Luminosity and Contrast

I purchased an ebook the other night and I’m about 60% finished reading it. I have always loved the simplicity of Black and White photography and this book has definitely inspired me to return to another one of my photography loves, landscape photography in black in white. While I have been focused for the past couple of years on compositing and painting, I still do a LOT of travel and nature photography and figured it was time to dig through some of my work and process some of them with a vision toward the simple concepts of “Luminosity and Contrast”.

The ebook by the way is by Alister Benn and it is Titled, “Luminosity and Contrast” and I purchased it on his website here:

I already posted a couple images from my Asheville waterfalls, but that was before I read this book. I have reprocessed them AND I built a cool three mat action in PS to put a white and black mat around the images to really set them off. I already have actions for digital mats for double mats, key-line mats and may competition mats where I need to add guide images. This new triple mat is nice addition to my collection. I set it to stop at each canvas sizing so you can set it to whatever width you want so you can vary the sizes of each of the three mats. It selects the foreground and background colors automatically… One and three use the foreground and the second mat uses the background color. It applies a couple of inner and outer mat styles I added and the entire process runs in about a second. Boom.. done. Image matted.

Here are my first three. All of the same Catawba falls just three different views. See if I was successful in having your eye follow the luminosity through the image. Did the light areas draw you in from the front to the back? Have any recommendations for changes? Feel free to add them to the comments below.

This one is a double mat action and not pure white: