A better way to do black and white

When I wanted to make a picture black and white in Photoshop, I would open the image then click on Image-mode-grayscale. It made the picture black and white, but also a little flat, drab and dull. I have discovered three better ways to make it black and white and here is the easiest of the three. I think it beats the grayscale mode hands down.

First open the image in Photoshop. Go under the image menu, under mode, and choose Lab color. This changes your picture from RGB (red, green blue) to Lab color. You won't notice a difference in your picture in the layers mode, the difference is in the channels. Now instead of having a Red, Green, and Blue channel, the luminosity (detail) of the photo has been seperated from the color which now resides in two channels named "a" and "b". The lightness channel contains the luminosity of the photo.

Click on the channels panel (found under the window menu) and click on the lightness channel. Now go under the Image menu, under Mode, and choose Grayscale. Click okay on the resulting warning dialog box. Take a look at your photo now and see if it looks to light or too dark. If it's too light, go to the layers panel, click on the Background layer and then press Ctrl-J to duplicate the background layer. To make this layer darker, change the layer blend mode to Multiply (right under the word layers in the panel you will see a drop down box that right now has the word "normal" in it. Click on the triangle and then click on the word multiply). Now lower the opacity of this layer until your image looks just right.

If your photo was too dark then change the blend mode to screen instead of multiply and dial in the opacity.

Here are the results:

Grayscale

The Lightness Channel Method with some text for the finished picture:

Photoshop Before and Afters

Let me say that I LOVE Photoshop. It is such a powerful program. I have been trying to learn how to use it but there are so many things to learn I don't think I will ever discover everything it can do. Here are some things I have been playing with lately.

This is a picture I took of my son in Texas. I like it, but digital pictures tend to be a little drab and colorless so I wanted to punch up the color a little and make that blue sky stand out a little more. Here is the before and after. Just a subtle change, but I like how it turned out.

Here is another one of the same son climbing a tree. Again, I wanted to make the blue sky stand out. Also I brightened up the subject a little bit because I thought he was too dark.

This is a picture I took years ago (oddly enough of the same son). I love the sky and how the tide makes a profile on the beach. It was taken at the wrong time of day and with a not so good camera so I wanted to see if I could improve it a little.

Garden of the Gods

Lighted Tree

Every time I pass this tree at night I think it looks so pretty all lit up from the street light that is right next to it.

The "alien lights"

We have these lights in our office that I call the "alien lights" because I think they look like what an alien's antennae would look like. I stare up at them every day while I am sitting at my computer.

I noticed the other day that I could see myself in them so I decided to snap a self portrait of me via the alien lights.

Now I know what I look like when I am taking a picture and now I know that I need to dust.=)

Grandpa's Farm

We visited Grandpa during the holidays. The kids LOVE his house. I think my kids might be country kids at heart!