Filter Friday

© Laurie A. Rubin

Filter Friday on Google+ By Laurie Rubin

The magic of Control Points… how can I explain it other than showing you how using Control Points have given me so much selective editing capabilities. It still amazes me every time I use them to either add or remove an effect from my image.

Let me demonstrate with this image of a Zebra that I recently took at the Oakland Zoo. When I was reviewing the images that I took that day, I knew that I wanted to convert this color image into black and white to emphasize the stripes on this Zebra. To do that, I went to my go-to program, Silver Efex Pro 2, because it never fails to produce stunning black and white results.

© Laurie A. Rubin

I tend to quickly go through the Presets that are available on the left panel to get some ideas as to how I want my image to look. Since I can click on a Preset and see immediate results, this speeds up my workflow process so that I am not spending a lot of time trying to come up with inspirational ideas.

In this case, I selected the Preset, Film Noir 2, because I liked the high contrast in the stripes of the Zebra, and the Border type. I decided to lighten up the background. First, I added Control Points to some of the black areas on the Zebra that I wanted to keep nice and dark. These are constricting Control Points. In other words, by placing a Control Point on the area that you do not want to have affected, or changed, you can simply place a Control Point on the area without making any adjustments to the actual Control Point itself.

Example of a Control Point added to retain the dark stripe on the Zebra

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After I placed several Control Points on the areas that I did not want to have affected, I added several more Control Points to the dark areas of the background and increased the Brightness and Amplified White sliders to lighten the background. In the areas on the bottom of the image where I didn’t want to totally remove the dark areas, I would increase the Brightness and Amplified White sliders to a lesser degree. By doing this, the Zebra did not look like it was floating in the image.

Example of a Control Point added to brighten the dark area in the background

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There are other methods of that can be used to get a similar effect, but I have found that by using Presets and Control Points, I am able to quickly and easily adjust my image. The final result was a more artistic rendering of this beautiful animal.

© Laurie A. Rubin

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Share an image where you used either a digital or glass filter or both on Google+, and tag your image #filterfriday curated by +Laurie Rubin. We’d love to see how filters have helped to enhance your images