Guy Gowan monochrome conversion

GristlyEnd

As promised below is what I can remember from a seminar at photofest yesterday. You can click on the images for a larger version.


This is the image we are going to convert. It's one I took in the Phoenix Park last year.




Add a new solid color adjustment layer. Leave it at black and click ok, then change the blend mode to color.




You will now end up with a monochrome image.




Making sure you have the background layer selected, add a new selective color layer.




To make the sky darker: Select cyan from the colors drop down menu and increase the black to 100% then repeat this for blue, then click ok.

To make the greens darker: With the backgroung layer selected again, add another selective color adjustment layer. Select yellow from the colors drop down menu and increase the black to 100%, then click ok.




You can now duplicate your selective color layers to make them darker again.




And this is the finished article.


If there is anything I have missed, please let me know and I will edit the thread.

sineadw

Nice one Darren I have a few from the weekend I might try this on.

Borderfox

Thats excellent thanks soo much

5uspect

I dunno that seems like an awful lot of over kill just to do a B&W conversion. Why not just use CS3's new black and white adjustment layer option?
Its much easier.

Also why use a solid colour adjustment layer and not just an ordinary layer (other than to just save memory)?

Sorry, I'm not having a go, it just seems like a lot of steps in this method are a little bit unnecessary.

GristlyEnd

I'm only passing on the information that I remembered from his seminar.

Whether it's the best method for converting to mono is up to the end user. There could be better ways of converting to b&w or this could be the best non destructive method. Who knows.

Anyway Guy, said it was the best so it must be true?? btw you could also buy his DVD for €60 at the show

Zillah

Huh...

What quality did you save the final image in? At full size its actually quite soft and has some jpeg artefacts throughout the clouds at the top. I hope it wasn't a result of the conversion method.

GristlyEnd

Everything was saved for web to keep load times down. You can download a 2.75mb version here

Zillah

Ah, much better. No jpeg artifacts.

Fajitas!

It's not too dissimilar from my method at all now is it?

One day my DVD's will be 60 a pop.

5uspect

DarrenG wrote:

I'm only passing on the information that I remembered from his seminar.

Whether it's the best method for converting to mono is up to the end user. There could be better ways of converting to b&w or this could be the best non destructive method. Who knows.

Anyway Guy, said it was the best so it must be true?? btw you could also buy his DVD for €60 at the show

Oh I know you great to post it. Adjustment layers are the best way to non destructively edit. I'm just surprised that he went to so much effort to get essentially the same effect that could be obtained and modified easily with the B&W adjustment layer or possibly a channel mixer layer.

I think you're right tho, everyone has their own preferred B&W conversion method and it is really you to then at the end of the day.

Dinarius

I am interested in this, but I'm obviously doing something wrong.........

1. Open image (16bit, RGB)

2. Choose, New Adjustment Layer/Solid Colour.

The image goes black.

3. Click OK.

The image stays black! It doesn't turn black and white.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

D.

Fajitas!

You need to change the blending method to colour.

sineadw

Same thing happened to me Dinarius, so I double clicked on the fill layer to bring up the layer style dialog box and changed the blend mode to Hue. I have NO idea if this is the right thing to do or not! It worked though, and the rest of the tutorial seemed to go as described. I'm using CS2, and assumed it was this that made the difference to above?

sineadw

Fajitas! wrote:

You need to change the blending method to colour.

Ah - colour. Question - the saturation one worked as well. What's the difference?

5uspect

I've started a new thread on blend modes if anyone wants to offer tips and tricks that they've picked up!

Dinarius

Doh!

Thanks for that. I should have guessed though!

Here's a link to a few articles on digital tips and tricks.

http://www.riecks.com/digitalinfo.html

The second last one is a fairly longwinded RGB to grey scale conversion.

Another quick and simple way (and one which gives a punchy/contrasty result which may be to some users' taste) is to simply do the following:

1. Open the image.

2. Choose New Adjustment Layer/Gradient Map/Black and White (top row, third from left in CS2).

3. That's it!

Now make any adjustments you like to the brightness/contrast using Curves or whatever.

D.

GristlyEnd

Sorry about that, I missed a very important step after applying the solid color. It has now been added.

f.54

5uspect wrote: »

I dunno that seems like an awful lot of over kill just to do a B&W conversion. Why not just use CS3's new black and white adjustment layer option?
Its much easier.

Also why use a solid colour adjustment layer and not just an ordinary layer (other than to just save memory)?

Sorry, I'm not having a go, it just seems like a lot of steps in this method are a little bit unnecessary.

You should give it a go its far better that the lab or greyscale convertion do both and compare. You may be surprised

5uspect

That's a two year old comment!

I still think it's overkill tho.

magicbastarder

thought it'd be better to resurrect this thread than start asking questions in the thread i got this from:

Don’t use the Convert to greyscale option in Photoshop. This conversion strips so much data from your photos and yields some of the worst conversions available. Avoid this at all costs.

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=66582180&postcount=769

can someone explain to me why the greyscale option discards 'so much data' and other methods do not?
as far as i understood, any greyscale option essentially equalises all channels, but the difference between the built in greyscale and the more advanced conversion options is that with the latter you can 'weight' the influence of each channels on the outcome - but the outcome (and thus loss of data) is still the same, in terms of data loss - i.e. you still get a single channel's worth of data, be it 8, 16 bit, or whatever?

Dimy

magicbastarder wrote: »

thought it'd be better to resurrect this thread than start asking questions in the thread i got this from:


http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=66582180&postcount=769

can someone explain to me why the greyscale option discards 'so much data' and other methods do not?
as far as i understood, any greyscale option essentially equalises all channels, but the difference between the built in greyscale and the more advanced conversion options is that with the latter you can 'weight' the influence of each channels on the outcome - but the outcome (and thus loss of data) is still the same, in terms of data loss - i.e. you still get a single channel's worth of data, be it 8, 16 bit, or whatever?

The convert to greyscale option creates an image with a lot of.... grey, there's not much contrast in the images and it should just be avoided as mentioned . I personally use either an adjustment layer and play with the channels individually, but recently I've been doing the B&W conversions straight from the RAW with DxO Optics (but that works in a similar fashion).

By playing with each individual channels you can create more black and whites and the images just get a lot more contrast. After you save the image I guess you're right about the data-loss being the same, but you'll have a much better picture as you have more control over the conversion.

magicbastarder

cheers, it was as i thought, but just worded badly. i was wondering if there was some technical concept i was missing.