Colours into tones 2

In this exercise I have attempted to increase the 'depth' of a photograph by working on the tonal range of the skies. The workbook suggests that I take a landscape photograph but as the weather has been so bad, I have had to select an image from my existing captures. The picture I have chosen does have the characteristics that I would have aimed for, i.e. a wide angle shot with a good sky and some foreground interest.

The first image serves as a reference image. This is a straight conversion to black and white in the software with default settings. The end result is again a fairly flat image. The blackest blacks are not totally black although there are some proper whites.

Here is the default conversion...

A default conversion by the software.

To create a more interesting shot and one that fulfils the brief, I have started with the default conversion and further worked this. After some initial tweaking of the contrast and blacks and whites to enhance the image, I set to work on the skies.

To create the depth I really needed to draw the eye to the sky area and emphasize the cloud layers. Most of this was achieved by working on the blue and aqua sliders. After some adjustment I was able to return to the exposure slider to brighten the image back up again. This allowed further tweaking of the image.

The end result can be seen below.

Conversion to emphasise depth.

Much as in the previous exercise, I was able to push the processing a very large amount. We are again deviating from reality but in black and white this seems more acceptable.