PShizzy: The Blog

This is an oldie but a goodie. It requires no plugins, just Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw. I’ve edited it to work better in the form of a blog. For now it will be a simple how to in the post, but if it’s popular, I may make a video of it. Here it is:

I’ve received quite a few comments on my black and white conversion, and I finally decided it would be best to post my own personal workflow on the process. My method by no means tries to be scientific nor accurate, only pleasing to my own eyes. I did not invent anything here, I picked up some info from various books and over time, found the following method to give me the most pleasing results. Hopefully you will find some use in the following.

First, we need a test file, so please download the following raw file (Note: this is a 1D tif file, and I renamed it to all lowercase, so if Photoshop tries to open as TIF, rename it to .crw or something). I’m also including a link to my PShizzy 2 Action Set, since I won’t go into exact detail how it converts to B/W

Ortega (1D RAW file, please use save link as)
PShizzy Action Set 2

Open up ortega.tif in ACR, and use the follow settings (which you might want to save for future reference, I call it “flat”): 0 everything out, from exposure to saturation, and make sure in the next tab, that sharpness and color noise is also set to 0. White balance is on a per picture basis, but for this example, please use ACR’s Tungsten setting, which is temp 2850, tint 0. Go ahead and and hit ok to get the file into Photoshop. If you haven’t loaded a 1D raw file before, please make sure that you have your file set to 16 bit and Adobe RGB

Looks pretty flat huh. That’s on purpose. Good B/W photography is about tonality, which is the range from black to white. Good tonality often means overcontrasted images, because it tends to seperate the subject from the background, and adds a heavy feel to the image. This in turn lends itself best to certain dramatic subjects and events. This is why boxing photography, photojournalistic features, and film noir tend to use b/w. This lets us focus on things other than color. Form and contrast end up becoming more important. If we process the image into B/W by using ACR, or by using an in camera B/W converter (such as in the 20D), then we lose control over our image. The computer, who has no idea of what is and isn’t important, does all the work. It cannot bias its conversion (as we will do) to favor the subject. We can manipulate the work that our camera gives us after it has already converted, but we are then working with an incomplete deck, as we are only receiving a fraction of the photographic information taken in by our camera.

Anyhow, the file looks flat. At this point, I usually use noise reduction softwate to take away some of the color noise. The bad news is that these plugins cost money. The good news is that black and white conversion doesn’t really need this. The grain in the noise tends to look “interesting” and “gritty” so it’s not necessarily bad. So let’s move on.

So far, we’ve open the image in ACR, processed it flatly, and noise reduced. Feel free to crop a little (I did, just on the top and right). From there, the next step is pretty easy: Use the PAS2 B/W converter to get your image into grayscale. Explanations on that are in the PAS2 thread, complete with instructions for it.

But PAS2 is half the battle. Really all it does is use the LAB mode to extract the luminosity. I won’t say this is the best way to convert to B/W for accuracy, but I will say it’s better than desaturating. Try desaturating a solid green blue or red, and you’ll see it gets taken to 128 across the board, which means that fire engine red or nuclear chroma green somehow becomes neutral gray. . . seriously, that makes no sense. With LAB, it tends to max out at about 220 across the board, which makes sense… as those colors, no matter how nuclear, would never be true white, but they should definitely never be neutral gray. Those of you who swear by using color mixer, I’m not saying you’re wrong. Color mixer is a great way to convert, but it is a biased conversion, where LAB is based only on lightness. Also, I just couldn’t make an action for color mixer, since a good conversion requires user input. So there.

PAS2 leaves you with 2 layers, the background (original) color layer, and a new b/w layer over it. Go ahead and delete that color layer if you like. I sometimes mess with it and use it to create old print looks (muting it and overlaying it over the b/w), but for this, it can go.

Curves: Learn it, live it, love it. Levels is nice, but it’s very underpowered. You can only control the ends, and pinch your contrast, then bias your midtone. Curves lets you set multiple points in order to determine the distribution of the values. This means you could use your midtones as your highlights, or your shadows as midtones (seriously). Now, this doesn’t mean you can under or overexpose your shots and miraculously save it with curves. It just won’t work. Curves doesn’t make a picture, it makes a picture better.

My method uses between 2 and 4 points (sometimes more, but rarely). It’s best to do it in a certain order, because figuring out your first point usually makes the second and subsequent points easier to determine. First, we start by opening curves, and we’ll notice the line thru the box. This just shows the basic representation between input and output. Say we take a value of 128 input and set it to 192 output. This basically takes our midtone (128) and sets it to 3/4 tone, more of a highlight. Everything between 0 and 128 now is redistributed to go between 0 and 192, and everything from 128 to 255 gets pushed to go between 192 and 255. Don’t worry about posterization too much if you shot raw. 12 bit data means you have 4096 levels of red green and blue within the image, despite only showing you a range of 255. Think of those extra values as fractions that get rounded later. They definitely come in handy. Oh, ya, another thing… shoot raw when you can for B/W. It’s just better.

BTW: Do not hit OK after each point is set. You need to set all the points in one curves to work this right.

First Point: Go ahead and open up curves and move it out of the way of your image, so you can see it well, because curves lets you live preview what you’re doing, and this is necessary to feel your way to the right tonality. go ahead and click a point in the midtone area, then drag it up. You may get some nuclearness going, but this is just fine. In fact, it’s reccomended. Often, people get scared to go over the edge. This is true for curves, for sharpness, for a lot of things. Just do it. Heres what I chose, btw: input 128, output 220. I got this by grabbing my midtone (128), and pushing it up until our fighter Ortega looks pretty bright. Remember, this is about him, not anything else, so if we blow out the ring ropes, or black out the background, who cares. HE IS THE FOCUS. Heres a pic of the curves dialog box and my image, so you can follow along visually.

Notice the top right of the curves, it just flatlines at the top. That means all those flatlined values will become 255, which you can see leads to blowouts.(such as Ortega’s chest and speculars on the face). This is called crushing your white. When you flatline at the bottom, that’s called crushing your black. This is usually bad. This will get fixed. We just needed to set that first point, and we’ll uncrush later. But for now, we got our highlight area figured out.

Second point: Let’s get our shadows. Make a new point around the first quarter area (use the lines to guide you… first line is first quarter, second line is mid, third is third quarter, end is fourth) and drag it down til you get some good contrast on our pal Ortega. I got something like input 64, output 34, which now makes the image look like this: Looks pretty good to me. Now let’s uncrush.

Third point: This one, and other points past the second are sometimes optional. Sometimes, the first two points lead to no flatlines. In those cases, don’t bother with this, as it’s pointless. But most times, especially in B/W, you will need to uncrush. First lets uncrush our highlights, as they’re much more noticable. Make a new point somewhere between the first point (our highlight point), and the end. Drag it down til you have no more flatlines, but be careful to not pull down too much. If it is not possible, you may need 2 points in here. Usually 1 point is enough. A note of caution: Never set a point to create a dip in the highlights or a bump in the shadows. This is like value switching and creates funky effects. Just make sure that as you go to the right, your curve always goes up, and as you go left, your curve always goes down. You can make it almost straight, but never have a curve go away from the grain, this is bad. Anyhow, make the third point, and have it kill your flatline. I used input 166 output 247, which looks like:

Fourth point: Same concept as third point, but for shadows. Grab a point between the leftmost line (the beggining) and your shadow point. Pull it up to curve the lower flatline. I used input 38, output 7, which looks like:

And there you have it. Obviously, this is to taste, so you could go ahead and edit your first point to lower the contrast, or raise it even more. You can do the same for the shadows. And uncrush points work off those, so those can be moved around too. It’s all in the eye. After I finished that curves, I went ahead and used the PAS2 Web Long action to get the final product, as seen below.

I hope this helped, as I know B/W conversion can be a bit of a mystery, so I hope this post clears some of the mystery up

Tags: photoshop // 2 Comments »