Colours into Tones in Black and White

Who would have thought that colour would be of such importance to black and white images? For this exercise I used an image I took while out shooting a previous exercise as it features the required colours layered like a cake which will demonstrate the concept in this exercise very well, and I like the texture of the materials in the image.

50mm, f/4.5, 1/500, ISO 400

Standard Greyscale

This first image shows the colour image simply converted to greyscale. No 'colour' here is more dominant than any other, except for subtle differences in shade due to their relative brightness/darkness to each other.

Red Filter

Here the red and its close relative orange have been lightened. Noticeably the red hasn't turned to striking white, presumably due to the original red being quite dark (the same effect is seen in the dark red pepper in the sample images of the course folder). Although they haven't turned particularly light, the red and orange now have a smoothed-out appearance, which most of the crinkles gone from the material, which is a detrimental effect in this instance. What is more striking is red's complimentary colour, green, turning very dark, almost black.

Yellow Filter

As expected, increasing the yellow slider has turned the yellow material in my image almost white. Strangely, it's complimentary colour, violet, has hardly changed at all, only becoming slightly darker. Perhaps this is because we aren't dealing with 'exact' 'pure' colours in this image.

Green Filter

The green slider has a much better effect on its own colour, and also its complimentary. The green turns almost white, and the red almost black. The closely related colours, orange and blue also change respectively.

Blue Filter

I think the blue filter had the strongest effect on its own colour and the complimentary, even more so than the previous green slider. The blue stands out strongly as an almost pure white, while the orange near the top of the image turns very dark, almost black.

This was an interesting exercise, particularly in seeing how a coloured 'filter' effected not only its own colour, but also all of the other colours, and in particularly the complimentary colour. I now have a sense of how choosing the colours in a scene carefully can have an impact even when shooting black and white images, and how those black and white images can be tweaked in post-production, making use of colour relationships to create contrasting tones of varying strengths.