Albertogblog

A few days ago, I was looking for sample pictures for a chat on photography that I will be holding in a cultural centre in Valls (Tarragona), where I live now. Diving in pictures from a few years ago, I came accross a forgotten one: a fountain placed on a beach limit, next to the sea.

Luckily, that day was cloudy, so there was no one around. I placed the camera at a given height, so that the upper decoration would be aligned with the sea horizon. Now, I decided to convert it to black and white, using some of the techniques that I described previously in this blog.

First, I made a basic conversion with the channel mixer. Uniform light created a nice colour separation (little saturation, though...), so that I could use blue channel (quite unusual) to darken the sand, while keeping sky light levels. Green channel did not add much information, so I only used some red component (25%) to highlight the decoration on the upper side of the fountain.

Then, I applied a double S curve edition (a central point to maintain middle greys, increase in clear greys and darker ones, also keeping pure black and white). After that, I added some light sharpening with GIMP's unsharp mask (under Filters -> Enhance) to reach the final result... What's your opinion?