Partial Saturation

Last weekend, I went for a hike and stumbled on a little historic farm in the middle of the park.  This farm had all sorts of fantastic photo opportunities, and I was excited to get home and try processing a few in black & white.  I’m not really much of an expert at B&W conversion, so I started playing with some different ways to convert some of these photos, starting with RAW conversion in PSE.  Among the first things I tried was simply turning color saturation off, which seemed to work well.
Needless to say, though, I couldn’t leave well enough alone.  The saturation control is a slider, after all, so I started playing with this a bit, and found that I really liked some of these photos with saturation turned down, but not quite off. In fact, on the barrels, I turned saturation down just about all the way for Blue & Green, but left a little more Red in the photos to highlight the rusty rings.  I really like the way these turned out — they’re clearly “antique-ish” without being done in a typical style (B&W, sepia).

For more in this series, have a look through the gallery.

4 Comments

  • I really like the simplicity of this one and think you really add to that with your color choices. It seems to bring out the era of old whiskey barrels somehow. Nice find on the location.

    • Thanks – I’m glad you like the photos. When I was shooting, I had a feeling these might make good B&W photos, but when I started playing with them in PSE, I really liked the way the darker colors “popped” – I really like the rust stains on the wood.

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