I’m a big fan of Google’s Picasa application. Its primary use is as a photo organizer, but it also has some photo touch up features that work pretty well. I was recently trying to turn some of my photos into black and whites, but wasn’t getting the results I was hoping for simply by transforming the image to gray scale in photoshop. Then I read a bit about how Ansel Adams made many of his images so impressive by applying red filters to his lenses. Using colored filters makes it so that different colors turn into different shades of gray. In many of his images, the red filter makes the sky much darker, providing greater contrast against snowy rocks and mountains. I knew I could do this kind of filtering in photoshop, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could also do it in Picasa with just a few easy clicks. Here are my results.
The Grand Canyon
