Filter fun...

That does sound a little bit geeky...

With all the filters almost finished, I thought it would be nice if you could actually apply them selectively... I call it 'gradient filters'. Not very original, the naming, granted, but it describes the working quite well.

They work a bit like the neutral density filter in Lightroom, albeit with a different user interface and quite a different effect.

Here's an example.

Red filtered gradient on only the top 1/3 of the photo.

Move over the photo with your mouse to see the effect...

Regular monochrome from Leica M9...
Move over the image to see the gradient red filtered monochrome...

As you can see, it brings out the sky a bit, changes the top of the buildings on the right half, but the bottom half of the photo is completely untouched. It turns the rather flat top half of this image into a little bit more vibrant.

Using the neutral density filter in Lightroom to achieve a similar effect won't work. It will darken the blue of the sky, but also the top of the buildings and the white clouds: in stead of bringing out these details, the density filter would just darken them.

This photo was filtered according to this setting in DNGMonochrome:

You can filter from top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right and right to left (especially handy for images that need to be rotated, since DNGMonochrome doesn't do that for you... I follow the lazy Leica way...). You can then select where the gradient needs to end on the photo, by changing it with the slider. You can apply these gradients in combination with all the RGB color filters (red, green and blue), not just with red (and mind you: the 'gray' gradient you see in the image of the window above, represents one of the three color filters... it's to indicate where the effect will be strongest and where it ends... it's not a 'gray' filter).

I think Photoshop might offer similar functionality, but you can't do this in Lightroom (at least not in 3.6). It would require a neutral density filter type option which can selectively color mix.

This will also be in the next release of DNGMonochrome...