Koi: Full color vs monochrome

[Marty E]

I’ve been focusing on monochromes while waiting for my Canon 90D shutter repair (due tomorrow or day after). Any thoughts on color vs monochrome improvements on these koi shots for post-processing?

[Patrick]

Glad to hear your almost sorted with your camera again , For me these need to be in colour as the standout feature of these carp is all about the colours they display , i think a single ghost koi with deep dark water creating some nice negative space around it would work in mono , Just my thoughts Marty.

[Marty E]

Thanks for the suggestion, Patrick. I’ll see what I can do with your suggestion. I like your thoughts on colour, but I also thought it would be worth experimenting with contrasts.

[Patrick]

You are perfectly correct to experiment Marty 🙂 , some things work some things don’t that’s how we get better.

[Marty E]

Thanks for your encouragement on experimentation. Initially, I was playing with making a koi abstract. Here’s an inversion of the same shot for a bit of fun, I love the blues and cool tones.

[beth]

the koi don’t stand out in the monochrome version because the tones of the fish match the tones of the water.  you need to differentiate the tones based on color.  for this i used the b&w adjustment layer in ps and made the cooler colors (greens, blues, magentas) darker and the warmer colors (red, yellow) brighter.  i added a levels adj. layer to add contrast and have tones ranging from black to white instead of black to light grey.  i would do it differently with a raw file in lightroom, but the general concept is the same.

[Marty E]

I appreciate your suggestions, Beth. Thank you! This gives me a good incentive to learn about PS adjustment layers, I like what you did with your adjustments. 😀

[Marty E]

Beth, I did some playing around with PS Elements presets for converting to B&W to see if any closely matched your adjustments. Your detail on the adjustment layers gave me a much better understanding of how to tweak the RBG, thanks again! Here’s a snapshot of the Scenic Landscape preset option which automatically brightened the red and darkened the blues and greens. I can tweak from there before converting. I’m looking forward to more practice on this with other presets as well! I’m also reading up on adjustment layers.

 

[beth]

that looks pretty similar to what i did with my sliders.  the end goal of almost all b&w images is to show contrast, a good range of gray tones from black to white – or from your darkest chosen tone to your brightest chosen tone if you’re doing a matte edit.  if you a strong color difference like the blues/oranges in your color image, then the easiest thing to do is to use that to differentiate your tones.

[Lenny Wollitz]

This is a very nice conversion!

[Marty E]

Very helpful, good to know! Many thanks

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

Top one looks like a Japanese painting. Lovely.

[Marty E]

Thank you for that feedback, Rob! Good to know. 🙂

I hope you & your family are feeling better. It sucks when everyone’s sick at the same time.

@admin-2

[Author]

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