David Bennett

How To Make A Black And White Image

A few weeks ago I was photographing animals at a Safari park for our ecard collection. The sun was bright and it was around mid-day.

These are not good conditions in which to take photographs because the sun washes out the colors and the shadows are harsh.

I was photographing zebras from high ground and when I looked at the images later, the color of the grass looked horrendous.

Maybe my camera couldn’t handle it. I had it set to Automatic White Balance (I almost always have it on that setting), and the grass looked horrible. It was a yukky yellow color.

White Balance And Color Temperature

White balance means the color temperature that shows white correctly as white. If the white balance is wrong, then all the other colors in the scene will be wrong as well.

Most cameras have an Automatic White Balance setting. Additionally, you can set this manually on some cameras, but then you need something to photograph that you know is white.

A piece of white card will do the trick, provided it really is white. You just photograph it in the conditions where you will be photographing everything else for that session and set the white balance to that value.

Or if your camera has ‘Scene’ settings, you can set your camera to one of these. There are often settings for Daylight, Cloudy, etc., which are pre-sets for certain fixed color temperatures.

But I didn’t do that. Instead I had my camera set to Automatic White Balance which meant that I relied on the camera’s ability to detect the correct color temperature automatically.

Often the camera does a good job and any deviation from the ‘correct’ value can be adjusted in Photoshop later. Sometimes however the image just looks yukky like it did here, and I cannot rescue it in Photoshop.

What Color Is Grass

I don’t know about you, but one of the things that photography has taught me is to simply look more.

I try to look and to see what there is to see rather than relying on the false knowledge in my head about what color things are.

That day, however, I was taking shots as quickly as I could and I was looking at the zebras rather than the grass.

So perhaps the grass really was that color. But it doesn’t look like any grass I have photographed before and the bottom line is that I simply didn’t like it.

I tried to correct the color in Photoshop to make the grass look bearable, but even then the grass was pockmarked with clods of earth that the zebras had kicked up, so it looked messy.

Black And White

I stared at the image and thought how graphic and pictorial the zebras looked. If someone was drawing a zebra, all they would need to draw would be the black areas. The rest would just ‘fill itself in’ as it were.

From there I thought that perhaps I could make the image black and white and take out the grass completely. I did that and then I made a second image by cropping and masking out two of the zebras. This is the cropped image.

How To Take Out Specific Colors In Photoshop

One way to make a black and white image without the cluttered background, is to open the image in Photoshop (I use Photoshop CS5) and then go to Image > Adjust > Black and White.

The color values will still be there, so the yellow and green colors will show as shades of grey.

So the next step is to move the yellow and the green sliders all the way over to the right and that will lighten those colors to the point that they look white.

Then go to Image > Adjust > Brightness and Contrast or Image > Adjust > Levels and move the sliders to increase the strengths of the blacks and bring out the whites even more.

After that it is just a question of using the paintbrush to paint out any remaining dark areas of grass. As you can see, I left some areas of shadow in to add depth to the photo.

A Couple Of Facts About Zebras

The animals in the photographs are Grant’s zebras, by the way. They have wider stripes than the Grevy’s zebra, which is another favorite animal of ours.

The Grevy’s zebra is bigger and also looks a bit more svelte with longer, slimmer legs. That might be the effect of the narrower stripes, however, like with any fashion clothing.

Also, evidence from embryology shows that zebras are not white with black stripes. They are in fact black animals with an overlay of white stripes and bellies.

More Ecards

We shall be adding the black and white Zebra image to our ecard collection shortly, and we shall of course be notifying members via our newsletter.

Update: we have now added these two images to our ecard collection in the Animals category at Quillcards animal ecards. You will need to click through to page five of the ‘animals’ images to see these zebras.

If you would like to be added to our newsletter, just head over to the sidebar and complete your details.

And you can always see our latest ecards by looking at our Recently Added section which shows a melange of images from various Quillcards categories – from animals, to cottages to flowers, to buildings, and everything in between.

Heading north, Berwick Upon Tweed is the last English town before the border with Scotland.

The town is just three miles from the Scottish border and a few hundred yards from the North Sea. On its seaward side there are these high earth ramparts built in the late 1500s, during the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I.

The ramparts are sheer, as tall as a tree and fifty feet wide, and were designed to protect the town from an invasion by Scotland.

The people you can see in the photograph above are walking along the top of the ramparts and the sea is to the left out of the frame.

The invasion never came. If it had, then fires lit in iron baskets like this one would have warned of the approach of the invasion fleet.

Meanwhile, On The South Coast Of England

It was beacons like this along the south coast of England that warned of the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

The scene was set with the Spanish invasion fleet anchored off the Dutch coast, ready to sail across the North Sea. However, the English didn’t wait for the invasion but instead sent fire ships among the Spanish galleons.

The Armada escaped north along the east coast of England and managed to sail around Scotland. But the heavy galleons of the Spanish fleet were blown off course by a storm, and many ships were wrecked off the coast of Ireland.

And that was the end of Spanish invasion plans in the undeclared Anglo-Spanish War that dragged on until 1604.

So it is interesting to think that the Armada would have sailed past the ramparts of Berwick Upon Tweed in 1588 as it attempted to regroup.

The Scottish Coast Road

Continuing north from the border with England, the main road runs along near the coast towards Edinburgh.

From time to time the sea can be seen from the main road, but there is another much smaller road even nearer the coast that is worth the detour.

It runs past the villages of Burnouth, Eyemouth, St. Abbs, and others. Each village has a harbour reached down steep side roads, with the sounds of fishermen calling to one another as they work on their tiny boats.

Looking out to sea it really does feel a world away from the south of England, with the hills behind and the lichen-encrusted rocks adding splashes of color.

The Fields Behind

At this time of year in the rolling fields near the coast, the wheat straw is bundled in these huge circular bales that have become the new visual poetry of the agricultural landscape.

A Short Walk To The Gallery

Here in the west end of Edinburgh where we are staying during the Edinburgh Festival, it is only a short walk to the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art.

This statue by Antony Gormley of a man half underground is at the pedestrian entrance to the gallery.

Or rather, it is at the pedestrian entrance to half of the gallery.That is because the gallery is in two halves.

Each half of the gallery is housed in a grand building set in its own grounds with the two galleries separated by a road.

The first time we visited – by car – we dithered whether to turn left into one half of the gallery or right into the other half.

I am sure there is the germ of an idea there for a new gallery exhibit – a video of visitors nonplussed in the middle of the road, lights winking in indecision.

One half of the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art was formerly known as the Dean Gallery. It’s name was very recently changed to Gallery Two, but there are still ‘Dean Gallery’ signs everywhere (more confusion).

Those Cold, Clammy Staircases

Gallery Two or The Dean Gallery is a former orphanage, and the staircases at either end of the building are dark and clammy with stone-cold steps and iron railings.

Because of that, I can’t help but wonder what the building felt like to the children to whom it was home before the building was transformed into a gallery and filled with art.

The gallery is home to a fine collection of woodblock prints including a number of prints by the Japanese artist, Hiroshige.

I used to own a book entitled Masters Of The Japanese Print (I wonder where that has gone?) that contained reproductions of some Hiroshige prints. I remember that I spent hours in my teens looking at the color reproductions in the book.

Now, seeing the large prints, I am struck by what a great graphic artist and realist Hiroshige was.

He places people, boats, and bridges half in and half out of the frame – capturing what is within the frame but alluding to what is outside the frame – so that we feel like we are seeing slices of the everyday life that he wanted to capture.

Ian Cheyne

There are also some wonderful woodblock prints by Scottish artists including some by Ian Cheyne – an artist who studied at the Glasgow School of Art.

He used exaggerated perspective to describe dramatic scenes of small figures going about their lives against a backdrop of towering cliffs and crashing waves.

Cheyne died in 1955 and his work was barely known until someone was researching local artists and found his work in the archives of the gallery.

Woodblock Prints

There is a display in the print room showing the stages in the making of a woodblock print – with several woodblocks and semi-finished prints.

I didn’t know before seeing this that some print makers use one block with all the elements cut into it, and make several passes with whatever colors they are using.

Other print makers, however, use several blocks. Each block has part of the image cut into it and each block is colored separately.

I can’t get over the skill and mental agility needed to cut several blocks so that together they make a complete image.

The display is a great introduction to the technique of woodblock printing and well worth seeing.

The Other Half Of The Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art

The other half the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art has the sculpted grounds that you can see in this photograph. The swirling mounds are an art installation designed by Charles Jencks, an American landscape designer.

Inside, the gallery houses paintings by Utrillo, Miro, Picasso, Leger, Gaugin, and Wyndham Lewis as well as more recent, how shall I call them, conceptual daubs on canvas.

Gaugin

The Gaugin painting is very interesting. It shows three Tahitian islanders, a young man and two women. They are close up and fill the frame. One is turned away, one half turned and the third is facing to the front.

Until recently, I didn’t take to Gaugin’s work. Slowly though since seeing a huge exhibition of his work in London last year, I have started to appreciate him.

One thing I learned at the London exhibition was how he had held down a responsible job for many years and that he had only gone to Tahiti after his wife demanded that he leave for failing to uphold the values she held dear.

I am sure the story is more complicated that that, but understanding that Gaugin tried to fit in and couldn’t, makes me understand his paintings differently.

Gaugin hated what had happened to Tahiti. He went there expecting a natural island paradise and felt that bureaucracy and Christianity had ruined the place. He railed against the authorities and ended up a drunk and quixotic figure in the eyes of those against whom he battled.

Utrillo

The Utrillo painting is of a lonely little Qquare – maybe in Paris – with the trees bare with their branches sticking up in the characteristic way of many of his paintings. Again, the perspective got to me – with a lot of flattened foreground road and pavement leading to the Square.

Edinburgh And Modern Art

It’s not only the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art that has modern art in it.

The Scottish National Gallery just off Princes Street in the center of Edinburgh has two or three rooms of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. There is a wonderful Cezanne there called ‘The Trees’ that he painted towards the end of his life.

There are also paintings from much earlier periods, but there is obviously some overlap with the Gallery Of Modern Art. So if you are interested in the art of before and around the turn of the 20th century, then you will want to make time to visit both the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art in the west of the city and the Scottish National Gallery off Princes Street in the center of Edinburgh.

Art Lovers

I couldn’t in all honesty say that the galleries in Edinburgh are world-ranking like the National Gallery in London or the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., but they are worth a long visit – and because we are staying so close to them, I have been four or five times in the time we have been here in Edinburgh.

The Waters Of Leith

Around the back of this building – behind the garden cafe and the car park – there is a path that leads down through the trees to the Waters Of Leith.

The Waters Of Leith is the name given to the river that wends its way through Edinburgh until it reaches the sea at the Firth Of Forth north of the city.

And standing in the river down below the gallery is this statue by Antony Gormley.

Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley also made the world-famous Angel Of The North sculpture that towers over and dominates the A1 road that connects the north and the south of England. You can read more about the North here.

The Little Wooden Bridge

A little wooden bridge spans the river behind the gallery, and I managed to photograph these two little dogs as they came across it.

That would have been a couple of days before the heavens opened and a normal August’s worth of Edinburgh rain fell in two days. I shot this short video, with the gentle Waters Of Leith now running fast.