Hamish's B&W action

Hamish · Forum Veteran Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Posts: 1020

I've created a photoshop action for B&W conversions using some of my favourite techniques. It gives a lot of individual control over the darks, whites and midtones. I'd be grateful for people's opinions on it. If you fancy a shot then PM me your Email addresses and I'll send it to you.

e.g.
original

using action

I'll just explain how it works, as you may not be used to some of the effects:

The first step is to use selective colour dialogue. Select the neutral box from the drop down menu and move the black slider left or right to darken the midtones, then doing the same with the whites and blacks from the drop down menu, but only moving the black slider. The idea is to adjust the contrast and brightness by adjusting the amount of lights/greys/darks in the image. It can be fairly rough as you can rescue things in the next step with shadows/highlights.

If you've lost a lot of shadow detail then you can pull it back a little by adding a small amount of shadow adjustment on the amount slider. If some of the light areas are a bit bright then you can reel things back a bit by adjusting the amount of highlights, but you won't lose the very white areas. You can then use the midtone contast slider to fine tune the contrast in the midtones.

Painting with light is a form of dodging/burning where you use a paint brush to manually darken or lighten areas. You simply choose a soft brush, of a low opacity, and paint with black to darken, or white to lighten areas. It's really useful for stuff like brightening eyes/teeth or darkening distracting elements in the background or enhancing contrast in specific areas. The possibilities with this are almost endless.

The last two bits use a high pass filer with a wide radius to sharpen things by adding a bit of contrast and roughness. The custom filter then adds a little bit of grittiness to the image. You're best to view the effects of the fade slider at 100%. It's maybe not to everyone's taste and won't suit all images, which is why I made it optional.

Cheers and sorry for the lengthy post.
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Hamish

JAW · Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:49 pm Post subject:

wow that's pretty good! thanks for taking the time to write all that! Maybe you could post a step by step with print-screens to make it easier to follow for a dumb ass like me? Though that would take a lot of your time!
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Hamish · Forum Veteran Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Posts: 1020

JAW - if you EMail/PM me then I'll send you the action. All the adjustments pop up in the adjustment dialogues, and you can mess about with sliders. It should make some sense when you see it, particularly if you use the text I've written as a guide.
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Hamish

JAW · Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:54 pm Post subject:

ok cheers mate! If you could send it that'd be great!

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