I like it, except for the distracting white line above her head.

Really like this Leigh. Cool treatment and awesome subject.

Excellent Leigh - is she trying to decide about going out with you

sirhc55 wrote:Excellent Leigh - is she trying to decide about going out with you

That is why she is looking up - for divine inspiration

powerful image leigh and very aesthetically pleasing too
whats the story behind it>
?

Excellent shot, Leigh. Great shadow detail and well PP'd. Can't wait to see more.

great image.

like the shadows and overall feel of this shot.

Steve

The girl was one of the protesters standing on a plinthe wearing gold paint, a bra, and undies and that's it. There were others wearing the same or a tad less, but she was standing with a model pose of just looking up at the sky. I knew when I saw it that it would make a good black and white, I just didn't realise it would take me half an hour to make it that nice (James took me the same amount of time, mind you).

is this daytime sunlight? or difussed cloudy

This was Wednesday around 1.30 I think outside of Parliament in the CBD, so it was probably partly cloudy.

The settings in post-processing have been driving me nuts because since there are so many pictures and sky kept on shifting from sunny to overcast, I've been having to shift my temperature so many times for the colour photos.

you like b+W why care about color temerature?

anyway looks like difussed light

great job

wendellt wrote:you like b+W why care about color temerature?

Two reasons:

1. You always want to start with the best image you possibly can even if you're going to post-process to a different style of image, say a sepia or a black & white image.

Fixing the colour is going to be important for the type of black & white you apply, also.

2. I may not export the image to black & white in the end. I do a lot of work in the monochromatic range because I'm not particularly fond of colour photography, but some images just don't need a reason to go to monochrome so I may as well have a good colour version at the RAW level.

This is a very soulful image that is beautifully composed and well lit. Excellent stuff. This should make the Black and White magazine, perhaps with a little less clothing
cheers
marco

Wow!

Where can one learn b/w conversion? For me, its's usually pulling the saturation slider all the way down, and doing a bit of contrast/brightness...

Cheers
Steffen.

Great image, Leigh. Who would have believed that it was a candid shot if they did not know the story behind it. Excellent pping too.

Alex

This is the original in case anyone is interested:

Thats a vast difference from the original to the PPed shot, and probably quite complex but could you give us a brief rundown on what PP was done to aceive the final image?

Cheers
Rod

hi

as much as i like the overall shot and the conversion, i find strange that you did not clone the white bit on the right. i think you could have reduce the opacity of it and bring just a bit more the all background.

i really like you conversion to b/w, great job.

thanks for sharing

christian

Worthy to send to newspaper editor (with support story) - if you hadnt already.

Pity the event has gone off the news radar.

Lovely portrayal of what "waiting" looks like

I don't think it was really on the radar to begin with.

That said, I haven't sent it to any papers at all. Might do that this week.

Wow, what a fantastic image Leigh. Can I add to the chorus of people asking how you achieve you b/w conversions? They're light years ahead of what I can manage.

Perhaps another tutorial in the PP section?

Well, I'm a virtualPhotographer user, but I've worked on a whole bunch of my own presets over time, and this was done with layering and using curves adjustments over around 2-3 layers.

So I asked Dad what I should do and if I should give out my presets and apparently now I'm to do a tutorial on how to make good black & white virtualPhotographer presets for yourself and then how to layer them to get a good result.

So this'll be a PC only tut with a free plugin being used.

And yes, I can do this without the plugin or go into the other colour modes, but I find using a plugin with my own settings is a quicker way of getting to black and white, considering that you still have to do a fair bit of work on top of the plugin pass.

did you just hard mask the background and turn it black
in the original file there are a few features in the backgrund that are quite noticable
in your final image the background seems knocked out, didyou acheive this by your custom settings or did you just fill the background with black?

Oh no, I pretty much use custom settings now.

I've made about 30 or 40 of them and I have different uses.

This one used about 2 or 3 of the settings with layer blends.

still don'tget how a custom setting can mask ou rtparticular bits of the background
the white balcony feature on the top left has high highlights

you must of masked out the girl to reduce that highlight to utter black
otherwise similar highlights on the girl would of been lost

It actually feels a little bit on the overdone to me. Like the guy who has eaten too much salt, and slowly keeps adding it and can't tell the difference until finally he's destroyed the entire dish.

I like the original though, the worked over version needs a softer touch on the woman.

I tend to agree with Dave that the PP seems a little overdone for my tastes, I like the affect on her face but not on her body.

Well, I'm happy with it.

Top shot Leigh. Some extensive work PPing but I think you've created a very interesting and powerful image. Very nice

Leigh good shit!. B/W seems your go now. Do you need to save your presets? You seem to have a reasonable grasp on Pshop. Have go without the saved stuff and open up. I reckon you can come up with some even more outstanding PPing. I quite like how you blow the highlites.
Jethro