[Kate]

I've been reading this month's Practical Photography about converting colour to black and white using Photoshop. I've had a go on some photos I took in Helsinki harbour, as I thought the ice and crane silhouettes would look cool in black and white.

Anyway, here are the results. I can't remember exactly what I did, but it involved messing around with the curves and using the channel mixer to convert to black and white. I'm basically looking for critiques, and wondering if there are any other Photoshop techniques I could apply to give them more of a wow factor. I can't go back and retake the photos, so that won't help, but advise on how I could take them better next time is always appreciated







I'm thinking of using one of these to have on canvas as my free Epson print, but I want to make absolutely certain that it'll look good

[CT]

Love 'em! I like the second and third best. Not much wrong with those Kate. To be honest I don't have a set routine for converting to black and white - I use a variety of methods on a suck it and see basis. One or two of the guys have been threatening to do a 'How To' on the channels method of converting. (hint hint)

[ppuga]

I like 1 and 3. GREAT PICTURES.

As CT says, there is no one method to convert to BW, they are a lot of ways, try them, see the results, and which one you like most, and wich one to use for each photo.

Cheers

[Steve]

Originally Posted by CT

Love 'em! I like the second and third best. Not much wrong with those Kate. To be honest I don't have a set routine for converting to black and white - I use a variety of methods on a suck it and see basis. One or two of the guys have been threatening to do a 'How To' on the channels method of converting. (hint hint)

TUT TUT sir, have you not checked out the tutorial I did ages ago..the channels method is covered in there :wink:

Great shots Kate, however the first and second shot are leaning to the left slightly and if you have either of those printed it would show up much more than on the monitor. Don't fear though as they can easily be corrected using Photoshop or PSP. The last picture suffers slighly from being split accros the centre by the waterline, take a look at CT's great article about rules of thirds and then try a few different crops to see what impact it has on the shot. All three are worthy of being printed after a little post processing has been applied.

Hope that helps a little.

[CT]

Originally Posted by Steve

TUT TUT sir, have you not checked out the tutorial I did ages ago..the channels method is covered in there :wink:

.

Oops!! I'll check that out then. :lol:

[Matty]

nice shots Kate, glad to see no creepy crawlies in them

[Matt]

Have to agree with everyone else, these images are nice.

I do have one nit though and that is the images have been oversharpened, you can see the sharpening artifacts on the top of the silohetted structures.
If you plan on printing these, I suggest doing them from scratch.
When sharpening use 100%/0.2/0 usm, apply this as many times as needed, if you over do it you can always delete the last action.

HTH

Matt

[Kate]

Thanks for all the helpful comments so far. It's certainly given me more to think about when playing around with the images.

Just taking into account Steve's comment about the rule of 3rds on the last pic... is this any better? Took me ages to try and replicate a sky, but I'm getting there... Picture looks completely different because I had to start from scratch again, and sharpening set to 100%/0.2 (I can't see a USM option), just to see how it looks

Not sure if it's better or worse than the last one really.. I think I might have overdone it with the curves on the boat.

Comments?

[digitalfailure]

Great pix kate

you mean you can't see an option for unsharp mask?

what version of photoshop are you on?

[Kate]

Originally Posted by digitalfailure

Great pix kate

you mean you can't see an option for unsharp mask?

what version of photoshop are you on?

D'oh, didn't realise USM stood for unsharp mask. What I really meant is that I didn't understand the third number, because it said 0 USM, and I thought it meant there was some level called USM that I needed to change... what a fool :roll: :P

[digitalfailure]

Happy to help

[milou]

That is a fab shot (also glad there's no pics of Spiders with Guns).