SargentRay Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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tonebag wrote:
Bonjour Ray,
Tres bien! Totally agree with ESC in KC. Care to share a link to the videos you used to help you acheive your results?
a bientot,
Tony
(forgive the lack of accents, I know where they go but I don't know how to get them to come up on my keyboard :-)
Thanks tonebag, sorry about the delay, i've been caught up with my Family tree research with Ancestry.ca namely. Incidentally i discovered my grand father on my mother's side was originally from the U.S., Gloversville, Fulton county N.Y. to be exact, family name Orlup. So far in 2 days i added 81 people to my tree covering 5 generations. I find this to be very fascinating, but tremendously time consuming :-).
So about the B&W conversion, doing some research the other day i came across this Mark Johnson's tutorial and it answered my question about wether or not to use the color slider controls in Photoshop when doing a B&W conversion.
At first when i started digital a little over 3 years ago i was using them all the time with mixed results to say the least. Especially in portraits when i would find a good adjustment for the skin tones, something else in the picture was getting destroyed or became of a weird tonality. Also when pushing one color too much on either side would often times break down the nice background gradient, because almost no color from our physical environment are composed of only one pure color.
In this well done video Johnson shows the viewer how to create different layers in order to impact specific areas of the image I.E. by making a layer for each specific color corresponding to a zone of the picture. The real trick is to set the blending mode knock out options to DEEP.
Maybe it's old stuff for you guys but it is all new to me and i find it very handy in controlling all areas of the image precisely and independently.
here almost every time i post a B&W conversion the question arises and a great majority of photographers say one should never use the color sliders when converting to Black n White. Since i wasn't able to independently control specific colours in my pictures i couldn't prove them wrong, so far that is.
As you can see in my picture the background still retains a nice gradient, the original color of this backdrop is a yellowish brown, so by creating a specific layer i simply lowered the red and yellows and it nicely darkened the backdrop. When i got to the skin tones i worked with a fresh new layer and was able to raise the red and yellows instead.
Without this knowledge i was unable to achieve such control, i'm quite happy now and will from this point on do all my B&W conversions in this manner :-)
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