A little play with selective color....

Playing in photoshop today simply because I don't have my "darkroom" stuff put together yet to revert back to old silver based black and white for my next manic round of experimentation. This image is a hint of things to come. Selective coloring where I will actually use felt tip markers to paint in color on a black and white negative. Yes, am going retro with traditional silver based films for the next big thing in my little artistic world.

This image started as a black and white negative. To get where it is now it took a few steps. I started with a scanned negative. Next I created a layer in Adobe CS5. With that layer changed its mode from black and white to RGB color.

Next step in the process was to select a color, I chose a medium blue. I took the brush tool and use the diffused edge in the largest pixel count I could get. I then painted in the sky towards the horizon line, but not covering the line to allow some areas at that line not to have color. Blending as a painter would. Once that was done I used the blending tool, "Multiply" to allow the two layers to show through each other. I ran through the gamut of blending options and found "Multiply" gave me the sort of mood I was looking for compared to the original image.

The final was then flattened for a smaller file, which was re-sized and made smaller via jpeg compression so it would easily be transferred and viewed on this blog. (The image will get bigger with a click).

Of course no amount of photoshoppery will make a bad image good. In this case I did like the composition highlighting the mound of the chat dump at an old glass factory near Flat River, MO. I just couldn't bring myself to take perfectly good old negatives and take magic markers to them for the sake of experimentation hence the use of photoshop today.

Another thing I didn't do was clean up the scan but getting rid of scratches, dust and other imperfections. I felt that it lends a certain amount of authenticity and age to final image. Whether I allow the same imperfections to show through in the future works purposely shot on silver remain to be seen. Never know what sort of mood I'll be in when I start selectively hand coloring in areas.