Here is a challenge for you: I would like to see this in black and white but when I convert it, it is completely monotone. Can it be a successful black and white? You tell me! I look forward to seeing edits and, ideally, instructions on how they were accomplished!
I'm no Phillip Breske, so I risk embarrassing myself here, Ruth. Here's an attempt. I think a difficulty here is a lack of dynamic range, i.e. you're trying to make black and white out of dark and light greys, largely. Look at the narrow band the image occupies in the histogram. Also, the degraded jpegs after posting limit what you can do compared to working with the original RAW. So, contrast can be increased in various ways but noise and grunge like jpeg artifacts build up quickly e.g. at bottom right.
I did this with Curves, Contrast and Clarity overall, further increasing contrast and clarity in the area of the lilies, adjusting exposure to blend in with the rest of the image. Finally I vignetted the top and right a bit, and cleaned up some dust spots, and a dark patch in the top right corner.
It would help if you'd "exposed to the right" more - given it more exposure. This yields bland, washed-out looking images - until they're processed. If in doubt, I bracket.
I played with it a bit, but the end result was comparable to Chris' attempt. He's correct that the overall lack of contrast kills our ability to edit this beyond very small amounts. When you start stretching out the histogram to increase the contrast, you start to pick all kinds of detrimental artifacts.
The first attachment is your starting histogram. The second is after pulling the white and black points in to normalize the levels. What you want to do is get your contrast correct before you export from the RAW original since RAW files have SO much more bit depth to play with.
Chris' "expose to the right" suggestion is good. RAW photos can handle quite a bit of overexposure (within reason), so you can go back and recover some highlights in post. The way digital photos are captured, you get a lot more information in the brighter parts of the image, so dialing down the exposure in post yields better results than dialing it up from an underexposed original, even if the original is a RAW file.
A bigger problem I see with this image is the unfortunate placement of the cloud reflections. The bright, inverted tops of the clouds are interfering with the greenery on the water's surface. It would make it a lot easier to clean up this shot if the clouds framed the flowers instead of fighting with them.
Hi Ruth. through this discussion am learning how to see things differently at field. To visualise BW version by chris out of nothing. And some day with that vision I will be able to position myself such that the water lilies are at the lower darker end of the composition with contrasting grey tones of light falling on them and blurry reflection above.
cheers.
Thanks Guys. I so appreciate the time and information!
Don't you hate when, while you are taking a shot, you think "this is going to be awesome!'" and then ..... it isn't. :)
So, I can go back to this location and, barring the clouds, I'd like to get this basic shot in black and white. Any suggestions for taking the shot settings-wise in order to increase the chance of a good outcome?
Lastly, the histogram. I will admit that this is a hurdle of knowledge that I haven't leaped. Well - there has been some leaping ... followed by catch toe, crash. I need to do some research here as you reference using it in posts often enough that I am coming to get that I need to figure this out.
Thanks to all!
Ruth do you have a histogram display on your camera? if you do and you should get that puppy up ad just have a play with it and it will eventually click in your head and you won't even think twice about it.