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Eugene
careful with axes
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
 
2006-11-02, 10:08

Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle2472 View Post
These were shot in B/W on highest JPEG. I just didn't adjust my levels on these copies since they were from my original images shot. I have a few images that were conversions, those were so I could pull out color in only a few areas of the image and leave the rest B/W.
And that's precisely what I mean. Any in-camera B&W setting is basically applying a grayscale filter to color images. The CCD has red, green and blue photodetectors. It *wants* to shoot color. In fact, modern digicams are bad in the sense that there's only one type of photodetector at each pixel location. Color is therefore interpolated from data collected by adjacent photosites. And to digicams, not all colors are created equal. HALF the photodetectors on your camera's CCD are green, leaving the other half split evenly among red and blue.

Here are examples of how different photos can look when you separate the colors from each other...I hope kgarchar doesn't mind that I borrowed one of his photos...No other adjustments made.

red:


green:


blue:


red/blue:


I chose a close-up of a face because of the fine detail you can extract or discard just by doing this. Which version is the correct version? That's arbitrary.

Pertaining to this photo only:
Red-only results in the most pleasing skin tone and good contrast. Not surprisingly, green is closest to grayscale because of the CCD's bias toward that color. Blue-only really brings out dimension and, for lack of a better word, topographical detail.. Red+Blue is a compromise between tone and texture, while the discarded green leaves the background foliage mostly dark and out of the way.

Last edited by Eugene : 2006-11-02 at 11:09.
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