B&W B&W: Words/No Words

All is quiet, thanksgiving day...

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I like the foreground clarity/sharpness Barrie. Was it done post production?
Hi Lou, I followed my usual post capture processing, RawTherapee to process the raw file, a minimal amount to get the black and white points established and then maybe a tweaking of lightness or contrast to get a reasonably well spread histogram, forward the image to GIMP where I further check the levels, a conversion to monochrome with what GIMP calls mono mixer, that's channel mixer in Adobe language, where I have several presets saved for different film stocks and also a small number of filters and finally a small amount of sharpening with unsharp mask where again I have a few presets saved. In GIMP the default values for unsharp mask are far far too high. In Photoshop I used to convert an image to LAB mode and then sharpen the luminance channel only. I made an action for this and it was just a matter of pressing a keyboard shortcut. I found that small amounts of sharpening, say 50% (I think my units are correct from memory) possibly applied two or three times were better than a larger amount applied once and if you'd gone too far it was an easy matter to go back one step in history to obtain an optimum amount of sharpening. It's possible to do it in LAB mode in GIMP but you can't save it as an action so it becomes a tedious procedure.

The processing time per image is much shorter than the time it's taken me to write this response.

Barrie

PS That image was somewhat aided by being taken on a misty day so the far background is softer to start with.

B.
 
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