Lightbox Digital Imaging Blog

I’m a big black & white fan, in fact, I’ve dedicated a sub-domain to showcase my black & white photos, even during my film photography days, I took several photos using black & white film, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to salvage it. Digital photography eased up the process of taking black & white photographs, some cameras (like my D80) has a built in Black & White feature complete with filter settings, for those camera that does not include this feature, post processing colored photos into black & white is just a few clicks away.

For my post-processing style, I don’t just use the black & white conversion feature of the Photoshop, I put extra effort (& labor) to fit my own taste & this is what I’m sharing right now.

I make sure that I start with a good photograph, right composition & proper exposure is the key. I picked this photo of a smiling kid & will try to convert it into black & white.

The first thing that I did is to convert the picture into monochrome using Channel Mixer [Image --> Adjustments --> Channel Mixer], then I clicked on the Monochrome box located on the lower left portion of the pop-up window. Then, I adjusted the Red, Blue & Green channels to fit my taste [For this project Red = +20, Blue = +60 & Green = +20), once satisfied, just click OK for the changes to take effect.

The next step is to duplicate the layer [Layer --> Duplicate Layer], once the layer has been duplicated, change the Blending Mode to Overlay, notice that the photo will lighten a little bit. It’s now time to apply some filter.

On the menu, click on Filter –> Blur –> Gaussian Blur, I normally apply a filter radius ranging from 10 to 20 pixels, on this project, I opted to have it at 15 pixels.

Next on the filters list is the Noise [Filter --> Noise --> Add Noise] for the grainy effect on the finished product. I don’t want the noise to be overpowering so I just set it at 7.

After that, I just merged the layers [ctrl+Shift+E], resized the photo & that’s basically it.

Just remember that while photoshop is there to help us enhance our photos, what really matters is how we take the pictures, our skill is still the most important thing to develop.

This post is tagged Monochrome, photoshop., Post Processing