Dolomites in B&W

[carlos58]

Hello everyone
some shot of Dolomites in black & white
for other shot :
Dolomites in Black &White Photo Gallery by carlogalliani at pbase.com

 

[ceeboy14]

Haloes on the first two are distracting but I do like the scenes regardless. Blacks are a bit blocky.

 

[DiskoJoe]

Good images but way to heavy on the contrast. I dont think the scenes really needed this much finessing.

 

[Gavjenks]

You've done something horrible to your skies. I don't know what you did, but here look:

Left: Major major posterization occurring, with single bands of grays 10-20 pixels wide. This has been stretched in post processing beyond recognition, and you probably did it in 8 bit mode too.

Right: This is what happens when I slide levels all the way to the left. Your entire huge sections of sky are all just the exact same value of black. Why? Are you trying to make it look like infrared or something?

In general, the skies just look goofy, like you went over them 200 times with a huge blur brush or something. They don't even look like they are from the same scene (is that what it is? Did you try to green screen in a more interesting sky?) Plus, when you make them that high contrast, the clouds become very distracting. Like in #3 especially, that one random cloud draws all my attention, yet it is probably the least interesting thing in the scene. You don't want to be drawing attention to the least interesting thing in the scene.

Also, what is going on here:

Major posterization again, and weird halos, as if you massively oversharpened? Or perhaps tried to go around this tree with a hand selection tool? I'm not sure, but it didn't work, whatever it was. This looks very photoshopped.


Go back to the originals and:
1) Don't butcher your skies. Just leave them alone however they were.
2) Go easy on the contrast overall. As in, move the curves to wherever you think they look good, and then do 1/4 of that.
3) If you're going to do lots of lighting edits, make sure you're working in 16 bit mode, so you don't get posterization.
4) Don't ever use a blur brush or gaussian blur filters unless you really know it's the right thing to do, unlike here.
5) Don't do whatever you did to make those halos (hand selection, etc.). Whatever it was, it looked like something you did to mess with the skies, which you shouldn't do anyway (see #1), so that might resolve itself.

 

[carlos58]

White and black are not my field. These are just experiments but I did not do all this work in Ps. I simply converted to B & W with high contrast blue filter. If I had worked in PS there would be no defects

 

[cynicaster]

It almost looks like a channel mixer layer was applied, and the blue was pulled down to negative infinity. A little too heavy-handed for my taste.

 

[Ilovemycam]

Beautiful!

 

[Gavjenks]

White and black are not my field. These are just experiments but I did not do all this work in Ps. I simply converted to B & W with high contrast blue filter. If I had worked in PS there would be no defects

Okay, well then why did you not use photoshop? I would be interested to see another attempt at these using a program you are comfortable with and that can do what you want.

Otherwise, it's difficult to say which issues are because you were using a non-preferred program, and which ones are artistic issues. For example, a pure black sky with super high contrast clouds looks weird here, and I find it very distracting. Even if it were done expertly in photoshop with no technical flaws, I would still find that to be very distracting and weird, you know?