I have been intrigued by the idea of fine art prints.  A CreativeLive seminar with Doug Landreth explored how he goes about making them.  It was interesting, but there was not nearly enough explanation. In Photoshop, he overlays images with layers that he manipulates into patterns that add barely visible elements and textures to the image.  The result is quite good.

As a first step in looking at that, I took some of the pictures I took last week on Highway 6, and transformed them into Black and White.

It turns out there are a variety of ways of producing Black and White images.  One is simply to reduce the color saturation of the image.  There are other “effects” in Aperture.  They somehow use selective filters in the operation. For these, the one that I liked the most used a Red filter.  I am not sure what that really means, but it had the effect of darkening areas of the sky until they were almost black.

It is almost like using a polarizing filter. The rest seemed to exaggerate the starkness of the image.

Looking at these calls to mind scenes from the old John Ford Westerns.