[Bob in St. Louis]

Interesting and surprising, but good to hear (not the Canadian part).
Thanks Guy

[Jon L]

Sad to see the tree and 2014 go..

EOSE2620Refl by drjlo1, on Flickr

[gfroman]

[stlrman]

Gfroman, those two pics are freaking EPIC!!! Wow!!

[PeteG]

Gfroman, those two pics are freaking EPIC!!! Wow!!

Yes, just outstanding!

[Guy 13]

Hi gfroman,
I love black & white when well done and yours are superbly well done.
Don't hesitate to post more...
Thanks for sharing.

Guy 13

[gfroman]

Thanks guys!

Swayambhunath Stupa, Kathmandu – Nepal

Pushkar Camel Festival - Pushkar, India

[Jon L]

Love these B&W's, as they seem to possess a unique look and atmosphere, espcially how light and shadows seem to envelop and dance around the subjects. 
I was wondering what your B&W post-processing workflow was?  Any B&W specialized programs or conversions?  Dodge and burn?

[JakeJ]

I was wonderin' if he just used a red filter?

[gfroman]

Thanks guys!
I typically do most processing in Camera Raw.
Convert color to B&W file.
Make adjustments with the color sliders (mostly red and yellow).
Sometimes use the graduated filter if sky is too over-exposed.
Maybe some dodge & burn if needed.
Crop.

[mikeeastman]

Moonrise from my front porch.

[gnuyork]

[thunderbrick]

DAMN!      Eerily majestic yet smooth like cream!  Care to share your technique with the class?   

[gnuyork]

DAMN!      Eerily majestic yet smooth like cream!  Care to share your technique with the class?

Ah thanks. First thing - get up early!! and be prepared (in the dark)- sunrise happens so fast. I did several different versions of this shot, and this one came out best. Still working on some others.

This is actually a pano stitch (of 7 shots), which is a fairly new process that I have been trying. I used to shoot 4x5 until my favorite color transparency film went extinct. I still have some left, but it's truly depressing for me that I cannot get any more. This image is from a digital camera.

I of course use a tripod, but I also have a special panoramic bracket. The camera is mounted vertically on the bracket and aligned to correct for parallax errors, and I have click detents on my ball head that helps to get consistent images for stitching.

I shot manual exposure, manual focus. Exposure for all images was 1/10th of a sec at f8. Lightroom cannot read my camera's RAW files, so I had to do the conversions in proprietary software, then export as tiffs to further adjust in Lightroom. For this series of images I did some minor adjustments, but one thing I did here, that I normally do not like to do is lift the shadows a bit (usually it's the opposite for my tastes). The trees were actually a bit more silhouetted than what appears here, but lifting the shadows brings out a little more detail. There was not much contrast to the scene, so lifting the shadows really did not effect adversely much else of the scene.

I sent the series from Lightroom to build the pano in Photoshop, which does a beautiful job of stitching, if you give it good input.

One thing you will not know unless I say, is the very tip of the tree on the left extended beyond the frame in the stitch (but not my original single image) so I used the spot healing brush tool to cut some off.

Another thing I normally NEVER do, but this time I did, was remove parts of another tree in the left side of the frame. It was distracting. My first time experimenting with removing using the content aware feature. Worked pretty well, but I needed to do some further cleaning up with the healing brush.

Once that was done, I sent the whole stitch back to Lightroom for some further enhancing - which again was very minimal. I used the brush tool to brush along the sand on the right and center to increase the clarity, which enhances micro contrast. I thought it brought out the texture to the sand.

And that's pretty much it.

[FullRangeMan]

Moonrise from my front porch.

Wow, what a view!

[bside123]

Ah thanks.

And that's pretty much it.

Very nice gnuyork. Good work! Those Lightroom/Photoshop tools can be amazing with a little care and practice. I can almost smell the stop-bath. 

[bside123]

edit

[gnuyork]

Here's an image that I created using the same process as gnuyork.

9 vertical frames, imported into Lightroom 5, exported to Photoshop Pano, re-imported to Lightroom 5 for processing. Unfortunately, like gnuyork, I did not have a tripod. This was taken handheld with a Sony RX100MKII pocket camera. The Photoshop processing required some adjustments to the the horizon for distortion. Also, I did not "photoshop out" the power lines in the upper right hand corner. Working with the subtle gradations of blues would take a lot of time and skill. As of now, the eye doesn't really go there.

B side - Nice one

As far as the wires, have you tried the content aware feature, rather than the healing brush? It's really quite an impressive tool, and I'm just newly discovering it myself. Just lasso select around the wires as close as and detailed as you can get, the hit the delete key. Double check to make sure it didn't mess too much with your gradations, and boom, there you have it.

[bside123]

Hey gnuyork!

I took your suggestion and looked into the "content aware" editing feature in Photoshop CS6. It's actually quite easy to use and offers a variety of editing modes.
Here's the improved pano sans the power lines. I also took the liberty to "clean up" some of the trash and improve the contrast a teenie weenie. Good tool!


Acigöl Lake Post-Edit

[gnuyork]

Hey gnuyork!

I took your suggestion and looked into the "content aware" editing feature in Photoshop CS6. It's actually quite easy to use and offers a variety of editing modes.
Here's the improved pano sans the power lines. I also took the liberty to "clean up" some of the trash and improve the contrast a teenie weenie. Good tool!

Nice. Glad you discovered it. Almost too easy, isn't it?