Tuesday 2 February 2010

Project 37

Filters with black and white film

The intention of this project is to show the effect that different colour filters have on black and white images. The brief is to produce a still life image with red, yellow and blue colours, mounted on a piece of grey card.

I then had to take one shot in colour, one in black and white and then three more black and white, one with a red filter, one with a yellow filter and one with a blue filter.

The principle behind this is that each filter lightens any object with the same colour, and darkens the others. the darkening is greater in complementary colours, i.e. those opposite on the colour wheel.

To kick this off, I have put up a picture of the colour wheel, highlighting the primary colours and the complementary colours of those.

colour wheel

From this, you can see that the complementary colour of yellow is purple etc.

 

SONY DSC

The original image in colour

 

SONY DSC                      

The same image in black and white

 

SONY DSC

With the red filter, the red pepper is lighter than in the original black and white. Unfortunately, there is no noticeable change in the blue or yellow objects.

SONY DSC                      

Using the blue filter, the blue object is lighter, and the other two are darker, with the red pepper being most noticeable.

 

SONY DSC

With the yellow filter, the lemon is lighter, and the blue object is noticeably darker. The pepper on the other hand is lighter than the original.

One of the things happening here is that my camera, in compiling the jpeg image, seems to be trying to interpret what it thinks the colours should be, and the actual differences are lessened (only a theory on my part)

I could shoot in RAW, and then apply my own changes (as discussed in a previous project), but at present, I really want to know what my camera will do by itself.