Achance darkroom discovery in the early days of photography led to the development of one of the most iconic darkroom special effects. Solarisation is a photographic phenomenon whereby part of the image appears inverted to negative, while other areas are normal. In the traditional darkroom it often occurred when someone accidently turned on the light during the developing of film or a print. The technique was transformed from a mistake into an art form by the photographer Man Ray, who created beautiful solarised portraits of his partner and muse Lee Miller.
The solarisation effect is very simple to recreate in Camera Raw (or with the near-identical controls in Lightroom’s Develop Module). All we need to do is invert one half of the tonal range. We can do this using Curves.…
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Teach yourself Black & White Photography United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, Teach yourself Black & White Photography 2017