Trees in winter landscape, Hokkaido.

monochrome

An image from my trip to Hokkaido, Japan earlier this year (February).   Minimalist black and white winter landscapes of Hokkaido are so popular that they have become something of a cliche. Nonetheless, the simplicity of such scenes draws the eye and almost compels you to take a photo! Hokkaido in the winter of 2016 didn’t get as much snow as usual so in many scenes there was grass poking up where in other years it would have been invisible.

Having processed the image in colour, which I’ve included below for reference, I wasn’t entirely satisfied and decided to go for a monochrome treatment.   I took the image into Silver Efex Pro and quickly went through some of the provided presets,  settling on the “dark sepia” look.   Whilst this looked alright, I decided to add some further contrast by using a Curves adjustment layer in Photoshop to arrive at the end result shown here. ~KD

monochrome
Trees in winter landscape, Hokkaido
Colour version
Trees in winter landscape, Hokkaido, colour version