This is an original photo I took as part of my trek across the Queensboro Bridge during the transit strike. As you may have seen earlier, I converted most of my daytime shots to black and white because the lighting was a bit flat that day. If you're a photographer and you're like me, whenever you convert to black and white you probably either just desaturate and adjust curves or you convert to a grayscale image. But Photoshop CS2 has a better way.
Photoshop now has a quick and easy way of simulating the use of colored filters on black and white film - the channel mixer. Check it out - these are b/w versions of the image above, with different settings:
The photo above is with blue set to 100, red and green 0 - looks like a foggy day, doesn't it?
That's red 100, blue and green 0.
You used to be able to simulate this by creating a bunch of layers based on different channels and adjusting them individually, but this took me literally 1 minute total using the channel mixer. The self portrait at the top right was done the same way (that's about 60% blue, 20% green, 20% red). Using the channel mixer, it's incredibly easy to simulate the use of color filters (in any combination you like) and their effects on contrast and depth in b/w photos long after taking the shot.
I prefer an original photo to black and white. It's so cool!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sudi... I just didn't think the original had much color to begin with. I could have tried to boost it, but some areas of the sky are just totally white. So, I figured I would just make it completely black and white...
ReplyDeleteJust in case people reading this think that they need CS2 for this effect - the channel mixer has been around for several versions back. You can probably find lots of tutorials about it on the net. It's also extremely useful for colour correction.
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