Click here for full size original and then click here for full size monochrome.

If you are like me, you can’t help but admire the work of Ansel Adams. While Adams used a view camera and 4 x 5 glass plates to record his images, he really worked his magic while creating his prints in the darkroom. Using his fingers, he would selectively agitate the developing solution over certain regions of the print causing some parts of the image to develop more rapidly than others. I think of this as the first kind of “digital” processing to form stunning high dynamic range images. I had a friend, who before he passed on, would travel the country with his own view camera trying to duplicate the photos of Adams. He did a very good job of it too.

With dynamic range in mind, I always shoot my images in camera Raw format. Typically Raw format images have 12 to 14 bits for each RGB channel. Jpeg format has only 8 bits, or 256 luminance levels, per color channel as compared to 16,384 levels for 14 bit Raw. Now the human visual system can only distinguish slightly more that 100 distinct luminance levels. This makes 16,384 levels per color channel seem totally unnecessary. The large number of levels provides an extended dynamic range that Ansel Adams would envy. The image detail is still there within the dark and light areas, we just can’t perceive the detail.  All these extra levels allow us to lighten dark areas of an image AND darken bright areas of the image to bring them within the luminance range of our visual system.

On my Nikon D3, my camera settings for the original barn image are ISO 200, F5.6, Shutter 1/200. For the D3, an ISO of 200 is the camera’s slowest setting. This provides a good average exposure level for the photo. The first step is to raise the luminance level in the dark areas and lower the luminance levels of the bright areas. Many photo software packages (Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, and camera manufacturer provided software) have the capability of performing this type of dynamic range enhancement. I use Apple’s Aperture and darken light areas and lighten dark areas of the image. However, after doing this I am still unhappy with texture of the bright grassy area in the image’s lower right hand corner. I want greater contrast and “depth” to the texture.

I use a method I have used to enhance photos for years. Using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop, select the bright grassy area using a huge amount of feathering (250px) in the selection. Now copy and paste the selection. In the Layers palette, change the blending mode from normal to multiply. This darkens the selected area and increases the texture’s contrast and saturation. There is a dark boundary around the selected region due to the feathering. Use the eraser tool to erase the dark boundary within the top layer. This process adds an Ansel Adams type of feel to the texture of the grass. See the before and after images here (http://gallagher.to/TLR/TLRblog_2.jpg). I am now ready to go monochrome.

For the next step, I use either the monochrome mixer in Aperture or the channel mixer in Photoshop. Either of these tools allows the creation of a very pleasing monochrome image by providing control over the amount that each color channel, RGB, contributes to the final monochrome image. For example, you can choose to use only the G channel, or R channel, or mix all three channels for a pleasing image.

The final step is to deal with the noise in the image. The dark regions that I have lightened at the beginning of this process contain image noise. Image noise has a way of cropping up whenever I lighten dark areas of an image. It is good to use some noise reduction tool. There are many such software packages. I have used a pre-release version of our new noise reduction software package called Noise Savvy (http://www.savant-gardesoftware.com ).