A little black and white experiment

July 23rd

Lake Partnun above St. Antönien is a worthwhile hiking destination. The limestone peaks that surround it are at least as fascinating as the mountain lake. On a beautiful day, the rough, bright spikes rise into the blue sky. The combination of the bright rock faces with the deep blue sky led me to do a little black and white experiment:

Anyone who, like me, has photographed with black and white film knows that strong color filters can be used to greatly influence the brightness and contrast distributions in black and white photos. The rule is relatively simple: Colors in the same or similar shade as the screwed-on color filter are displayed brighter, while contrasting colors are displayed darker. For example, if you used an orange filter, all orange tones would appear brighter and all tones in the opposite spectrum - these would be the blue tones - would appear darker.

You can also create this effect virtually in various image editing programs, such as Adobe Lightroom. Here is an example:

Output image

This is what the original colored image looks like. It is practically unedited, I just increased the sharpness a little and adjusted the contrast slightly.

First step: conversion to a black and white image

With one click of the mouse I convert the color motif into a monochrome image in Adobe Lightroom. The virtual filters are all still set to zero:

Second step: Apply the virtual black and white filter

Now I apply the virtual black and white filter: I can make various colors in the image lighter or darker. In this case, I dragged the blue slider to the left to make all blue tones (which in this case is basically just the sky) appear darker.

This works wonderfully because although Lightroom displays the image in black and white, the original motif with all color values is stored in the software.

Purists may turn up their noses at this approach. But as already mentioned, this technology has already been used in analogue photography. When I see Ansel Adams' dark skies, I'm pretty sure he used black and white filters for several of his magnificent shots.

Small picture gallery with photos of the peaks around Lake Partnun