Hand Colored???

[Harold Davis]

inspired by darth. i thought it was a pretty good idea when you have a busy foreground that needs to be muted a little, why not B&W it and paint the color back in the subject??!! hope you like it. another from the hooptie trip to tampa bay.

D300, Bigma at 500mm, f/6.3, 1/1000s, 0EV, ISO 400

converted image to B&W in CNX then painted the color back in with the paint brush. pretty tedious work and took a while to do it. you know when you color outside the lines!! had to fix a few spots along the way. but no crop!! full frame!!

hope you like it!! thanks for looking and comments and critiques are appreciated!!

[Jackie Schuknecht]

I think this is cool. I imagined the water to be sky and then the pelican was looking upwards at it. Neat treatment Harold!

[Oscar Zangroniz]

H, you're getting too good at this. Excellent capture my friend. Very sharp and excellent tones.
Regards,

[Julie Kenward]

Good one, Harold...but you left a lot of noise in that dark BG above the pelican's head. I did a shadow/highlight adjustment and brought down the noise a bit. You did an OUTSTANDING job of hand-painting that color back in. Way to go!!!

[Gus Cobos]

Daktari,
Very nice capture...I like the landing gear...:eek::p Placed just right in frame with sharp details in the feathers and good color rendition...:eek:

[Desmond Chan]

inspired by darth. i thought it was a pretty good idea when you have a busy foreground that needs to be muted a little, why not B&W it and paint the color back in the subject??

Or de-saturate the colors by a whole lot then reduce the contrast. Change some of the colors if you need to, too. If you simply convert the background (am I correct you're talking about the background and not the foreground?) that has some white/bright spots, those spots could still be distracting. Another thing you could also do after that is to blur the background a bit.

Good capture of the pelican. Good pose and sharpness. I think it was looking at you ;)

[Harold Davis]

thanks for the repost, jules!! i intentionally left the grain in the bg. always been a big fan of b&w and it's just been a thing with me to leave in the grain. kinda go hand in hand. in fact the original looks exactly like your repost. i darkened up the bg to try to get the pelican to pop out more.

desmond, i guess i was wrong in my words. the bg and the fg were converted. i will give your way a try too. might come up with something different and cool!!

thanks for the comments everyone!

[Lance Peters]

Hi Mr H. - like it - well done - justthink this is how it used to be done in the day before colour film was avaialble.

:)