Black & White

Pioneer Woman ran an assignment for black and white photos recently. Of course, I'm usually too slow at these kinds of things...but it inspired me to look at a few of my photos and convert them to black and white. Here they are:

Baby In Hat

My entry into this week's Iheartfaces contest is not a new photo for my blog, but is a new photo for Iheartfaces. (I have not submitted it before.) It is one of my favorite photos. If you want to see the technique I used for converting this image to black and white, then check out this blog entry. Oh, how I wish my toddler were little like this again so I could take more pictures of her...

Pictures I Love

I was going through my compact flash card trying to pair down pictures on it today. I can't delete them yet because I haven't put them on at least two computers (both of which have redundant hard drives or RAID). That's my rule. My photos are priceless to me. So, I was going through to see if there were photos that weren't so great that I could delete so I wouldn't keep getting the CF Card Full message. I hate that message, don't you?

Anyhow, I noticed a bunch of pictures from my husband's birthday - that I just LOVED. I hadn't done anything with them because my computer was down in February. Can you say..."thank you redundant hard drives"?

I love upping the blacks in Camera Raw and adjusting brightness and/or contrast to compensate.

This one is all composition. I was happy with the black and white conversion on this too.

I just love this picture above. I love it despite the clutter and the reflection of me taking the picture. I just love the pure enthusiasm of my daughter, giving a present to her Dad.

Yummy dinner. Nothing too special about this picture - except to say I like when the focus on food is closer rather than farther away - notice how the focus is in the front of the bowl.

Fix It Friday - Black & White, Color, Desaturated

It's Fix-It Friday at iheartfaces.com. I love doing this because I get a chance to play around with someone else's images other than my own.

Here is the original image, which I think is a great image to begin with:

Below is my black and white conversion for this. I couldn't use my stand-by black and white conversion method by itself on this one because the green of the outfit didn't show up dark enough in my conversion. So, I used a combination of methods.

First, I duplicated my layers and partially converted to black and white with the channel mixer, by clicking monochrome in that tool and playing around with it until the green outfit was nice and dark, and stood out from the background. I made this layer partially opaque and combined my layers. Then I used my standby method:

Changing to lab color, then grabbing the lightness channel, then converting to greyscale, then selecting, then selecting the inverse, then going back to RGB, then adding a solid color, choosing black, and reducing the opacity of that layer.

Then the look of the girl's skin was a little off. I had saved a copy of the channel mixer version of the black and white image. I copied this into a new layer. I selected that layer and chose alt-channel mixer button (square with round circle in it). I painted out her skin in select spots to make the tones normal looking. And combined my images. I also did some sharpening.

Here's the "fixed" Black & White version.

Here's my fixed color version. First off, I made a selection of the girl and saved it seperately and changed the curves, color balance, and levels independently. Then I took the main image and altered the background to my liking without worrying about the effect on the girl. I did a numbere of things - exposure, curves, color balance, and levels. One thing of note that I did to the background is that I selected a color out of the wall behind the girl and added a solid color to that background using a similar color as the orange rust circle on the wall. I, of course, had done this on a duplicated layer and so I then reduced the opacity of the orange effect until I liked it. After combining this main image, I adjusted the sharpness using Unsharp Mask on the main image (independently of the girl). I copied the girl back into this image, flattened the image, and then fine tweaked the final sharpness.

To desaturate this, I chose Hue/Saturation a couple of times and desaturated in there for select colors.

Snow

Just a quick post about this picture.

I was experimenting with the concept I've been using for converting black and white images, but without converting them to black and white. I went to channels and selected a color channel, then CTRL-clicked the thumbnail, then selected the inverse. I then went back to the layers tab and added an adjustment layer - selecting solid color, black. This created a really nice effect I thought. I also played with curves of course, and I altered the saturation of the image one color at a time.

Black & White Baby Portrait

I've recently learned a new technique for converting images to black and white. And I am just in LOVE with it! I could spend days and days just converting old favorite images to black and white. And, although I could probably come up with an action for a small part of the conversion, really it is very individualized, so it's labor intensive (a labor of love). Here is a pic I just converted. It was one of my favorites that I took of my youngest when she was a small baby.



Here is the converted image.



This is the SOCC (straight out of camera) version.



Here is another image converted to black and white with this method.

Here is how to do this type of conversion (I used Photoshop CS3):

1. Select Image > Mode > Lab Color
2. Click on Channels in the layers pallette
3. Select Lightness
4. Select Image > Mode > Grayscale
5. When Photoshop asks you if you want to discard other layers, click Yes
6. Go back to the Channels tab and CTRL-click on your thumbnail image
7. Choose Select > Inverse
8. Choose Image > Mode > RGB Colors (this allows you to have more options for altering your image)
9. Click on the layers tab
10. Select New Fill or Adjustment Layer (the half white, half black circle at the bottom of the layers palette), then choose Solid Color. Choose black as your color (#000000). You can alter the opacity of this adjustment layer to suit your liking. You can do this now and/or later.
11. Select New Fill or Adjustment Layer, then choose Curves. Make a slight S-curve to your liking (pull the bottom half of the curve slightly to the right, the top half of the curve slightly to the right. This increases the contrast.
    
    You can also alter the opacity of this layer later if you want to your liking. If you move your mouse over the word opacity, it becomes a hand with an arrow and you can slide the opacity of any layer to tweak the effect to your liking.
12. Select New Fill or Adjustment Layer, then choose Levels. Adjust the levels to your liking.
13. Once the image is to your liking, merge the layers.
14. Now choose Filter &gt Sharpen &gt Unsharp Mask and sharpen in to your liking. My sharpens tend to be in the 150 (amount), 3 (radius), and 5 (threshhold) range, but what you choose for your sharpen totally depends on your picture and your tastes.