A good friend, Martin from the UK, taught me a few tricks on how to make black & white images with some punch. I'm going to try explain parts of the process here. So sit back and enjoy!
We start with a not soo good color image that I took one day. As you see I overexposed the window. But don't dispair, there's ways to get back some of the detail.
To bring back some of the detail in the window, we start to use the Polygonal Lasso tool to select the window panes. To select more than one area, hold down the Shift key and continue selecting the next window pane.
After we've selected all parts of the window panes, we need to soften the selection somewhat. That's done with Feather set to about 5 pixels (under the Selection menu).
Next, while the window panes are still selected, press the keys Cmd-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to make a new layer with just the selected area.
Make sure the layer with the window panes is selected, then go to the menu Image > Adjustments > Selective Color. In the top of the dialog Selective Color select the Whites from the popup menu by Colors. At the bottom, move the slider for Black all the way to the right.
While still in Selective Color select the Neutrals from the popup menu by Colors. At the bottom, move the slider for Black all the way to the right.
If you don't get the "zing" in the first round, repeat Step 3 and 4 again, until you're pleased with the result. This is how it looks like when I've done Step 3 and 4 twice. A big difference from what we started with.
In this case I want the view outside the window to be a bit more blurry (it's pretty contrasty and looks like it has no depth of field at all). So first I go to the Layers palette and Lock transparent pixels for the next step.
To make the view outside the window more blurry, go up to the menu Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Move the slider to taste (in my example I decided to go with 2 pixels).
I'm not pleased with the window just yet, so I go into the menu Image > Adjustment > Levels to darken the midtones a bit more.
Now the fun starts! First we have to convert the image to black & white. I prefer doing it in Channel Mixer. Since I haven't flatten the image for the window pane and the rest of the image, I choose to use an Adjustment layer. But you can go directly to the menu Image > Adjustment > Channel Mixer if you don't need to keep a sensitive area away from what's comming next. Mix the channels to taste. In my case I want more reds in my mix, so I made this mix. Important in Channel Mixer is to make sure the box Monocrome is marked.
Now the Doge and Burning starts! In this case I want to enhance the woods in the stairs and bits and pieces around, so I choose the Dodge Tool. In the option bar above I select a big and soft bruch and I make sure I set the Range to Highlights. I set the exposure to a pretty low value, so I can work the images over and over to get the result I want.
With my brush I now start working the stairs and the wall to bring out more details. I work in several passes to not make the edit too obvious. When I feel I'm pretty satisfied with the result so far I move on to the next step.
If you have more complex areas than this, you can do as I did with the window panes, select a part of the image and work on that on a special layer. When I'm satisfied with the result I merge the layer with the Background layer.
Now it's time to increase the contrast of the image. So go to the menu Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. In the dialog for Unsharp Mask set the amount to 25% and the Radius to 55 pixels. Leave the Treshold at zero. Click OK.
Now do the same settings again, for a second pass of Unsharp Mask. If it's too much you can always go under the menu Edit and choose Fade Unsharp Mask.
You might want to work a bit more with the Dodge (or Burn) Tool, so keep working on the image until you feel it's done.
I now want to bring out some of the midtones in the image, so I go to the menu Image > Adjustments > Levels and move the middle pointer towards the left to bring out some more in the image.
The job is done and I can flatten any layers I'm working on. I'm going to post my image on the Internet, so I go one step further and resize the image (in this case to 400 x 600 pixels) and go up to the menu Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask to sharpen the edges. I chose a fairly mild sharpening with an Amount of 80% and a Radius of 0.3 pixels. If it feels too weak, it's always possible to run another pass of Unsharp Mask with the same settings.
Here's the result of my work on the image. I'm pretty pleased with it and I hope you've enjoyed to follow me through this process. There's a lot of ways to do this of course, but I find this method being pretty easy.
© Petra Hall
