Traitorous Doubt (unprocessed)

"Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt."

- William Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure"

I have a thing not only for B&W, but for B&Ws of trees in fields. I dunno, I just like them. Anyway, today I had a full-day clinic out at Lithgow. The journey there is really very gorgeous. I noticed this field and its trees on Monday when I was taken to visit the Lithgow clinic, and resolved to photograph it when I next passed that way - which turned out to be today.

I did lots of tricky processing trying to compensate for the over-exposed sky (and the verging-on-under-exposed tree): I had duplicate layers and a curves adjustment pulling down the white point to such a degree that the whited-out parts of the sky became the dark parts (which was kind of weird, but kind of worked; it just looked like the blue of the sky was really dark), and ...

Then I showed it to my wife, who was quite definite that she preferred it in colour. "Damn" thought I, as I had been thinking in B&W, and in fact that was one of the driving factors behind taking the photo in the first place.

So I thought about it.

Then I worked on a colour version: cropped to avoid the worst over-exposed sky; mild curves adjustment (luminance pulled down) with a gradient mask on the sky and erased from the main tree; luminance and contrast both up a bit on the trees and ground. I then did a B&W conversion of that, with red filter close to 100%, green filter about 30%, and blue filter just over 10%.

And I thought about it some more.

I exported both colour and B&W and flicked between them.

A lot.

And thought some more.

Then I loaded the B&W into Filterstorm and adjusted the white balance: pulled the temperature down to -42%.

And yes I thought about it some more ... and finally decided to go with the cooled-down B&W.

In other news, Miss 5 drew a picture for me today: a theropod footprint. ^_^ That's going on the wall at work.

Final version here.