Give your holiday landscapes a little extra punch

How to make a digital camera

How to make a digital camera

Do something different with your summer shots.

Holiday times always give us a chance to capture a few landscapes. Often they are a more difficult to get right than is appreciated. In fact a little thought can make all the difference. Think about your composition and your colours. The key to a good landscape is to find impact and contrast. In the video below Gavin Hoey shows you two things. First he shows how to think about your composition and colours. Next in the context of colours he shows how to turn your landscape into black and white in Photoshop (actually you can use any full featured image editor to do the same thing).

B&W Landscape Tips


AdoramaTV

Making black and white images

In the video Gavin Hoey made a great point about shooting in RAW. Landscape pictures often look great to the eye when in the field but they lose their appeal when the image is created on-screen. So in order to make your landscape pop some post processing is essential.

This video shows how to bring out contrasts to make the scene look great in black and white. However, he makes an important point about shooting in RAW. You don’t lose the original colour, it is retained in a RAW file. Then you convert to black and white afterwards. This is not possible in *.jpg. That format does not have the colours stored like the RAW format. If your black and white *.jpg is less than successful you lose the colour option too.

Gavin Hoey points out that you should test that your camera will process a RAW file in monochrome mode on its screen, but still leave a full colour RAW file. It is possible your camera converts the RAW file to a *.jpg file in the colour scene mode. So cover your options and try it before going in the field.

Gavin showed the conversion method to black and white using the colour sliders. Most image editors have two basic ways to create monochrome shots. Your shot can be simply colour converted to shades of grey, or you can use the colour slider method where you have some control over the intensity of colour which greys are created from. This latter method gives you much greater control over the contrasts in the picture. When working in monochrome that is the most effective way to ensure the picture has visual impact. So always choose the colour slider method to get better control of the conversion.

There are some additional links below to show how to improve your black and white shots in other ways.

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By Damon Guy (author and Photokonnexion editor)

Damon Guy - Netkonnexion

Damon Guy (Netkonnexion)

Damon is a writer-photog and editor of this site. He has run some major websites, a computing department and a digital image library. He started out as a trained teacher and now runs training for digital photographers.
See also: Editors ‘Bio’.

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