DPC Mentorship - B&W Photography

07/24/2005 08:26:22 PM · #76

Originally posted by Kavey:

Hi Folks

Here's a draft of the first part of the document I wanted to share with you about TONES.

Wonderful start to the document Kavey! I'm going to print out those 'color' wheels. Think it might help me when trying to convert images.

Thanks!
-Christine

admart01

Canon EOS-20D

07/24/2005 09:00:43 PM · #77

Originally posted by Kavey:

Hi Folks

Here's a draft of the first part of the document I wanted to share with you about TONES.

I do want to add more to it but let me know if it's helpful as it stands and what I could add to make it so/ more so.

I'll also think more on doing one about textures, light and shadow.

Kavey

Great work -- very helpful... the photos tell the story quite well. You also mentioned "channel mixers" in a later post... I've got to read the thread to see if you post info on this... I'm not sure I know what that is/does. Did Gordon provide any resources for the dual/quad tones he spoke to you about? I just entered a b&w in the "wooden" contest and could have used a good tutorial on it.

Theresa

07/27/2005 10:23:38 PM · #78

hi kids.

i'm SO sorry this group has fallen by the wayside. i've had so much going on in real life that i've totally dropped the ball.

but i AM committed to working with all of you and certainly hope the interest is still there from you.

when i get back from this weekend's notacon i will have a much free-er schedule and will be jumping into this group again with both feet.

thank you so much for your patience. :)

rob

Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM

07/28/2005 04:50:38 PM · #79

I haven't yet posted about channel mixer but will do, unless Muck already has that in hand. I don't want to step on his toes as I know that, despite being busy, he has been putting thought into this.

I'm glad what I have posted so far will prove useful and that the examples work to illustrate the points I was trying to share.

I used to have printed colour wheels years ago but I couldn't find them so I sourced the colour one in my little article from the net and just desaturated it for the greyscale version.

I have been working at various client sites every day this week which means very little time indeed online but I'm working from home for the next couple of weeks.

Once I've taken care of business commitments I'll come back and work on adding to the page I've started there on other things that I think I can contribute to.

Falc

Canon EOS-1D Mark III

07/28/2005 05:14:36 PM · #80

Hi Kavey,

thanks for your article on tones I found it reminded me of a lot of stuff I had forgotten.

I guess I should share my prefered method of turning an image into b/w, which I think I learnt here on DPC but for the life of me I can't find the original forum thread now.

So I'll describe it here:

First add two new Hue/Saturation adjustment layers in Photoshop
Selecting the topmost hue/sat layer reduce the saturation to zero, this turns the image into basic monochrome.

Now comes the fun bit - select the underlying hue/sat layer and within that select each of the colour channels in turn from the drop down menu. Then adjust the lightness and saturation sliders for each colour.

The effects can range from very large and dramatic to very small and subtle. You can achieve some very smooth transitions of tone using this technique.

Hope that helps

08/08/2005 12:57:55 PM · #81

Sorry that I've been unavailable everyone. Had to go out of town on emergency, only to come home 4 days ago to a sick 18 year old cat.

I will try to catch up with everything just as soon as I can.

-Christine

08/08/2005 03:47:11 PM · #82

after much grief and delay, we're on! i apologize for the time lapse here, but let's get over it and get converting!

side note: if you guys don't check the site often or if you are afraid to miss any of the notes here since the pace is rather lackadaisacal, please choose "E-mail Replies" from the dropdown at the top of the forum screen. the site will then email you when there is action on this thread and you can jump right into it without needing to check it every hour of every day.

ok, i like a lot of the images you guys have posted so far. hopefully everyone has a color image that they've selected to convert to black and white.

there are about 15,000,000 ways to convert images to black and white with the software tools that we have available now. in this post, i'm going to focus on using the Channel Mixer in photoshop to get b/w images with some pop. there are a couple of other techniques (one of which i just recently discovered via DPC and now love!) that we'll work with in a bit, but for know this is going to be the big one.

most importantly: Conversion Rule #1 NEVER EVER EVER EVER use the Edit/Mode/Grayscale conversion available in photoshop. just pretend it doesn't exist. it makes gross, disgusting images and you'll spend as much (or more) time trying to fix them than if you had just taken a bit of time to do the conversion yourself.

the image i'm going to use today is this:

it's a random shot of a young girl that i took while i was at the DC GTG. it's got some problems (it's dark), but that's good because it's a perfectly salvagable photo and will give us more to talk about.

just as a lark, i decided to convert it using the aforementioned grayscale converter:

BLECH! the image is dark and gross and flat. it's not black, not white...it's gray. we want to explore the entire range between black and white and see extremes on either end. the grayscale tool does none of that. it just makes everything flat. and gross.

so, forget you just saw that. purge your mind. we're entering new turf here.

Conversion Rule #2: converting your image to b/w should be the FIRST thing you do when you're going to make an image black and white. don't worry about clone stamping and changing levels or anything just yet. do the conversion first. once you make an image b/w, it's going to be very different than your color image and most of your color edits won't be the same in the b/w image.

ok, here's my original again:

i've opened it in photoshop (i'm using photoshop CS, but these instructions should be the same for anything 6.5 and above, i believe) and we're going to use the channel mixer on it. now, you CAN go to "image/adjustments/channel mixer" but that is going to apply whatever changes you make directly onto the active layer in photoshop. instead, what i like to do is use adjustment layers, which make the adjustments exactly the same, but put themselves on a different layer in your layers palette so you can delete them and start over, or save them with your PSD file for tweaking in the future.

trust me, once you start using adjustment layers, you'll never go back.

to get your adjustment layers started, click on the half-black, half-white circle at the bottom of your layers palette and choose "Channel Mixer" from the list:

you'll see that this creates a layer on top of your original and brings up the Channel Mixer dialog just as if you had opened it from the "image/adjustments" menu.

you'll also note that your image hasn't changed at all yet. using the channel mixer lets you independently manipulate the different color "channels" that make up each dot in your image. in an RGB image, there are three channels (red, green, and blue). in a CMYK image there are 4 (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). well, we're going to be working with ONE channel and varying the red, green, and blue images of every dot in the image at the same time.

side note: i'm not super-technical. i know what a pixel is and i know what the colors are, but i can't go into detail about the theoretical blah-blah-blah about all of this stuff. there are a bunch of people on this site who can, but i just choose to "know what i know" and get what i want done. i know enough to be dangerous. so, if i slip into some kind of generic language (i.e. "thingy" or "whatchamacallit") please know that i know how to USE the feature, but don't necessarily know how it WORKS. :D

ok, so, first thing we need to do is tell photoshop that we want to work with all three channels on every pixel at the same time -- essentially, we want a monochrome image. well, lo and behold, there's a little checkbox at the bottom of the channel mixer box that says "monochrome." that's where the magic happens.

click it and you will see that your image is changed to some funky black and white with heavy emphasis on the red channel and nothing on the others. frankly, the photo probably looks pretty gross. here's mine with just the monochrome box ticked:

now what you're going to do is place the channel mixer to the side of your image and start playing with the sliders. rarely are you going to have any of them at 100% and RARELY are you going to make any of them have a negative value. you just need to work the three of them independently so that the different tones of the image start to take shape.

again, there's a lot of theory about all of this that i COULD probably fumble through but you don't really want to know. if you know what colors were originally in your photo, you can play with the proper channel to make those colors pop or disappear. for example, if there is a red neon sign in your image and you move the red channel all the way to 0, the sign will pretty much go away. but so will anything else that is red.

there's no "set" color combination because you really need to know the colors of what you've got in the original photo in order to use the channel mixer. the one tip i WILL give you is to watch how the blue channel affects fleshtones. if you're working with a portrait (like me), you're going to want to spend extra time with the blue.

my image was kind of difficult because i wanted to emphasize the girl's face, but i didn't want to blow out the shirt or the sky behind her. here's what i finally came up with:

her face is still dark and there's still some work to be done with the image, but the tones are pretty good and i've got a good dynamic range of black and whites in the image. note that her face is really flat, too. that's something i need to work on, because i want to bring out what little shadows there were in the original.

the constant slider at the bottom of the channel mixer dialog is something that i don't often play with. essentially, it can add or remove some brightness from your image, but there's a brightness and contrast adjustment layer that i normally add to do that kind of thing.

now, take a minute and look at your layers palette. you've got your original and now you've got a channel mixer adjustment layer on top of it. if you go to the palette and hide the adjustment layer, your image returns to the original state. decide you don't like the channel mixer settings you just did? double click on the adjustment layer and the dialog pops right up with the settings intact and ready to be tweaked. you can't do that if you apply your image adjustments directly onto the background layer, so this is a huge time saver.

NOW, we're going to combine techniques here because i'm still not happy with the image and the channel mixer is good but doesn't necessarily do magic.

my original image was pretty dark. if i were going to keep it a color image, the first thing i would have done would probably be to go in and adjust the levels and/or the curves to brighten it up a bit. well, since my b/w version is also a little dark, i'm going to do the same thing. BUT because i did the conversion first, i'm going to be working with a "truer" version of my image...the levels and curves corrections that i would have made to a color image probably would be different for b/w.

so, i add another adjustment layer -- this time for curves. adjustment layers affect all of the layers beneath them on the layers palette and you can stick as many of them as you would like to in there.

here's what my layers palette looks like with 2 adjustment layers:

side note: using adjustment layers is perfectly legal for basic editing DPC challenges AS LONG AS you leave the blending mode to "Normal" and you do not edit the mask that covers the entire adjustment layer. other blending modes or work with the masks are NOT legal for basic editing (but are fine for advanced editing).

curves are kind of tricky sometimes. levels is really a better place to start learning how to adjust the tones in your images, but we'll be advanced here. the original curve that comes up in the window has one dot, or "handle" in the middle of it. normally you're going to want something along the lines of an "s" curve, so you need to add another handle to the line that's present.

once you do that, move the two handles around until your shadows and highlights get to a point where they play nicely with each other. again, this image was difficult because i was trying to emphasize the shadows on her face without blowing out the lighter portions of the image. a slight "s" curve, as show here, did the trick.

and here is the final image:

as you can see, it's a far cry from the grayscale version and it's really got pretty good tones.

i've also combined the 4 different steps into one shot for comparison purposes:

now, your assignment: using the color image you posted earlier, convert it to b/w using the channel mixer. then post BOTH your original AND your converted image back into the thread.

ALSO, once someone else in the group posts theirs, please view both and comment on the converted version, noting any areas of improvement you would like to see and what you think they did very well.

ALSO, start picking another color photo and once most of us have worked with this technique, we'll move on to a couple of the other ways of doing a conversion. try to use a different subject (if you are doing a portrait, try something architectural for example) for the next set of conversions.

AND please ask away if you have any questions. :)

Message edited by author 2005-08-08 15:47:57.

08/08/2005 04:11:39 PM · #83

Here is my original colour image (processed as per the others in my June GTG portfolio):

And here's the black and white conversion.

I wanted quite a high contrast treatment to show the decaying industrial aspect of the subject matter.

Message edited by author 2005-08-08 16:12:11.

08/08/2005 04:15:51 PM · #84

Folks, I think I'm gonna drop out of this class. My apologies for wasting your time and wish you all the very best.
Thanks

Message edited by author 2005-08-08 16:33:59.

08/09/2005 10:07:57 AM · #85

Originally posted by Kavey:

Folks, I think I'm gonna drop out of this class. My apologies for wasting your time and wish you all the very best.
Thanks

:( You didn't waste our time Kavey... you contributed, which is more than I've been able to unfortuately. Am sorry to see you go. :(

-Christine

08/09/2005 10:28:10 AM · #86

Thanks Christine, I'll certainly follow the thread and am looking forward to seeing everyone's work.

Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM

08/10/2005 06:01:10 PM · #87

has anyone had a chance to read through the channel mixer post?

i know that we're all busy, so i'll just ask: is there still interest in this group? :) be honest!

Falc

Canon EOS-1D Mark III

08/10/2005 06:03:56 PM · #88

Yes I'm still up for it. I'm just recovering my system from a hard disk crash, so I've had little opportunity to do much recently. Should be back online and fully upto speed in a couple of days.

admart01

Canon EOS-20D

08/14/2005 05:04:41 PM · #89

I've read through the channel mixer post but will have to see what I can apply to Elements 2.0 (I do have a software cd that's the "hidden powers" of elements that pulls in some history/curves.) I did enter a b&w in "wooden" challenge to take some lessons from the discussion to that point and am finding your comments useful. T

08/15/2005 03:36:25 PM · #90

i would be really interested to know how much of this is possible in photoshop elements, as i don't have a copy and honestly have never used it. :)

anyone else have a chance to go through it?

Balko

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

08/15/2005 07:11:39 PM · #91

I don't think PSE has Channel Mixer. I'm in PS CS2 right now and that is where I go to do any IR or advanced work :)

Balko

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

08/15/2005 08:31:59 PM · #92

Here are my 2 shots of Shiloh:

08/15/2005 09:45:02 PM · #93

Originally posted by papagei:

Here are my 2 shots of Shiloh:

i think that's really great work! personally, i think it's a much better shot (but I might be a little biased). :)

Balko

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

08/15/2005 10:23:27 PM · #94

You...biased? Nahhhh :) Thank you!

Actually, I liked it myself, so much so, that I upsized it and have it submitted to prints.

Message edited by author 2005-08-15 23:28:42.

tfaust

Canon EOS 80D

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro

08/15/2005 10:55:11 PM · #95

My color and b/w conversion:

The color is on DPC and clickable. The b/w conversion is on Pbase... Link to large b/w image

Message edited by author 2005-08-15 22:56:02.

Falc

Canon EOS-1D Mark III

Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM

09/03/2005 06:53:59 AM · #96

Back from vacation and ready to start putting some work into this group again ;-)

09/13/2005 01:05:02 AM · #97

Back and forth to doctors and hospitals, getting ready to take my Mom back to hospital up in Orlando for Cardiac Cath.

Hopefully, life will start settling down soon for everyone, and the group gets back on track.

Christine