Posted by Jim Erhardt on January 12, 2009 at 6:34 AM
Does anyone have a recommended B&W conversion workflow for CS4? I am experimenting with conversions of winter scenes but am not entirely happy with my current process. Any insight is appreciated!
Posted by Robert Fisher on January 12, 2009 at 8:23 AM
Jim,. have you tried the tools available in ACR? You can get some very nice b&w done with your RAW opening them in PS.
Winter is tough because of the general lack of colour which means a reduction in the available tonal values to provide contrast. In general, lower than normal contrast or higher than normal contrast can work. Lower than normal contrast gives a softer more serene look whereas higher than normal contrast highlights the stark, bleakness of winter.
What are you doing currently? Would you be willing to post some examples for others to take a crack at?
We're doing it mostly on portraits, but the techniques work really well for scenics, especially snow and other high contrast scenes. With both types the problems are most likely to occur in the red channels, for which a straight BW conversion or desaturation can be problematic.
I do it in three adjustment layers so I can adjust the relationship between them.
Layer 1 is most important and most powerful. That's Selective Color. It gives you the most control over all the colors at play and how they'll be portrayed in the final BW. Use only the black slider at the bottom of the control panel for each of the colors unless you really need to move colors around so they're more or less apparent in the final image.
Layer 2 is Hue and Saturation. I use that only to desaturate the image.
Layer 3 is Brightness/Contrast for final adjustment.
Make your best guess with the color version in Layer 1, then desaturate in Layer 2. Now, without making Layer 2 invisible, go back to Layer 1 and make your adjustments. Don't cheat! No peeking!!!! Don't make layer 2 disappear, because in extreme cases the "true" colors without desaturation might be really wierd. You don't care about that in the desaturated version.
Use Layer 3 for final adjustments.
Sorry for the quick and dirty explanations, but I'm rushing on other projects right now. When you get comfortable with all the controls in Selective Color, it's virtually a magic wand for controlling conversions to BW.
Posted by Dan Borzynski on January 12, 2009 at 1:49 PM
Jim,
Hank's summary is probably the best starting point for working with a color image. Since I don't have CS4 at the current moment, I can fake the selective color tool by using the the Hue and Saturation tool, completely desaturating and looking at the results, hitting undo and continuing to tweak. It is a pain to work this way and the new tool in CS4 is a far easier way to go.
Once you get further into it, you can start playing with things like channel selections, but this new PS feature works so well you might never have to use anything else.
Hadn't thought about the version differences, but I'm acutally doing this on CS2 or PS7, depending on which machine I'm using at the moment. I'm doing it in 8 bit rather than 16, but that shouldn't make a difference for BW conversion. I just do the three adjustment layers on top of the original color file.
For us (and especially my wife, who's the studio guru facing several hours of image processing a night), it's quick and easy. Often no more than a couple of minutes. So easy in fact, that in addition to normal color processing she often does a few BW conversions from each session on spec. She does it just to see if she can garner an extra BW sale or two on top of the color sales. And yeah, she's had really good luck with the extra sales.
Rereading my directions, I realize that I was typing faster than I was thinking. You have to make your adjustments on each layer before going onto the next. Then you use the opacity slider on each layer to adjust the effects. My wife uses it a lot to adjust for detail in white hair and white wedding dresses along with skin tones, so it bodes well for snow scenes.
Posted by Jim Erhardt on January 12, 2009 at 7:00 PM
Thanks to all, I will give these recommendations a try!
Posted by John Mumaw on January 12, 2009 at 7:06 PM
The Black & White Adjustment Layer in the new Adjustment panel in CS4 enables you to do what Hank outlines all in one dialog. No need to jump through all of those hoops any longer. One of the best reasons to upgrade from CS2, IMO.
The Auto setting sometimes works quite well, but at other times you'll want to adjust those color sliders to taste.
In the top left of the B&W dialog box, click on the hand with arrows.
This will allow you to click and drag anywhere in the image and adjust only that particular tone. This is a tremendous way to tweak an image to your liking!
Here's how I like to create quick high contrast b&w images in CS4:
First, make sure the Foreground color in the toolbox on the left is set to black.
In the Adjustments panel (new to CS4), click on the Gradient Map icon (second from the right on the bottom).
That's it! Not too bad, eh?
This method will work with previous versions of PS by simply using a Gradient map adjustment layer.
another good way is to convert the image from an RGB file to a LAB Color file. Click on Image then select mode then select Lab Color. Then look at the channels on the palette menu. You will see 4 listed, one called "Lab" one called "Lightness" and ones called "A" and "B". Click on the "Lightness" Channel and you will see a greyscale image based on the luminosity values of your image. Then change the mode from LAB Color to Greyscale and it will throw away all the other information but the greyscale.
This way works good for winter snow scenes where there is not a lot of color in the photo to start with
Posted by Robert Fisher on January 15, 2009 at 8:30 AM
Wally, converting colour spaces like that is a destructive process. It tosses out a lot of information and degrades the quality of the digital file. With the tools available now for converting to b&w, there really is no need to do a LAB conversion any longer. Just as with the improvements in sharpening algorithms and methods, there's really no need to convert to LAB to sharpen the Lightness channel.
That said, if you like that method, try this:
Once you've done the colour mode changes, hold the CTRL key and click with your mouse on the Gray channel. That will load the lighter values in the image. Now you can apply an adjustment layer to tune the lighter values independently from the black. You should now have your first adjustment layer mask sitting in your Channels palette. Activate it and click on the little dotted circle at the bottom of the Channels palette to load it as a selection, then go to Select>Inverse and your dark values will be selected and you can apply an adjustment layer just to those darker values.
Robert, I know it is a destructive process but so is anytime you go from a color image to a B&W one. I did not suggest doing that to sharpen the image I suggested it to convert a pretty much monochrome RGB photo into a B&W one. Where I live we get lots of snow and if I take landscape pictures in the snow lots of time you get an image that is pretty much B&W to start with. You have white snow and sky and brown to black trees. Using my normal methods of B&W conversions have never quite pleased me. With so little color information available using something like the Greyscale Mixer in Lightroom just does not work very well. I have found this method however to work wonders, and of course I do it on a copy of a 16bit tiff and not the original file
Posted by Robert Fisher on January 16, 2009 at 8:34 AM
Hey, like I said, if you like the method that's fine. I was just trying to help. And I know you didn't mention sharpening in LAB mode, I was simply using it as another example. Some people don't know those kinds of changes are destructive. You do, so good on ya. You'll also note that I provided you with another little trick that if you didn't already know it is a nice way to tweak a greyscale photo.
Discussion
12 repliesWinter is tough because of the general lack of colour which means a reduction in the available tonal values to provide contrast. In general, lower than normal contrast or higher than normal contrast can work. Lower than normal contrast gives a softer more serene look whereas higher than normal contrast highlights the stark, bleakness of winter.
What are you doing currently? Would you be willing to post some examples for others to take a crack at?
We're doing it mostly on portraits, but the techniques work really well for scenics, especially snow and other high contrast scenes. With both types the problems are most likely to occur in the red channels, for which a straight BW conversion or desaturation can be problematic.
I do it in three adjustment layers so I can adjust the relationship between them.
Layer 1 is most important and most powerful. That's Selective Color. It gives you the most control over all the colors at play and how they'll be portrayed in the final BW. Use only the black slider at the bottom of the control panel for each of the colors unless you really need to move colors around so they're more or less apparent in the final image.
Layer 2 is Hue and Saturation. I use that only to desaturate the image.
Layer 3 is Brightness/Contrast for final adjustment.
Make your best guess with the color version in Layer 1, then desaturate in Layer 2. Now, without making Layer 2 invisible, go back to Layer 1 and make your adjustments. Don't cheat! No peeking!!!! Don't make layer 2 disappear, because in extreme cases the "true" colors without desaturation might be really wierd. You don't care about that in the desaturated version.
Use Layer 3 for final adjustments.
Sorry for the quick and dirty explanations, but I'm rushing on other projects right now. When you get comfortable with all the controls in Selective Color, it's virtually a magic wand for controlling conversions to BW.
Hank's summary is probably the best starting point for working with a color image. Since I don't have CS4 at the current moment, I can fake the selective color tool by using the the Hue and Saturation tool, completely desaturating and looking at the results, hitting undo and continuing to tweak. It is a pain to work this way and the new tool in CS4 is a far easier way to go.
Once you get further into it, you can start playing with things like channel selections, but this new PS feature works so well you might never have to use anything else.
Hadn't thought about the version differences, but I'm acutally doing this on CS2 or PS7, depending on which machine I'm using at the moment. I'm doing it in 8 bit rather than 16, but that shouldn't make a difference for BW conversion. I just do the three adjustment layers on top of the original color file.
For us (and especially my wife, who's the studio guru facing several hours of image processing a night), it's quick and easy. Often no more than a couple of minutes. So easy in fact, that in addition to normal color processing she often does a few BW conversions from each session on spec. She does it just to see if she can garner an extra BW sale or two on top of the color sales. And yeah, she's had really good luck with the extra sales.
The Auto setting sometimes works quite well, but at other times you'll want to adjust those color sliders to taste.
In the top left of the B&W dialog box, click on the hand with arrows.
This will allow you to click and drag anywhere in the image and adjust only that particular tone. This is a tremendous way to tweak an image to your liking!
Here's how I like to create quick high contrast b&w images in CS4:
First, make sure the Foreground color in the toolbox on the left is set to black.
In the Adjustments panel (new to CS4), click on the Gradient Map icon (second from the right on the bottom).
That's it! Not too bad, eh?
This method will work with previous versions of PS by simply using a Gradient map adjustment layer.
This way works good for winter snow scenes where there is not a lot of color in the photo to start with
That said, if you like that method, try this:
Once you've done the colour mode changes, hold the CTRL key and click with your mouse on the Gray channel. That will load the lighter values in the image. Now you can apply an adjustment layer to tune the lighter values independently from the black. You should now have your first adjustment layer mask sitting in your Channels palette. Activate it and click on the little dotted circle at the bottom of the Channels palette to load it as a selection, then go to Select>Inverse and your dark values will be selected and you can apply an adjustment layer just to those darker values.