Inversions

WernerG

Bleeding Heart



Marsh Marigold



Hobblebush Viburnum

FlyNavy

Amazing!!! Very well done. Can you post a short tutorial of how you processed these photos?

Cornflake

Very nice! Particularly the first one. I'm not sure how you did it, but I find myself thinking of ways I could imitate it.

black mamba

Beautiful work, Werner. The PP is perfect for these shots.

Tom

WernerG

Thank you John and Cornflake. The idea was to try to create a the look of an oriental painting with colors drawn on a white canvas. I think the 2nd one creates that look the best. The bokah in the first makes the background more abstract. The 3rd doesn't quite work as well.

The basic structure is a totally inverted luminosity curve, basically an inversion of light and dark, (not an inverted RGB curve, which would create a color negative). In Capture NX2 it is the LCH function. The second step is usually to color mask the main subject to keep that color from inverting. Yellows look pretty ugly when its shadows and highlights are inverted. Masking is easy in Capture NX2, just use a negative control point on a color and make it effective everywhere. I'm sure there are similar functions in PS but I don't know them. The images that seem to work the best have simple compositions, few colors, preferably midtones, and deep shadows beyond of the subject. After that it depends on the look you want, more or less saturation/contrast, etc. The 2nd adds a white vignette to fade to white at the edges.

Edited to add: Inverting a curve means grabbing the black point of a linear luminosity curve and raising it to the top of the chart, then grabbing the white point and dragging it to the bottom of the chart. Doing this with a luminosity curve inverts tonal values but doesn't alter colors. Midtones can be inverted and will look almost the same.

WernerG

black mamba wrote: »

Beautiful work, Werner. The PP is perfect for these shots.

Tom

Thanks Tom, I haven't yet taken a picture specifically to use this process because I still don't have a feel for which pictures will work and which won't. I did a lot of flower shooting this summer so I went back through those files and tried it out on them. Strong primary colors are tough. Sunlight is a killer also, the white reflections become black dots. Low contrast, midtone colors work best. Contrast can be added after tonal inversion.

Cornflake

Werner, I experimented with this and enjoyed it, although I didn't get any results as good as yours. I also tried the variation of inverting the colors but not the luminance. That worked well on some images.

WernerG

Cornflake wrote: »

Werner, I experimented with this and enjoyed it, although I didn't get any results as good as yours. I also tried the variation of inverting the colors but not the luminance. That worked well on some images.

I've found very few flower pictures and no landscapes where the technique creates a pleasing image. If I were to set one one up I would try a garden scene or wildflower scene with muted colors, dense foliage that has deep shadows and lots of green, like the second one in the series. Green foliage seems to come through it pretty nicely. Color that are not pure, ie, diluted by gray tones don't work well at all because it is hard to color mask when there is a gray cast in the colors.