Exercise 16: Colours into tones 1

Take or choose an image which contains at least two strong contrasting colours.  Using the channel sliders or controls available in your software create two opposite versions of the image in black and white.  In one lighten the greyscale tone of one of the colours and darken the tone of the contrasting colour as much as possible.  In the second version perform the reverse. 

          To begin with, make and save a ‘default’ black and white version and keep this as a reference.    You should aim to produce two black and white versions with a strong difference in their tonal distribution.  Write down what effect these different adjustment have on the creative quality of the image.

 Original Image

 
My original image was a picture of a tractor with strong orange and blue colourings

I desaturated the image (Ctrl+Shift+U) and below is my default black and white picture.

First Adjusted Image

I adjusted the red slider to increase the Reds/Oranges and got the result below:

Second Adjusted Image

I went back to the original black and white image and adjusted the blue range and achieved the image below:

You can see from the images above that by increasing the red slider on the black and white option within Photoshop, it lightens the red within the image, making it a pale grey. This obviously has the reverse effect when decreasing the red slider; it then darkens that particular colour within the image.

Now that I’ve completed this exercise I’ve got a better grasp on how, by increasing tones it can influence other areas of colour.