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Tamalpais
5 December 2019
This afternoon we used the new Capture One 20 to convert a recent DNG of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County into a black and white image. We shot the image from the corner up the street, about 20 miles away.
Tamalpais. Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 200mm and f5.6, 1/250 second and ISO 400. Processed in Capture One 20.
The overriding reason for the monochrome conversion was that the color was rather weak thanks to the atmospheric haze late in the afternoon, just a half hour or so before sunset. We thought we could bring out the undulating headlands a bit more credibly in black and white.
We can't pretend to be proficient yet in the new tools Capture One 20 provides. We just installed it today (and were happy to see our extensive collection of styles came along for the ride automatically).
But we also don't mind disclosing we had no trouble doing what we wanted to this image. We used a mix of a black-and-white style and heavy manipulation of the tones with the Curves tool to get this image.
Just for fun we opened the same original DNG file in Adobe Camera Raw and optimized the image there. But we preferred what we'd done in Capture One 20.
We can't draw any conclusions from that. It was just how the cookie happened to crumble at those two particular moments of the day.
But it does show how good the tools are these days. As one might say of the lovely mountain to the north, you can get there from here.