structure

I prefer winter and fall, 

when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, 

the dead feeling of winter. 

Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

~ Andrew Wyeth

I'm sure you know by now that I like to play with my images - pre capture and post.

I like to play in setting up small vignettes of still life scenes in unconventional ways, adding textures,

turning images upside down, and popping them into black and white.

This time I inverted the black and white so that black became white and vice versa.

Too fun.

I use black to white gradient maps to create my B&W images. There are many ways to turn a color image into B&W, this is one way and it seems to work fine. I create three layers of gradient maps (all black to white) with three different blending modes, Normal, Screen and Multiply. I adjust the opacity in the Screen and Multiply layers as needed and use a soft brush to adjust finer details on their respective layer masks.

For the top most image I did the normal B to W gradient, then I added two W to B gradients.

I was smitten.

I loved how the graphical elements stood out, and the different tones in the water popped.

It totally changed the feel of the image.

The original and B&W images are below...which of the three do you prefer?

I imagine a little goes a long way and I won't be doing this B&W inversion often.

But it was fun to play with it in this image.

This is the home of the Whimsical Pixel! ;)

FujiXT1 ISO 200 f/2.8 1/40 sec  XF35mm (53mm EFL)