One Four Challenge — The Path II — Monochrome

This post continues from my first entry for this month’s One Four Challenge hosted by Robyn. This time, I wanted to focus more on the stone of the structure itself, and the stone wall behind it. I know — this, when the title for this series is ‘The Path.’ Well, what can I say? 🙂 Only that the path will still feature in all of the pictures this month; taking it away makes the picture look incomplete to me.

During some very fun experiments, I found that I liked this monochrome version. Well, that means I’m also submitting it to Leanne Cole and Laura Macky’s Monochrome Madness series, hosted at Leanne’s. Of course, this picture looks very processed, and that’s alright. I like the sharpness of the stones in the wall and the altered texture of… almost everything, really.

I’m mostly on Linux, and I use ImageMagick for simple processing, and the impressive GIMP for anything that deviates from easy with ImageMagick. For this picture, I cropped the image at the bottom for a 5:3 aspect ratio, and converted it to grayscale. To exaggerate the texture, I added a duplicated layer above it in Divide mode with 50% opacity. I embossed this layer, performed edge detection using Prewitt Compass algorithm, and applied a Gaussian blur to soften the edges slightly.

Earlier images