From the crew over at Imagenomic (known for their Portraiture and Noiseware plugins), comes Instant JPEG from RAW. It’s not a program, but rather a system level utility. Right click on a folder, select the utility, and just like that the images are extracted. Sounds great. Here are my favorite features

1) Um, it’s free. This is big. I don’t like installing weird apps like Zoombrowser (which is free) to do one single thing. It’s a waste. But a simple utility, that’s right clickable? Awesome.

2) The Imagenomic folk aren’t strangers to many of us. I know a few people who use their Portraiture and/or Noiseware applications.

3) It’s cross platform. Since I rock a Dell laptop and a Mac Pro tower, these things are important to me.

There are limitations. The biggest one, as noted on their blog:

IJFR has no control over the look of the file. Since the file was created by the camera, it was the settings on the camera at the time of capture that rendered the file into what it looks like. In the case of a DNG exported from an application like Lightroom or ACR, it is the adjustments in that application that will affect the look of the rendered JPEG that is stored in the JPEG (it is called the Preview image).

There are ways around this, but it could be more work than just exporting out of Lightroom or Photoshop.

A little more info, the link, and thoughts after the jump.

So when is this useful? Well, that’s up to each of us. I’ve already thought about a few different ways this could be interesting. For one, reviewing photos could be made easier. When I’m done downloading, I could simply use the utility, then review the jpegs. I could choose my selects quicker, because the program has a smaller more managable file to review. Consider this: a current year camera easily takes a 12mb RAW image. Multiply that by 1k, and you’re looking at churning through 12gb of photos.

My laptop gets a little sluggish. It’s a core 2 duo pro, with 4gb of ram. My Mac handles it better. Of course, it’s a Dual Quad Core Xeon with 14gb of ram. yup, fourteen. So… uh, you could spend the cheddar to get that kinda performance. Or you could just use this free utility, review the jpegs, get the image numbers, and then process the relevant RAW file.

You can send out a quick JPEG for review too. The program will even resize (though it is limited to the size of the JPEG preview as its largest size). But sending out an untouched jpeg from the RAW file isn’t always the best move. Images are sometimes flatter, WB may be off, etc. If only we could “edit” the preview file.

Enter the DNG format. For those of us that use it (I don’t use it primarily, but do know how), it allows us to reinsert a JPEG preview file into the image. Simply edit your image as normal, then save out as a DNG. If you import files into Lightroom as DNG, then you’re already there. DNG’s can be very useful. Recently someone was asked to send a RAW file to a client. I don’t know who does this and who doesn’t, and I believe it’s pretty much up to the photographer if they’re willing to do this, but I do know that the JPEG preview from a RAW file can be unflattering.

The DNG file could be the answer. Simply adjust the settings in a program like Lightroom, or Bridge. Then save out the file as a DNG. This does NOT bake in the settings. It simply adds tags to the RAW data about the WB, cropping, exposure, and other settings. Now, when saving out the DNG, it will create a JPEG preview file, which DOES bake in these settings. But now the preview has been adjusted to reflect what the DNG will start off as.

This is a very flexibile solution. Your DNG is still a RAW file, for yourself or clients to edit. Your JPEG preview is a decent low res (or hi res: the DNG format allows full res previews) comp. You can extract that as needed, have the ability to redo the preview, and can always play with the DNG data.

Of course, this really only makes send if you already use DNG.  If you don’t, this may sway you. Not sure. I’m just offering options and opinions.

Here are the links:

The Raw Workflow Blog: this is where you find the blog posting and links to the file. You need to register, but again, it’s the good folks at Imagenomic. I don’t mind. If it were random startup Inc, then I might be a bit wary.

Imagenomic: These are the folk that created the Noiseware and Portraiture Plugins, as well as RealGrain. Their Noiseware plugin is a popular choice for noise reduction, and they even have a standalone Community Edition, which is slightly limited, but FREE.

Please, check them out. While the utility won’t change the way I do everything, I think it’s a nice tool to have, and supporting the creators only gives them reason to improve and innovate even further.

If you try it out and like it (or not), please feel free to comment. As always, I am on the lookout for applications and accessories that can make the average photographers life easier without making our bank account too much smaller.

Everyone has different ways of dealing with this. For some it’s a matter of exposing properly, and then bringing up the shadows in post process, either with something like the Fill Light tool in ACR, or Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop. Using these tools have their problems, as bringing up shadows also brings up image noise. It can also look unnatural if used improperly.

Another method is to expose for the face of the subject, letting the chips fall where they may on the rest of the exposure. Caveats here include nuclearizing your subject’s white uniform, or radiating the entire field if it’s a bright color. Fun fun.

Over the weekend I was shooting the Arizona USSSA Independence Day Classic, a fastpitch softball tournament held over in Pinetop, AZ. With start times of noon, though, getting the entire range of an image captured was difficult. Read on to find out what I did to combat this, from steps I took in the camera, to an action I made in Photoshop that helped with post process. Oh and it’s a downloadable action. =)

Depending on what camera you use, you’ll have a variety of options available to you in order to squeeze the most dynamic range out of your camera. The first and most obvious thing you can do is to shoot RAW. Lots of advantages here, mainly the ability to adjust white balance in post, and having between 12-14 bits of image data to work with. But shooting RAW also means a huge file increase. While most 10mp jpegs are 3-4mb, RAW files can easily be 10-12mb. This increase adds up quickly. I typically shoot 500 or more images per game for youth sports, and that would be 2gb in jpegs, but 6gb in RAW files. Multiply that by the 20 or so games covered over the weekend, and we now are looking at 120gb of storage. While this isn’t a big deal to some, for others, that added overhead can be an encumbrance.

So, what if you just shoot Jpeg, what then? For one, I would reccomend shooting Adobe RGB, but only if you understand now that you must convert to sRGB later, and know what that entails. Viewing an Adobe RGB image on a web browser is a hit or miss proposition and you may get color errors and overall flat color. But using Adobe RGB gives you a wider color gamut. That means that colors that might fall out of the range of what sRGB can “see” may still fall into Adobe RGB. By keeping that information, you can later edit that image with more accuracy. BTW, if you shoot RAW, colorspace isn’t important, as you can do this after the fact.

Newer cameras offer in camera adjustments to help with dynamic range. Nikon offers D-Lighting, which is an adjustable setting that fills in shadows in camera for every image. Not only can you do that as part of the image setting, but you can also edit images after you’ve taken them, and add D-Lighting to them. Nifty.

Canon offers Highlight Tone Priority. It basically shoots an image at a lower ISO than stated, but renders out the image processed properly, keeping the highlights from blowing out. By doing so, you can shoot a little brighter than usual, without blowing out highlights as easily.

Cameras offer different color looks, such as neutral, vivid, portrait, landscape, etc. These images adjust colors and tonality. Since this is all a formula for adjusting certain colors, the adjustment may end up hurting your image. Go with a setting like Neutral, that offers little to no adjustment.

Now you’ve got a pretty basic baseline image to edit, but how to process them?

It may sound crazy, but using noise reduction on your image can be really beneficial, even on low ISO images. This is because, as you edit your image, you will be bringing up your shadows, and doing brightness adjustments, and those effects will be most prevalent in your shadows, which also contains the noise in any image. Here’s a common trick: First change your image to 16-bit mode in photoshop, then use noise reduction. Because you’re working with a larger bit space, any formulas (such as noise reduction) applied to the pixels (which are just number values for colors) will have a larger range of numbers to fall on (after they’re adjusted). Remember, you need that lattitude as you make all your adjustments.

As I stated before, you could use the Shadow/Highlight tool to adjust your images, and it’s pretty effective, but it has it’s issues. For one, it’s not an adjustment layer, so once you save the image, you can’t really undo it. Sure, you can duplicate your layer, but if you don’t like the effect it has on certain parts of the image, you’ll have to use a mask to edit that out.

So, in playing around with a few images, I tried to find a simpler, more automated way to do all this. As I’ve stated before, I’m a huge fan of actions, and have a few articles on the topic. Anytime I can automate a process, I save time, and ultimately that means I can either get my work done faster, or get more work done in the same time. Either way, it’s a win win. In this case, I took 11 steps, and turned it into one shortcut (F4)

You may notice that it says crop, 16 bit, and Noise Ninja in the history pallete. These are not part of my action, as cropping and your noise reduction of choice are all personal preferences. As for 16 bit, just make sure you try that before whatever noise reduction you choose. There are plenty of choices for noise reduction. A few popular ones include Noiseware, Neat Image, Noise Ninja, and others. Some offer free trials, or even free editions that have feature limitations (the killer here is that most of the free versions often limit themselves to 8-bit images only).

On the left here, you’ll see the result of the action. It will maintain your original image as is, but create a separate shadow layer with its own adjustment layer, as well as an adjustment layer for the original, and a hue/saturation adjustment for the entire composition. Since it’s all adjustment layers, you can double click on them and change the settings. If you hide all the layers, you can see the original as is. One thing I noticed after all the adjustments and layers was a bump in saturation. I added a simple hue/saturation adjustment in order to tone it down. You can adjust this to taste as well.

Instructions are simple. Download the action, and install. Hit F4 to invoke the action. Preferably do this on images that are shot in daylight, and try to do this on images that are 16 bit.

If you need further assistance with the action, please feel free to email me (the link is on the sidebar on the right).

The action can be downloaded by clicking on the link below. The name is addon, because it’s only a single action, and I intend to add it onto my PShizzy Action Set 2:

PShizzy Addon

Oh, and I have a small gallery of images from the tournament. All in all, it was a great time. One last tip: If clouds do show up (which they almost never do in Arizona), shoot as much as possible! Cloud cover is like a big softbox for the sun. Use it to your advantage.

The gallery may be seen at:

Independence Day Classic

As the lead slowly dissapeared, Taurasi and the rest of the team looked frustrated. When they fought back to get the win, I expected the players to have some sort of outburst, and after a shot and a foul, I captured the image shown.

More on the game, and the full gallery, in the post.For the Mystics, Alana Beard really did her best to keep the Mystics in the game until a late surge by the Mercury led to the Mystics loss. While I waited for Taurasi or Pondexter to let off some steam, I followed Beard to see if she would do the same after letting the Mercury build the lead late in the game.

Each possession being crucial in the fourth quarter, I captured this image. Trying to urge a referee for a call in their favor, time running out (as shown by the clock in the background), Beard could only hope the ref would listen to her plea.

To me, these moments were more important than any image of a jump shot, or a defense collapsing on a post player. It’s important to anticipate these moments, as I mentioned in previous posts.

The full gallery can be seen here:

Washington Mystics at Phoenix Mercury

But it’s there. And in order to explain it, I used Lightroom. Yes, I used Lightroom to explain Photoshop curves. It makes sense if you watch the presentation. I also had to make this more like a video, with full motion captures in order to show the effect of curves on an image.

So, continue on to read about the making of the curves presentation, as well as the link to the presentation.

First, the reason I used Lightroom was simple: Tonal Curves can be adjusted by clicking on the image itself. I like this a lot, because it’s very hands on, while curves is not. If you have Lightroom and Photoshop, try this in Lightroom first, you’ll understand what I mean. In fact, if your workflow involves Lightroom, and it’s not out of place in your workflow, just use Tonal Curve adjustments there. It’s very slick.

Becuase of the full motion video, there were some glitches, display errors with the mouse cursor in Lightroom. I tried to edit the cursor but it just wasn’t happening. So I’ll let it be.

Explaining curves with Lightroom: Easy. Explaining it with words: Very difficult. I could have gone more in depth, but if I did that, I may as well break out the chalkboard and trigonometry examples. I tried to keep it more hands on, and very simple to see the cause/effect of it. I want to keep all my flash presentations light, and simple to take in. That’s also why I try to stick to one topic per presentation. If I tried to do a Photoshop presentation, It’d be the PShizzy.com equivalent of Stephen King’s “the Stand”

I’ve already got more ideas for presentations on the horizon. In fact, I have too many. But I’ll keep em coming

And here is the presentation:

Photoshop Curves

Feel free to leave feedback, especially if you view the presentation. I’d love to know what I did right, what I did wrong, and how to improve that for future topics. I’d also like feedback and ideas for future topics.

I think I did a fine job with the idea of the image: An expectant bride, recently married, is waiting for her husband. The empty chair sells me on that vibe.

But look at the white balance. It’s this sickly yellow that envelops the entire image in its tint, and to me, it’s especially noticable on the dress, and on the brides skintones.

In this post, we’ll look at different ways to get a good white balance.The first thing you can do to make sure your white balance is dead on? Shoot RAW. Shooting RAW means that white balance can be adjusted in post process without loss in image quality. Even if you get the balance wrong in camera, you can fix it in post process without loss of quality.

I shoot RAW for all weddings so I can adjust the image to get the best color balance. In this case, Adobe Camera RAW actually did a pretty good job of selecting a white balance:

I think that looks a lot better. The dress has no yellow film over it, the skin tones look pretty good, and in general I’m much happier with this image. Could it be better? Yes, but not by a lot.

But that’s why you shoot RAW. If this still doesn’t make me happy, if it’s still a touch off,I can adjust it again. And again, and again, to hearts content, until it’s perfect.

Eventually, this is the image I came up with. I adjusted the Adobe Camera Raw selection, adding a little bit more blue to offset the yellow, and bumping up the magenta to work with the skin tones a little more. I also added a little something to it to get the contrast to be punchier.

I’m glad I shot this image RAW, but I don’t shoot raw for every event. For weddings, I think proper color balance is critical, and I have no problems shooting RAW and managing the files and space that entails.

But I also shoot sports. A lot of sports. If I shot sports in RAW, I’d have piles of hard drives all over the place. Actually, I kinda do, so I can’t begin to imagine if I shot RAW all the time. So I shoot jpeg. Shooting jpeg means that the camera handles all the processing of the image. You get a file that can look good, but you need it to look good coming out of the camera, because there isn’t nearly as much latitude as there is with RAW. In fact, if you really screw up the white balance, you will probably lose a lot of image quality trying to get it to look normal.

In the camera, you have four different options for white balance: Auto, Presets, Kelvin or Custom. Auto means you let the camera figure out what the lighting is and adjust automatically. It does a good job, but it can be fooled. Just look at the first image in the post. That was auto.

Presets are generic settings for color balance. Tungsten, Flash, Daylight, Shade, Fluorescent, are all common lighting situations, but not every situation is that clear cut. What if you’re in a room with a lamp on, and a window that has daylight coming in. There’s no tungsten/daylight hybrid preset.

Kelvin is where you dial in the color temperature for the current lighting. For a lot of us, this isn’t easy. Rule of thumb: If you don’t understand where the term Kelvin comes from, just skip this.

Finally, there’s custom. Custom requires a little bit of work on your end to determine the lighting. You also need a gray card, a neutral card with no color bias. When you take a picture of it, the camera can easily look at the color from the lighting that spills onto the card. It then figures out the proper white balance to neutralize the color bias of the lighting. This is the most exact method of getting white balance, because it takes your specific lighting situation into account.

For the most part, when shooting jpeg, do your best to get an accurate white balance. If you don’t already have a gray card, get one. Start using it. If you’re in a difficult situation, where you can’t get a white balance reading off a gray card, the other options can work in a pinch. Kelvin could work, if you understand the color temperature of different light sources (like tungsten is about 2900, daylight is 5500, shade is 7000 or so).

You can also try the presets. If your lighting is obviously all tungsten lighting, then why not give that preset a shot? Out on a nice sunny day, why not go with Daylight?

And if all else fails, if nothing works, then by all means, try auto. It’s there for a reason. But you shouldn’t rely on it as your goto white balance. Just look at the first image in the post. Auto White Balance is not perfect, but armed with a better understanding of the white balance settings in your camera, and knowing that RAW can allow for that latitude, you at least now have options with which to get a better image with truer color.

Last weekend I spoke about the key elements to covering an event. This time around, I’ll cover the bases on the technical side of an image.

What makes for a good clean image? What keeps the images looking consistent in their color, white balance, and exposure, not just from one image to another within one event, but from event to event (as an example, compare last weekends gallery to the one for last night’s game).

In this post, I’ll do an overview on things you can do to keep a consistent look and quality to your images.

First things first: Get the proper exposure. Everyone is going to have a different opinion on this. Aperture priority mode, Program mode, Manual mode, everyone has a different way of achieving the same goal. Whatever you do, make sure that your exposure is good. If you consistently have to take images into Photoshop and adjust the exposure, than you should consider looking into different modes and techniques for proper exposure.

White balance is also key. By getting the right white balance, your colors will look more true to life. Cameras have come a long way, but even the best auto white balance can be fooled under tricky lighting situations. Your best bet is to learn how to lock down that white balance. Most cameras offer preset white balances like tungsten (the light bulb), fluorescent (the blinking bar), daylight (sun). Some cameras will also allow for a custom white balance. You can set a custom white balance by shooting a gray card (this is a card that is measured for color accuracy to be neutral). This will measure the hue of the light, and neutralize it.

Most cameras come with color modes. Things like Vivid, Portrait, and Standard, try to punch up different hues in order to produce a great image. I like to avoid these, because in lower light situations, the images tend to have a lot of image noise, and those color modes will accentuate this noise. Rather, I like to shoot in a neutral or no adjustment mode. From there, I have a set recipe that I use in Photoshop to color my images. A lot of people like to experiment with different adjustments, using levels, curves, brightness/contrast, etc, to punch up their colors, but I find those to be too time subjective. By finding the right recipe, I can apply it to any of my images automatically, with an action, and not manually adjusting each image.

All the images I’ve posted from the last galleries for the WNBA games were processed with a simple Photoshop action. I do not manually adjust anything to taste, except for cropping the image. From there, my action automatically uses noise reduction, then applies my color recipe, and then resizes the image. If I didn’t have a consistent exposure, white balance, and color mode in the camera, the process would take each image all over the map as far as their “look”.

Keep your work consistent, and you will see that no matter what your post process is, it will be a lot less time consuming, and the results will look that much better.

Please feel free to comment with your opinions and ideas on how to get a consistent “look”

The link to last nights game can be found here:

Seattle Storm at Phoenix Mercury

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

Leave a comment, and if you see someone’s comment and agree, then say so. If I see 10 comments on the same subject, I’ll know that’s a great idea. But just in case you’re not sure what to consider, I’ve created a list of ideas I already have in mind.

So here’s what I’ve got in mind for the future

• Obviously, I plan to do more on Actions
• Noise Ninja, something I promised to write about on FM, will be a post/video here
• Green Screens. They tend to be tough, what with spill, and getting a good key to pull the green off an image.
• Lightroom. Not everyone uses Photoshop, so something on Lightroom might make sense.
• For that matter, what programs would you like to see in use? There’s so many out there.
• Anyone remember the video of me packing a Minitrekker into the photo equivalant of a turducken? Ya, well I’ve got a Computrekker, and an Airport Security too. So, uh, who wants to see me pack that?
• I’m considering an article on data storage/backup. From how to make backups in realtime, to maintaining proper offsite storage, etc.
• Aside from lenses and cameras, what else do I take with me to shoots?
• Someone mentioned this. Honestly, I’m not sure it would be that interesting, but if enough people are interested, I would do it: Day in the life, like a video of me and what I normally do on a shoot day.
• Someone also mentioned this: What the different modes on a camera are, from manual to aperture to shutter priority. Oh and I am a Canon and Nikon friendly person, so it would be geared to both those cameras. Kinda like how I have a PC laptop, but own a Mac Pro. The duality of man, the Jungian thing. (btw, that’s a Full Metal Jacket reference).
• Anyone notice I put a student tag on some articles? Well not every student can afford photoshop, so I’m considering articles on alternative apps for students on a budget. You’d be surprised what you could pull off without Photoshop.

That’s stuff of the top of my head. But there’s so much more I’m sure I haven’t even touched on. So you tell me, what would you like to see on PShizzy.com?