Ex. 18 Colours into tones - 2

Wanting to experiment more, I have completed this exercise with each of the three target images, all taken from my library.  The first 4 images are from a holiday a year ago close to the equator in Indonesia.  These scenes possess good attributes for the exercise in hand as they are hazy due to the humidity or possess very bright green foliage.

The subject is a dive boat heading for home at the end of the day.  The standard conversion is ok, but very flat.

To enhance the haziness I have reduced the clarity slider, which reduces the sharpness of the image, and then significantly lightened the Blue and Aqua channels. as can be seen in the Lightroom toolbar below.  the image is much softer, the background almost looks as if rain is falling.

My second image, also captures the tropical evening, and again the standard conversion is quite satisfactory, but fairly high in contrast:

Once again I have reduced the clarity slider, although less this time.  I also had to be careful with the colour conversion, as moving the Aqua slider too much had a very negative affect on the foreground sea.  However, this conversion really conveys a sense of mistiness in and around the volcano.

Turning to greens, the tropical colours are quite amenable to brightening.  This photograph is of a coconut palm plantation in north sulawesi.  The shot was taken from a moving car, but the day was exceptionally bright:

In the initial conversion the green grass and leaves are dark relative to the sky.  By lightening the greens and dropping the blues I have reversed the toning almost creating a negative or even IR style image.   With this conversion I had to take care to also increase the yellows as the palm trees had a significant yellow component

Selecting a more difficult image the next photograph is of an island surrounded by a lagoon.  In this case there is a significant green element to the ocean:

Once again I have darkened the sky, but in this case that has also darkened the sea, balancing the lightening of the green channel.

My final image is a portrait.  The background is a bookcase and has some tones quite close to skin, meaning that I had to be very careful with the conversion.

in this case the conversion has resulted in far too dark tonality on the face, something I have corrected by carefully lowering the Yellow and Orange channel.

Overall, another very useful exercise, the power of these tools to alter the mood of a photograph is remarkable, this cannot be done so easily in colour, and does demonstrate that B&W as a medium offers quite a lot to an artist willing to experiment.