Exercise: Colours into tones 1.

Outline: Choose an image with at least two strong contrasting colours. Using the channel sliders available in your software, create two opposite versions of the image in black and white.

Well this exercise was a pain from the start but only down to a software issue. I have photoshop elements 9 and much to my annoyance, altering the channel sliders is not a feature this software has! Looking at the RAW converter, these are the options I was faced with:

The sliders available only deal with the overall image and you are unable to alter individual channels. Using a JPEG image is the same:

This is the nearest you can get to altering the shades of the image in black and white. It does give you preset options for the overall contrast of the entire image, and then gives you the option of tweaking each individual channel but this affects the whole image and not an individual colour tone.

So I have had to download a trial of photoshop which I'm pretty sure I had to do during 'The Art of Photography' as well, to undertake a fairly similar exercise. But after 2 hours It's actually uploaded and the exercise completed.

I started with a JPEG image of a childs painting set

This has a large space of red colour with other colours around the outside. I converted the image to greyscale to create a default black and white setting.

This shows all the colours as a pretty similar grey tones. By increasing the red slider, the tones change.

The red coloured area has now turned lighter to white.. But moving the slider in the opposite direction creates the opposite effect.

In this image, the red area has turned more to black.

The above showed the effect of changing just one slider. Next I wanted to explore the options using a RAW image and as advised the sliders were available in the RAW converter. Here I have an image consisting of two vibrant and contrasting colours.

This image was taken for a previous exercise and serves this purpose well. Here I can show the same effect as above but using two sliders, the red and the green.

Increasing the red slider and decreasing the green sliders as much as possible creates the following effect:

But to create the opposite effect, all we need to do is swap the sliders, so increase the green and decrease the red as much as possible:

Conclusion:
This is an important exercise which continues from the previous exercise highlighting contrast. Where as the contrast and tonal range can play a huge part in creating tones and defining texture in an image, altering the colour tone can also play a large part in altering a specific tone as opposed to that of the whole image,which is very important in black and white photography.