Hi Inanina

This was an old photo I had which I took because I adore the very formal big Yucca plants which we only really get to see in public gardens here in the UK (This is at the University of Dundee).

I used this one to demonstrate the contrast effect because it has lots of different greens in the picture. So the middle image is the original as I took it. On the right hand side I have used GIMP software to desaturate the photo (literally take all the colour out ... but that doesn't make it the same as if I had taken a black and white picture in the camera so then I would have to play around with levels, brightness, contrast etc. I wanted to demonstrate the effect of contrast only for Ha55ha (you remember her green banana pencil sketch and her worry about the contrasts?) so in the picture on the left I changed only the contrast setting a little and you can clearly see that the image goes slightly 'soft focus'?

Many people have never taken black and white photographs (and the same values apply to monochrome drawings) and so when the picture involves lots of greens people struggle to get the right contrast settings to make the different plants distinguishable.

To make this final montage then I had three copies of the original photographs, made the changes on the two end ones and lined them out in GIMP and then added a background, border and text. I used to hate GIMP but now I have got used to it I love doing my photo edits in there and using it to put together digital scrapbook pages too; it is less good for drawing with though so it isn't a direct competitor with Queeky