Nice tones, though.

That’s a combination of my selective desaturation, a duotone-alike thing, and the high-pass filter giving it that hard, war-torn look.

Sorry, SB, I was a bit miserly saving those jpegs: the raws were a bit better, honest.

Filters that play with the entire image is what I’m after, here… sort of in the spirit of a darkroom technique rather than a digital graffiti cowboy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, that’s what I wanted to play with when I got myself a digital camera: but I’ve begun to fall in love with the pictures that you never use a brush with. It’s just what I’m playing with right now.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by your competition, but I’d be glad to play along (and will provide any raw files for any images I’m asked for).

The third technique, based on Marcus’ settings, keeps the nice yellow colour; but the overall picture is fairly light, especially when you compare it to my quick and dirty “desaturate” approach that took a lot less time. But the desaturated image looks poor because it’s mostly greyscale, but with strange looking patches of mousey coloured hair and pinkish ears (which might be interesting if it weren’t for the fact we’re used to seeing kids with consistent colours on their face).

Your last image is quite nice, it has a washed out look, but comes across as warm and natural.

I’ve also been playing with the histogram functions, such as changing the luminosity based on a nice curve, fiddling with the contrast. But how you combine all these seems to depend on the original photo. For instance, if the original photo doesn’t have much contrast in the hair, you may need to fiddle with the settings in order to make the different strands and contours more visible (unless you intentionally want to make it consistenly bright/dark in order to emphasize other areas of the face/photo).

Talking of selective, it seems many people like to use the filters and then apply/blend it into selected parts of the original image. Useful if you decide you want to use different settings to make the clouds in the dark sky look more menacing and full of different greys, without making the face into a washed out or overly dark mess. Various filters applied across the entire image might not return the result you’re looking for.

Whenever I look at the JPEGs you’ve put online, the things that catch my attention the most are the artefacts and high compression, which then look even worse once you start to manipulate it with various filters. I saved my image as PNG, which probably makes it easier to spot the flaws in the original JPEG that allows you to clearly see square blocks around the corner of Meg’s left eye (you can see them in the original if you look closely). On your original “challenge” post I managed to play with various settings that revealed a lot of different shades of grey in the girl’s shirt, but it also highlighted the noise/compression, which made it look bad.

Sorry, that was much longer than I’d originally planned. The worst part is I prefer the original image, as it’s mostly pinky/browny/yellowy with a nice contrast on the pink lips and yellow daisy. The daisy has a natural vibrancy that makes it lovely to look at, you don’t really need filters to make it look “better”.

I think one weekend we should have a competition where we have half a dozen different photos (high resolution/low compression) and half a dozen different themes and you can mix and match the themes to the photos and do whatever you like, and then post the results online somewhere for everyone to see.

SB: It’s not just a case of desaturising it, but of selectively doing so. The grey bits get greyer faster than the not so grey bits. I’ve not finished playing about with it yet, but to get an idea of some of what I’m going for, try looking at the photos linked to in the last post.

The idea wasn’t simply to desarate, but to explore and compare the methods. This picture is a good one for skin tones, but I want to do something similar with a picture with much brighter colours. Watch this space.