Colours into tones 1

1. Original colour image

2. Default grayscale image

Changing colours into tones definitely made me come to realise how powerful adjusting a few sliders could affect the final outcome provided you knew how each slider impacted on the overall photo. For me this was carried out using the 'Black and White Mix' box in Adobe Lightroom, where each slider changed only that hue, which was apparently not the case inside Photoshop. This was useful in one regard: changing the hues independently meant you could play around freely. At the same time, this meant it wasn't immediately apparent the relationship between contrasting hues. However, I found it was usually necessary to 'balance' the contrasting hues anyway, by pushing them in opposite directions; similar to Adobe Photoshop.

   I found a landscape image I'd taken (Image 1) that mostly consisted of two strongly contrasting colours: blue and orange. I would say the difference between the two resultant images after I had adjusted (extremely and oppositely) the blue and orange sliders on the two images were massive. I thought they could be mistaken for two different photographs, although I only felt one of the two was effective by itself.

3. Blue slider increased, orange slider decreased

   That image was Image 4, where I had increased the orange slider greatly and decreased the blue slider greatly (actually to the maximum for both). This created a stark, striking image in my opinion that showed off both the sky and the foreground details (which were opened up) well.

   Image 3 (where I had increased the blue slider greatly and decreased the orange slider to the maximum) suffered a lot in the sky for me, even though I hadn't increased the blue slider all the way. The sky was somewhat offset by the dark, contrasty foreground where anything orange was converted to dark grey but nevertheless the sky looked washed-out and less-contrasty.

   Image 2 (the default grayscale image with no hue adjustments) looked most similar to Image 2 but was pretty unremarkable in comparison to Image 3; where everything in Image 3 seemed much more dynamic so it was good to see that altering these sliders could make such a dramatic and in this case, positive change.

4. Orange slider increased, blue slider decreased