The warm fuzzies

One week I’m short on words another I’m light on images. This week is of the former persuasion and follows up on the manipulated iphone images I featured a couple of weeks back. All were taken with an iphone 7 and processed the handy-dandy Snapseed app. This is, admittedly, a lazy man’s approach but the merit of art need not be its degree of difficulty. I hope. Today I am either unapologetically lazy or overwhelmed by the weight of life’s minutiae.

As all of you know, I’m primarily a black and white shooter albeit one how favors warm tones. Renowned photographer, editor and teacher George Schaub asked about my process this week. His query stemmed from images he saw on Instagram or Facebook. Probably Instagram since that’s where photographers share their stuff.

I told George that I processed my smart phone images in Snapseed, first as color photographs and, then, after producing a color photo that made me giddy I convert it to black and white and, finally, to the toned version you see on Instagram. With images shot with my Canon 5D Mark 3 the workflow is almost the same. I fully process the color file in Photoshop then convert to toned black and white using the Hue and Saturation tool. In Photoshop the photograph remains a “color” file but a muted monochromatic version of the original full color iteration. In Snapseed I convert the color file to black and white and warm it up using White Balance. It’s a season to taste operation where I raise the color temperature 10 points. It’s pleasantly warm but shy of brown. In Photoshop my recipe is a Hue of 31 and Saturation of 8. I don’t know if the degree of warmth achieved with Photoshop and Snapseed are the same but I'll have to compare a few photographs to see. I bet they’re really close.


And, yes, I am continuing to apply a modicum of blur for that oh so appealing alternative process look. Note how the building in image three seems to recede into the background because of thr blurry softness.