Posted by TIMERNST on January 21, 2007 at 11:58 AM
One of the many new treats in CS3 is the Black & White Adjustment Layer. While all of these same controls are also available when you process in new included ACR4 (minus the presets), I prefer to leave the conversion step until I get into Photoshop and then create the BW adjustment layer - there is a drop-down menu at the top that has several stock presets (plus you can add your own mix), and sometimes you can play around and find one that is just perfect. The photo above was created with a single click - the BW Adjustment Layer with the "maximum black" preset. We will be using CS3 in all of my workshops this year, but this will come in especially handy for the black and white printing workshop in February - this adjustment layer is about as powerful as any of the $100 black and white conversion plugins I am used to using (my favorite being Convert To BW Pro), and even easier and quicker (we can always just use the channel mixer too, but this way is so much better).
Posted by Tim Buchanan on January 21, 2007 at 1:51 PM
Yes! This is one of my favorite features of CS3, and I've been using it to produce some nice black and white images (lovely falls, by the way!).
For whatever reason, I've never been able to get the B&W in RAW to work - it looks fine on the screen, but when I Save, Open, or anything else, it loses the fine tuning and just gives me the default black and white (which is usually kind of flat). I'm assuming this is a bug that will be fixed before commercial release.
Hum, must be something wrong with your copy. I get exactly what I see on the ACR screen when I open the file. Or perhaps it is your computer - you must be using a PC! This program only runs correctly on Macs! (just kidding, but the new intel Macs are the only reason that Adobe has given the world this free update to play with for six months - so that CS would run well on the new intel macs)
Posted by Bill Dark on January 21, 2007 at 9:51 PM
Beautiful job on this waterfall Tim! And thanks for the tip. I've played around with the B&W adjustment layer but never looked at the presets. This CS3 release just keeps getting better and better!
Discussion
3 repliesFor whatever reason, I've never been able to get the B&W in RAW to work - it looks fine on the screen, but when I Save, Open, or anything else, it loses the fine tuning and just gives me the default black and white (which is usually kind of flat). I'm assuming this is a bug that will be fixed before commercial release.