positively …. not

When I first saw the sun streaming through my glasses on the dining room table this morning, I had an idea for a high contrast black and white image.

And then I began to play ….

This is another preset in my Nik editing software.  It’s called solarisation and mimics what happens to prints or negatives in a darkroom when someone accidentally switches a light on.  Colours and tones become reversed - much like a negative - depending on how long the light is left on for.

This is what Lee Miller did in the 1930s when working as an assistant to Man Ray, who perfected the technique and made it an art form.  

It would appear though, that people have been switching lights on in darkrooms by accident ever since darkrooms were first invented, but presumably assistants were sacked and the results binned, because the subjects did not want to see themselves in a negative light, so to speak.

The solarisation preset has a slider entitled elapsed time and I’ve only just twigged that this is meant to simulate how long the dark room light is left on for.  (Doh!).

Warning; if anyone is considering playing with this effect and hasn’t yet done so, it’s seriously addictive - and - if you want to make a pig’s ear out of your perfectly respectable image it will let you do so.


The extras show what happens when you whizz the slider back and forth.