How I Made the Greyscale Leaves Image (George Hay)

[This post shows how one of the images in last month's Club competitions was produced.]
The start image in this guide was a jpeg. The original I used for the actual image was a RAW file. The steps described here are the same. The original image is the colour one shown at the left and the final image is on the right - click on the images to see larger versions.

Step 1 - Load image into Lightroom.

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Step 2 - I adjusted the BLACK and WHITE sliders while holding down the ALT key to get the effect I wanted.
Step 3 - I moved the HIGHLIGHT slider all the way to the left.
Step 4 - I adjusted the lens correction to lens used.

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Step 5 - I then converted the image to B&W and the image was then cropped.
Step 6 - The Clarity slider was adjusted all the way to the left.
(click on the image to see a larger version)

Step 7 - The image was then opened in Photoshop.
Step 8- The clone tool was then used to repair damaged edges and flaws on the leaves.

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Step 9 - The areas that did not contain any leaves were selected and erased.
Step 10 - The layer was then duplicated twice, and these layers moved to fill in the erased areas.
(click on the image to see a larger version)

Step 11 - The finished image was then saved as a jpeg at the right size for the Club's competitions.

by George Hay