Photoshop

I’ve been doing a lot of digital darkroom work lately, partly due to my current fascination with Adobe Camera Raw. I’ve always been partial to black and white photography. With digital, you don’t have to choose whether to use B&W when shooting a photo.

What I tend to do when working with a photo is ask if the color serves some functional purpose for that image. If not, I usually convert it to black & white. (If the photo stays in color, I’ll often push the saturation to make it quite vivid—if the composition is about color, I usually like there to be a lot of it.)

Of course, the right way to do black & white digital conversion is not to desaturate the image—the result is usually pretty uninteresting. There are a number of options, including (in Photoshop CS3) a black and white conversion option. Lately I’ve been working with the conversion tools in Camera Raw, which allow value adjustments based on specific colors in the image. That means, for example, that you can make the greens darker or lighter. I always experiment with a range of settings for each color. I also usually apply a color split in Camera Raw with B&W images. That means you can select a color for the lights and another for the darks (and you can adjust exactly where the split between light and dark lies). The image is not strictly B&W, but if you don’t go overboard you can achieve some subtle effects. I usually make the lights a warm color and the darks a cool color, but not always.

Also of interest

• What you can do with an overexposed photo (0)
• Camera Raw (0)

I thought I’d show the original version of the photo I posted a couple of days ago.

The photo is badly overexposed. Normally, I’d discard it. With a bunch of tweaking in Camera Raw, however, I got something I rather like.

Also of interest

• Camera Raw (0)
• Black and white (0)

The photos I’ve posted in the last couple of days were shot with a Nikon D70 in raw mode. When a digital camera creates a raw file, it makes a file that is unedited data straight from the sensor chip. (Technically, a few things are done with the file, but it’s basically just sensor data.) The advantage of a raw file is that it is not processed by software in the camera to “optimize” it. A raw file is designed to allow the photographer to process it on a computer using software such as Photoshop. Before such editing, a raw file looks a lot worse than a standard JPEG file that any camera can produce, because it hasn’t gone through software optimization. But a raw file can be more extensively edited than a JPEG. In general, only midrange and professional class cameras can create raw files. Low-end consumer digital cameras generate only JPEG files.

It’s a very good idea, by the way, to convert the raw files your camera creates into a different format—DNG files. DNG is an open format created by Adobe that has several technical advantages over proprietary raw camera formats. Because it’s an open format promulgated by a major company, DNG files will be readable by photo manipulation software 20 or 30 years from now. By comparison, any given proprietary raw format from a specific camera manufacturer may become obsolete in a few years (it’s already happened to some early raw formats). You can get the free Adobe DNG Converter at Adobe’s web site.

Lately I’ve been learning about Camera Raw, which is the program that comes with Adobe Photoshop for working with raw files. The newest version of Photoshop, CS3, comes with Camera Raw version 4. This version has impressive photo editing capabilities all by itself. In fact, it is possible to do all of your photo optimization in Camera Raw, using Photoshop only for certain kinds of tasks. The photos I’ve posted in the last couple of days are edited only in Camera Raw—they haven’t been touched by Photoshop or any other image editor.

I really like Camera Raw’s parametric image editing controls. Particularly excellent features include:

• The ability to recover data from clipped white pixels. When the brightness of a pixel is maxed out in one or two of the three color chanels, Camera Raw can recover usable data from what remains.
• The ability to easily copy parameters from one photo to others. If a group of photos is shot under similar conditions, it’s much faster to edit one photo, copy those edits to other photos, and then tweak them, than it is to edit each photo one at a time in Photoshop.
• All edits done in Camera Raw are non-destructive. That means that none of the original pixel data are modified. You can always go back to the beginning. In Photoshop, you need to work with complex layers to avoid non-destructive edits. In Camera Raw, all changes are recoverable.
• Camera Raw version 4 can now edit JPEG files. You can’t do as much with them as you can with a raw file, but that’s still a useful feature.

Of course, you can’t do everything in Camera Raw. If a file needs masking or pixel-level editing, you need an image editor. But I’ve been amazed at what you can do with what I used to think was just a conversion program. I know this sounds like an advertisement, but it’s really a great program (and I’m not nearly important enough for Adobe to pay me to say that).

Also of interest

• What you can do with an overexposed photo (0)
• Black and white (0)

This is the Eiffel Tower, seen at night from the first of three stages in the journey to the top. Every fifteen minutes (I think) there is a small light show across tower, and I managed to catch this shot with the lights going.

This photo had a lot of digital noise. To correct this in Photoshop, I copied the image to a new layer, set the blending mode to Color, and applied a gaussian blur. This removed the noise without removing detail.

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• This photo (0)
• The Online Photographer (0)
• Photoshop greyscale conversion (2)
• Work in progress (5)
• Vertigo (0)

Is a lovely photography blog by Mke Johnston. He has great taste in photography, unencumbered by rules that say what a good photo or a good composition is supposed to be. He’s incredibly knowledgeable about photography without being a pedantic techie. And he has strong, cranky opinions that are always worth reading and considering.

The Online Photographer

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• This photo (0)
• Photoshop greyscale conversion (2)
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is from County Connemara, Ireland. Without editing, the photo is kind of boring (trust me). But I was playing with the Curves adjustment in Photoshop, and something happened with the foliage: parts of the forest emerged as bright and saturated, while the rest fell dramatically into darkness. It was a very striking effect. It took took some tweaking to make that effect work without distorting the rest of the picture, but I think the result is interesting.

By the way, while I accomplished this manipulation digitally, it’s not anything that couldn’t be done with film in the development process. So don’t get all purist on me.

Also of interest

• Eiffel flashing (0)
• The Online Photographer (0)
• Photoshop greyscale conversion (2)
• Work in progress (5)
• Vertigo (0)

I love black and white photography. Here are some ways to convert color digital images to black and white (or variations on the theme of low saturation tone) in Photoshop. There are special programs and plug-ins for doing this, but I find that Photoshop has all the flexibility I need.

The simplest, and least satisfying, method of converting a color photo to greyscale in Photoshop is to choose Image -> Mode -> Grayscale. It just strips the color information out of the file, converting each pixel to a shade of grey. You have not control over the process. This is not the right tool. Never use this.

A better way is to create a Channel Mixer adjustment layer in the layers palette. In the dialog box, you can choose the percentage of each channel that contributes to the final image (it’s good to have the numbers add to approximately 100). Play around with different values until you get an image you like. This is a good way to do it, especially since the adjustment layer doesn’t change the original image. You can change the channel mixer values, or go back to color, any time you want. You can also adjust the opacity of the channel mixer layer to desaturate the image to whatever degree you like.

Even more flexible (but more complex) is this method: first, create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (rename it to “desat”). Change its blending mode to Saturation. In the dialog box, move the Saturation slider to 0. Now the image is greyscale; big deal. But now create another Hue/Saturation adjustment layer underneath the first (rename it “tone”). Play with the Hue slider. As you do, you see a dynamically changing view of the image as colors used to create the grayscale image change. You can select for yourself the value that best brings out shadow detail or whatever you like. If you like a toned effect (like sepia, only with whatever tones you want), create a Color Balance adjustment layer on top of the two other layers. Try changing the color values differently for shadows, midtones, and highlights. For example, you can have a “grayscale” image with cool darks blending into warm highlights.

Very nifty.

Update 25 February 2007: As Scott Williams pointed out in a comment, this technique is made obsolete by the more flexible Black and White adjustment layer in Photoshop CS3.

Also of interest

• This photo (0)
• The Online Photographer (0)
• Eiffel flashing (0)