Exercise Colours into tones 1

For this exercise I have to chose an image with at least two contrasting colours, I have chosen red and green in the form of poppies.

This is the original JPEG version I decided to use aperture priority for these photographs allowing me to concentrate on the image its self.
The settings were F6.3 with a shutter speed of 1/640's matrix metering and daylight white balance, I kept the iso at 200 as there was plenty of light.

I then needed to produce a 'default' black and white image this I did by opening the photograph in raw  and adjusting the clarity before opening it again in elements and going image,  convert to black and white.

This produced a fairly 'flat' photograph with no real depth to anything.

The third photograph in the series saw me lighten the red of the poppies and darken the green of the leaves.

This produced a completely different image, the poppies are now white and detail is missing in the bottom right hand corner, the green is still almost a background to the poppies without much detail or interest being there.

the final photograph saw me make the opposite adjustments this time lightening the green and darkening the red.

This time the poppies are almost black and again detail is lost , the leaves are much lighter now and are more evident in the photograph. One other thing that I did notice was that the bright spots are more noticeable in the final photograph, in a way there is an almost dappled light to it.

For the purpose of this exercise I have pushed the sliders to the extreme, to really highlight for myself the 'power of getting the tones correct.