The Church Bench

That's a very nice B/W...I like the angle. The bench is looking away from us, so I wonder what's over there. I also like the texture and shadows. Well done.

It looks just a little flat to me - even if your intent is a relatively high key image, there still should really be some part of the image that includes true black - your tone is a little high, and there is nothing between 0 and 10 on the histogram, and you only really start seeing black tones at 30 - that's 10% of your tonal range doing nothing in the image at all... the whites aren't too bad - there's a spike on the histogram, due mostly to the white border, but I did bring them down to 250, just to spread all the tone we can - that brightens the highlights on the bench a little - and if it was my shot, I'd probably go 247, 245 even... from there, what you do with the midtones is what's going to emphasize how you want the image to look... bring the midtones to 1.10, 1.15 to brighten it up, 120 to really up the high end, or make them .90, .80 to give it a darker, moodier finish - combine two images and you can do an HDR B&W, with the stonework lovely and dark, and the bench held lighter to bring out all of it's texture... here's my take:



I converted one image nice and dark, and one lighter, blended the lighter bench (and pillar on the right) onto the darker wall and floor, then added a third layer with a copy of both over the top (ctrl-alt-shift-e on a pc) and burnt the edges in somewhat, pulling the opacity of that back to 65% so the burning didn't look like PS burning...

Cheers,
Stuart

Thanks Terri.

Stuart you have made it look like how I wanted it to. I tried myself in paint shop pro and improved it some but you have got it looking really good. I will read your steps carefully through and see if I can reproduce what you did. I think I have a lot to learn, but thats good!! Mainly I need to learn how to analyise the image using the editing tools so I can define what is wrong as well as seeing it.

Very very many thanks

Regards

Jono

I'll have to see if I can grab a copy of PSP again, and see what I can do to help, Jono - I stopped using it when I finally succumbed to Photoshop five years ago, but I should be able to convert some of the common stuff over still...

Cheers,
Stuart

Interesting shot, love the shadows, but flat. Stuart did a great job of bringing up the contrast.