I didn’t get much of an opportunity to seek out a good spot for photography today, so I just broke out my G7 when I headed out to pay for my daughter’s driving lessons. I captured a few unmemorable photos, though one was angle of our street which I’d not before photographed. I was perched up on the small retaining wall around the church lawn, looking down toward to steeple of the nearby Methodist church down the street. There was something about the way the street sign played off the distant steeple which peaked my interest, and I thought it might be a keeper.

My hopes were dashed, when I was unimpressed with the results I got from my Lightroom development. The sky was bland, and the elements on the ground looked drab even after I did some tweaking. There was just too much shadow, and it flattened everything.

But when I was clearing my SD card I performed an accidental double-click on that file, opening a program I’d forgotten I even had installed on my MacBook! Tonality CK is a great app for creating custom photo looks, and monochrome development is its strength. When Tonality opened my drab photo had a dramatic Black and White development process applied, which transformed the drab composition into a contrast wonderland! The drab shadows became dramatic, and the foreground and background elements began to pop. The image brought out the very things which had caught my interest in the first place.

It was a wonderful lesson, when I know something interesting is there in the photo I really should try to use different methods for bringing it out.