The church of St. Armel in the market town of Ploërmel was built at the beginning of the 15th C and the building was completed in 1425. This is the main entrance which is sheltered from the prevailing weather by surrounding buildings and, as a result, the delicate and intricate patterns of the stone work and the carved wood doors have been preserved in virtually their original condition. They still look absolutely splendid today as you can see in this image.
@annied Lack of proper town-planning in the middle ages so that local commerces built in close proximity to the church in order to attract passing trade!
Beautiful. I love the history and detailed carvings. I sometimes wonder what future generations will think of modern carving and whether it will last like these to be appreciated by future generations. Fav. Katharine
@northy Hi Mira - I tend to know when I take a photograph what I want the finished image to look like, then I process to achieve that, so what I use and how I use it won't always be the same. This one was initially tidied up in LR and then I did some heavy-lifting in SilverEfex Pro 2 and then back to LR for some levels adjustments. The final stage was to apply a Highpass filter in PS CC to sharpen the image overall (Softlight blending mode) followed by a 20 pixel Gaussian blur at 20% opacity to take the hard edges off and finally I quad-toned it with Black and three different shades of grey. Back to LR to adjust the brightness and export to jpeg for uploading to 365. This is simply what I did here - not a process to be followed.
@vignouse no no... i get that completely... like you, i generally have an idea of what i want to do and it will vary from one image to the next... i keep wondering if i need to delve into PS for part of my black and white work... the thing is, so far, i haven't wanted to do something that i couldn't do between LR and silver fx... i take it that the LR sharpening tool doesn't get you what you need?
@northy Sometimes LR sharpening gives me what I want and I do prefer it to Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpening but the Highpass Filter gives an effect that I like very much although it's very easy to overdo it if you use too high a pixel radius - I tend to use from about 7 to 15 depending on the image and the amount of work needed. Then there's the choice of blending mode, normally Softlight or Hardlight with the results that you would expect from their names and, finally, the opacity of the layer. You need to try it for yourself to see what effects are possible. You can see better the results that can be achieved in B&W with my image 'Seat with a View' which used a fairly strong Highpass Filter softened with a wash of strong Gaussian Blur before being Quadtoned, again in PS.
@northy I've done a couple of 1 day Scott Kelby courses. The Adobe guru says the he no longer uses Photoshop for converting to b&w and only uses NikEfex. Hope that's useful.
Always love how you process your photos - reading what you told Northy I see that a lot of thought and effort goes into it. I need to be less impulsive - just moving sliders around willly nilly.
Very impressive.