4. Colours into tones in black-and-white

The still-life for this exercise was an arrangement of objects bought from the local flea market for no more than 50p each. I lit the arrangement using an inexpensive home studio kit which, in effect, is a slightly larger version of the readily available ebay box. I determined the exposure using a grey card and mounted the camera on a tripod. The exposure, at ISO 100, is f11 at 0.5 secs.

In adobe photoshop I applied a black-and-white adjustment layer to the image:

This is the default image with the following slider values;
Red - 40
Yellow - 60
Green - 40
Blue - 20

(The cyan and magenta sliders were left unaltered at 60 and 80 respectively).

I then adjusted each of the sliders individually to lighten each of the elements of the arrangement in turn. I stopped each slider at a point of personal preference rather than whitening the objects completely. The results are as follows:

Finally, I adjusted all four sliders simultaneously to provide an image that I judged to be reasonably balanced and attractive:

The slider values in this image are:
Red - 50
Yellow - 70
Green - 60
Blue - 60

'Less is more'