I switched form film to digital 5 years ago after spending the last 30 years in the wet darkroom doing exclusively BW images, the change from film and the chemical process was difficult, trying to achieve the look and style I did seemed impossible at first, to try and achieve the contrast and tonal scale that neg to positive gave, after years of experiment with different ways to convert a colour file to mono I have eventually reached the the same level as the wet darkroom and surpassed it now in many ways, although it is a different medium and really should not be compared, [binary and silver halide]
To control the EV range in a picture such as this one cannot be done solely in camera with one image , with digital it can be, my way is this, protect the highlights and retrieve shadows in PP, shot in raw, bracket with three shots, use the data from the expanded EV range from all three and blend the exposures in PS to create a master colour file, convert the colour file using a method I call contrast grading, I use basically three plugins imagingfactory, Alien skin2 and photokit and use PS to power it, the idea is based on the wet darkroom using multigrade papers at differing levels of contrast on one image, the method of working is different but the output is the same especially for printing, contrast grading avoids any form of dodge and burn and reduces the likelihood of halos where dark meets light on the file, by opening imagingfactory and adjusting colour and contrast sliders and placing the effect behind a layer mask and painting back, correct contrast can be placed any where within the image, the sheep pic for example, the sky would have lower contrast settings applied so highlight detail is not blown and shadow detail is not clogged to pure black, the foreground is adjusted with higher contrast to give a more textural look with deeper blacks and strong highlights, the overall effect is of higher luminance that cant be fully appreciated in a small 800px image, to further enhance selective sharpening is applied, usually avoiding the sky and more on the land areas, thats an overall explanation, more fine tuning is done using contrast masks and film presets from the other plugins mentioned.
Martin
