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05/27/2002 03:06:16 PM · #1 |
| I have done a lot of black and white photography using film but can't even come close to the same results with digital. Digital color images seem to compare fairly well to film prints. Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can improve on my digital black and white images? |
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05/27/2002 03:16:15 PM · #2 |
Black and white is hard to do with digital I think because the human eye can distinguish an incredible amount of shades of gray's whites and blacks. Sometimes with digital we can see banding or blocking where large areas of one color, particularly well saturated colors like blacks, blues and reds are concerned.
What you might try to do is take your photo in color, choose a hue and shift the saturation down until you get an acceptable black and white image. I like choosing a blueish or redish tint and shifting saturation down until it looks black and white.
There is another black and white technique called duo-toning but I am not sure if that is allowed in the DP challenge rules or if you even have that on your digital photo software. |
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05/27/2002 06:42:00 PM · #3 |
| If you use Photoshop, the most versatile tool for B/W conversion is the channel mixer (image-> adjust-> channel mixer)with 'monochrome' selected. Take a color image, then play with the sliders until you get a look that strikes you (trying to keep the total of the red, green and blue values ~100). R 43, G33, B30 makes for a nice, neutral contrast setting to start with. If you make the channel mixer a layer, you can still go back and adjust the levels on the background layer for more precise contrast and gamma adjustment. |
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05/27/2002 11:07:38 PM · #4 |
Is grayscale the same as black & white?
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05/28/2002 12:01:49 AM · #5 |
Originally posted by irae:
If you use Photoshop, the most versatile tool for B/W conversion is the channel mixer (image-> adjust-> channel mixer)with 'monochrome' selected...make the channel mixer a layer, you can still go back and adjust the levels on the background layer for more precise contrast and gamma adjustment.
This is really a great tool I've never played with (I still have a disk with Photoshop 2.0 on it) until now. Although, when I tried it on a color image I'd previously adjusted, the numbers you suggested gave me almost the same look as just converting the image from RGB to Grayscale -- or maybe that's the proof your formula works. Thanks for the quick lesson. |
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05/28/2002 02:21:30 AM · #6 |
my favorite way to convert to bw in pshop is to go to the channels palette, and look at each channel one by one, seeing which one has the best black and white look. then i use the calculations menu command to blend the 2 best looking channels. this may actually be a more circuitous way of doing the same thing irae talked about.
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05/28/2002 02:21:50 AM · #7 |
yes, pete. it is the same thing.
Originally posted by pnicholls:
Is grayscale the same as black & white?
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05/28/2002 03:35:15 AM · #8 |
Originally posted by irae:
[i]If you use Photoshop, the most versatile tool for B/W conversion is the channel mixer (image-> adjust-> channel mixer)with 'monochrome' selected. [i]
Yup, I'd second the suggestion to use the channel mixer. You might also want to try duotoning the images afterwards to give a more 'natural' black and white tint that is similiar to the effects different printing papers give.
I put some examples and different channel mixer settings for different effects on my web page, along with explainations on how to duotone the
image. (all for photoshop but apply to other tools too)
Black & White conversion
Duo & Quad toning
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