365 Challenge #265 - Black & White Conversions

I'm still working my way through Scott Kelby's book, The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers. It's so helpful! I've been reading about HDR, and all manner of retouching in Photoshop. There are a few pages dedicated to the conversion of raw files to black and white, and I'm really liking Mr Kelby's step by step style.

As I've realised recently, there are about a million shades of gray, which is what you're dealing with in a black and white photo. It's all about the contrasts between variations of gray.

What I love about Kelby's books, is their simplicity - he uses a lot of words to get across each concept, but ultimately, the books are really easy to follow, particularly when you're using your own photos to work through the steps.

The image(s) above are an example of converting a RAW image to black and white, using one of Scott Kelby's "recipes".

Basically, he does much of his processing in Camera Raw, because it's easy to do there. Gotta love that!

Basically, the steps he goes through to achieve a high contrast B/W conversion like this one are as follows:

• Click on the HSL/Grayscale icon (the 4th icon on the left in the main Camera Raw menu).
• Go back to the first Camera Raw editing tab and crank up to your exposure as high as it will go just until you start clipping the highlights (the book gives pictures here, which make it much easier to follow).
• Crank up the blacks, by dragging the Blacks slider to the right until it looks really contrasty.
• Go to the Tone Panel Curve and choose Strong Contrast from the pop up menu - or otherwise, just drag the Contrast slider to the right until the image looks really contrasty.
• Then, increase the Clarity to about 75 (or 25 for a portrait, or 0 for a baby, says Kelby)
• And that should be that!

Ok, so it might be a bit too high contrasty for your liking, but for a day where the skies were completely blown out and blah (like in my image), I reckon blow them out and focus on the detail elsewhere in the image.

What's your favourite black & white conversion technique?

Delving into HDR

As part of my ongoing mission to improve my Photoshop skills, I've been reading about HDR (high Dynamic Range) processing.

I've been working my way through Scott Kelby's awesome book, The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers - it's SO practical! It's literally a step-by-step guide on how to do a bunch of stuff in Photoshop CS5.

According to Scott, when you increase the dynamic range of the photo, you get a greater range of tone and light than today's digital cameras can create, which gives you an image closer to what the human eye captures.

Photoshop CS5 comes with Merge to HDR Pro - a module that pretty much does everything required to take one or a series of images into "photorealistic" look right through to the "hyperreal look" which HDR images seem to be renown for.

Scott's book tells you how to set up your camera to shoot HDR, and then goes through the steps to get an image that started off as something like this:

to this:

Ok, so it looks Photoshopped to bejeezus, but I kinda like it - this is way more towards the "hyperreal" end of the scale than the first photo, which is the actual correctly exposed image that the camera took.

I also tried processing a few images HDR-style, where I manually changed the exposure in Photoshop - again, cheating, according to HDR-purist rules, but hey - I like experimenting. Watch this space for more HDR experiments!