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View Full Version : Image Editing Tutorial - Monochrome from Color


Suhit Gupta
02-23-2007, 03:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.trustedreviews.com/editorial/2007/02/22/Image-editing-tutorial-Monochrome-from-colour/p1' target='_blank'>http://www.trustedreviews.com/editorial/2007/02/22/Image-editing-tutorial-Monochrome-from-colour/p1</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Although colour photography is far more popular these days, there’s still something very attractive about nice black and white print. However you've probably noticed that if you simply set your camera to black &amp; white, or convert a colour image to greyscale (removing the colour information) using your image editing software, the resulting image looks very flat and uninteresting. In traditional black and white photography colour filters are placed over the camera lens to emphasise different tones in the final image. For example a red or orange filter blocks out blue light, and so makes a blue sky look much darker, which allows the clouds to stand out. You can achieve the same effect in Photoshop Elements using two hue/saturation/brightness adjustment layers, one to simulate the effects of the colour filter, and the other to convert the final image to monochrome."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/4133-Boat1greyscale.jpg" /><br /><br />Some of my favorite images are ones in B&amp;W so this is a welcome tutorial. Previously I would just buy some B&amp;W film but now with my digital camera, I often just convert pictures into greyscale mode using Photoshop. However, this articles teaches one to create B&amp;W images by going beyond just converting modes. And it looks like they get better results.

Vincent Ferrari
02-23-2007, 03:27 PM
If you like this method, a nice guy named Rob Carr took the trouble to make an action that does it in a similar way. I use it all the time. Elliot Shepard talks about it here and links to it after the methodology:

http://weblog.slower.net/archives/3

Very good stuff.

Jason Dunn
02-23-2007, 04:08 PM
I love the way B&amp;W photos look, but it's strange, I almost never convert my own photos. This is one rare exception:

http://photos.jasondunn.com/gallery/2062454#106149608-L-LB

B&amp;W really helps make grainy images more "acceptable" to the viewer...

Neil Enns
02-24-2007, 01:20 AM
Adobe Lightroom has tools specifically designed for taking colour images and converting them to greyscale. Similar to what you can do in Photoshop using the channel mixer filter, but easier to wrap your head around. Here's an example:
http://www.clearviewphotography.net/gallery/2328870#121826207.

Neil