Just for Fun No C&C will be given: Heavy Industry

Taken in London, on Cheapside near St. Pauls.

Cranes socializing above London!

Paul Abbott said:

Taken in London, on Cheapside near St. Pauls.

Paul Abbott - Cranes in Cheapside, London​

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So this is what machines are doing! Excellent work! What did you use for this? Did you have a filter on the lens? Did you crop this or is there more sky?

Asher

Asher, this is as taken, no cropping, shot at 16mm (24mm) I think. The sky was a brilliant blue and the image has just been slightly contrasted with no other processing.
I never use polarizers at all with digital. I waited for those clouds to move into those positions.

Yep Paul

the clouds are well waited - and become sort of balls that the crane are playing with.
How comes the high cranes remind me toys and not big towers?

In the old film days, one would have asked about red filter...

Yeah Michael, a red filter was a cool option for B&W skies. Thanks.

Well-done, Paul. This looks like quite a dense project with such a crowd of short-reach cranes.

I've been assembling a series of similar images of cranes in somewhat anthropomorphic configurations. Will share when they're ready.

Paul Abbott said:

Yeah Michael, a red filter was a cool option for B&W skies. Thanks.

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Hi Paul,

I love your industrial cityscapes!

A Red or Orange filter can be simulated when converting to B&W. In fact, when converting an RGB image to B&W, one has many more choices to tweak the color conversion into greys. My prefered method of conversion is by reducing the overall saturation of the RGB image to zero, and then adjust the individual color color channels for selective tonality. It also improves noise, because one averages the noise of 3 channels.

Cheers,
Bart

Thanks, Ken. I look forward to seeing your images. I love the city and all that it offers the photographer.

Bart, thanks for the heads up on that, I will look into doing that myself on my future images. I guess the noise improvement makes sense. Meanwhile I just convert to greyscale in Lightroom and then improve tonality with the various sliders there.

Paul Abbott said:

...Bart, thanks for the heads up on that, I will look into doing that myself on my future images. I guess the noise improvement makes sense. Meanwhile I just convert to greyscale in Lightroom and then improve tonality with the various sliders there.

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Hi Paul,

You can do what Bart has suggested in LR also. Do not convert to B&W. Instead, bring down all sliders for saturation to zero. And adjust the luminosity and hue sliders for the mix. Might be worth a try.

Cheers,

Thanks Cem, appreciate it.

You might even better use HSL to filter

Michael Fontana said:

You might even better use HSL to filter

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That's precisely what I tried to say. A film tutorial by Martin Evening is of course much better, thanks for the link.

Fantastic! Thanks for the link, Michael.

You' re welcome, I haven't used LR for a good while anymore, but still remember HSL as a powerfull tool!

Bart_van_der_Wolf said:

Hi Paul,

I love your industrial cityscapes!

A Red or Orange filter can be simulated when converting to B&W. In fact, when converting an RGB image to B&W, one has many more choices to tweak the color conversion into greys. My prefered method of conversion is by reducing the overall saturation of the RGB image to zero, and then adjust the individual color color channels for selective tonality. It also improves noise, because one averages the noise of 3 channels.

Cheers,
Bart

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Bart,

I use the Channels layer in RGB over a Hue/Sat layer set to monochome. Then I go back to H/S and adjust each channel separately and it's brightness and sat and sometimes remap the hues. The last adjustments are in the Channels although occasionaly I do go back to H/S again. How does that effect the noise? I do of course try to watch for noise, but what of the math?

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

Bart,

I use the Channels layer in RGB over a Hue/Sat layer set to monochome. Then I go back to H/S and adjust each channel separately and it's brightness and sat and sometimes remap the hues. The last adjustments are in the Channels although occasionaly I do go back to H/S again. How does that effect the noise? I do of course try to watch for noise, but what of the math?

Asher

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Hi Asher,

Yes, the HSL approach is the most flexible, that's what I suggested. The math is simple, but the effect depends on the information in the R+G+B layers. When converting 3 layers to a single monochrome one, we are left with a single layer (or 3 identical ones) with its specific noise profile. Subsequent alterations will increase the visibility of noise in some parts, and decrease in others. How much, depends on the e.g. curves or local dodge/burn adjustments to influence the brighnesses.

However, when the 3 original layers are kept intact, we always will have a weighted average of 3 individual layers. Each of those layers has its own noise profile, but to a large extent these noise profiles have an independent Gaussian distribution. Averaging 3 independent random noise sources, will significantly reduce the noise (by approx. Sqrt(3).

A very dramatic effect of this can be seen with Near Infra-Red (NIR) images. The Red channel is the one with most info, and Blue and Green are significantly underexposed and thus noisy. However, the noise in the Red channel is still reduced by the noise in the other channels. The HSL desaturated version will create a much smoother result when the contribution of the Blue and Green channel is boosted (e.g. with White Balance), and the three layers are averaged.

Bart