The Black Rock - Filterama Challenge

Regular walkers at Barns Ness in East Lothian know there is a single large black rock in among the grey rocky shelves at the edge of the beach to the east of the lighthouse. I suspect it is formed of basalt but it has been smoothed either by ice or sea erosion over the year and is in sharp contrast to the grey jagged roocks around. This area is famous for its geological formations and was studied in great detail by the Edinburgh geologist, James Hutton. To the west of the light house there is a geological trail which takes you along beside limestone pavement and rocky areas where fossils are to be found. Quite how the black rock landed there on the beach I do not know.

However, I chose it as the focus of my blip photo for today and obviously I wanted it to stand out against the rest of the beach. At the time of taking I thought a monochrome treatment would be best as there is copious lime green seaweed around which would have detracted from the rock.

As it was a filterama challenge, Monday I wanted to incorporate this into my work flow. I chose to do this by copying the background layer in Photoshop after I had converted to monochrome in Lightroom. I used the Find Edges filter on the copied layer then blended it with the original by reducing the opacity. This gave a slightly crisper edge to the rocks.

I then spent quite a bit of time in Photoshop using curves adjustment layers with masks to work separately on the black rock, the other rock formations, the sea, the seaweed, the beach and the sky. darkening or lightening as I felt appropriate and increasing contrast though the use of 's' curves.

However, I wasnt entirely happy with the the final image and tried another tack using my favourite monochrome software plug-in, Silver Efex Pro. As with the photoshop manipulation I treated all the different elements in the image separately and was far happy with the result. Somehow I think the SEP image has more bite, largely due to the use of the 'structure' slider which like 'clarify' in Photoshop and Lightroom works on the contrast in the midtones but much more effectively I think.

See what you think, my final image is the one you see in my blip and is best seen LARGE

The coloured capture you will find HERE

The initial monochrome version done in Lightroom is HERE

The Photoshop image with each of the elements worked on separately is HERE