1. Process a single raw image in Photomatix into a Pseudo HDR picture
2. Save as a 16 bit Tiff
3. Open in Photoshop
4. Create a new layer and apply Shadow and Highlight
5. Reduce noise with Noise Ninja
6. Adjust Curves with blending mode set to luminosity
7. Adjust Levels with blending mode set to luminosity
8. Create a Hue/Saturation layer, blending mode set to colour. Also on the default drop down
select sepia
9. Brush through the mask on the hue layer with 20% opacity to reveal some colour
10. Sharpen with high pass and overlay blending mode
1. Select a Raw/Tiff/Jpeg file
2. Open In Photomatix
3. Click on “Toning”
4. Apply the following settings [The image will look very washed out]
5. Settings
Strength 25
Colour Saturation 46
Luminosity –5
Light Smoothing No2
Micro Smoothing 30
Highlight Smoothing 68
Shadow Smoothing 0
Shadow clipping 0
6. Save as Adobe RGB and 16 bit Tiff
7. Open in PS
8. Create a new curves layer with the blending mode set to “Luminosity”
9. Double click on the black point eye dropper [This will bring up a default settings dialogue]
10. Set the three lower box levels R G B to 7.0 exit and save.
11. In the curves dialogue box click the black level eyedropper once.
12. On your picture select the area, which will have the darkest curve level i.e. a shadow area.
[This should make the blacks pop, click in different areas to achieve different results. The
opacity slider can also be moved to affect the overall look
13. Duplicate your background layer and apply shadow and highlight to these settings
Shadows
Amount 18%
Tonal width 19%
Radius 30%
Highlights
Amount 0%
Tonal width 0%
Radius 0%
Adjustments
Colour Correction +20
Midtone Contrast
14. At this stage I merge all visible layers or flatten.
15. Duplicate your background and reduce noise with “Noise Ninja”
16. Optional process create a new layer and apply B/W gradient
17. Using Alien Skin exposure II apply a film finish to your taste. Grain etc.
18. Merge all visible layers again.
19. Duplicate your background layer
20. Apply a high pass filter at about 1.8 and set blending mode to soft light.
I used to use all the gadgets and sliders and color modes until I read this guys' tutorial. If your even half way photoshop savy, it will change the way you look at layers and masks. Most of the information is free to you read, but he makes the tutorials available for really cheap. i bought them and am very glad I did. I have a deeper understanding of whats going on at the pixel level and feel I can get more of what I want.
I used to use all the gadgets and sliders and color modes until I read this guys' tutorial. If your even half way photoshop savy, it will change the way you look at layers and masks. Most of the information is free to you read, but he makes the tutorials available for really cheap. i bought them and am very glad I did. I have a deeper understanding of whats going on at the pixel level and feel I can get more of what I want.
1. Import in to Lightroom
2. Switch to "greyscale" treatment
3. Adjust the exposure slider until the histogram is as far right as it will go without clipping
4. Adjust the blacks slider to pick a good black point for the image
5. Use the brightness slider to adjust the actual brightness of the image since step 2 can often leave it too bright.
6. Adjust the contrast slider until there is a good separation between the light and dark tones
7. Adjust the clarity slider until the image has the right amount of "pop" without any weird artifacts in high contrast areas. This is very subject dependent as some subjects look better with lower clarity.
8. Next I move on to the tone curve and basically add and move around points until the various areas of the image are showing the detail I want. This is what I use to bring out more detail in the dark tones or bring down some highlights. In other images, I bring down shadows and bring up highlights to get an S shaped curve that gives a high contrast kind of look.
9. This part is really the essence of the black and white conversion process for me. The previous steps can be applied equally well to color images. I spend a lot of time playing with the different "grayscale mix" sliders. Each one controls the contribution of every color to the grayscale output. You can really fine tune how the colors appear in your image. For example I can turn down the green slider if I want to make grass look dark and not glow much, or I can crank up the same slider if I want grass that looks almost white.
10. I occasionally go for split toning, but it depends on the look of the image I'm going for.
11. I usually add at least a bit of vignette to almost every image. I know some photographers make a big deal about having no vignetting etc, but I find that I like the look especially if it is subtle. In some cases I make it not so subtle. Again, depends on the image.
12. Finally I tweak the preliminary sharpening settings. This is only the basic "in-camera" type sharpening and the final sharpening will be applied in the output stage during the export dialog. I use this mainly to make sure detailed parts of the image are looking reasonably crisp. It's important not to overdo it here otherwise after the second stage sharpening your image will look quite bad.
13. I double check the histogram to make sure there's no significant amount of undesired clipping.
14. Leave the image in my Lightroom catalog for a day or two.
15. Come back to look at it again, go through all the steps to tweak anything I don't like any more.
16. Leave it for a couple more hours, come back to it once more.
17. If I'm satisfied, export for web, post to my gallery.
Usually before print I'll go through the recheck process again, since I usually find things I'd like to tweak here and there. For print I also usually export to TIFF and make some minor edits in photoshop, although with Lightroom 2.0 this is hardly necessary due to the addition of the spot healing and brush tools.
Kamil Kisiel wrote:
Here's a pretty extensive rundown of my workflow:
1. Import in to Lightroom
2. Switch to "greyscale" treatment
3. Adjust the exposure slider until the histogram is as far right as it will go without clipping
4. Adjust the blacks slider to pick a good black point for the image
5. Use the brightness slider to adjust the actual brightness of the image since step 2 can often leave it too bright.
6. Adjust the contrast slider until there is a good separation between the light and dark tones
7. Adjust the clarity slider until the image has the right amount of "pop" without any weird artifacts in high contrast areas. This is very subject dependent as some subjects look better with lower clarity.
8. Next I move on to the tone curve and basically add and move around points until the various areas of the image are showing the detail I want. This is what I use to bring out more detail in the dark tones or bring down some highlights. In other images, I bring down shadows and bring up highlights to get an S shaped curve that gives a high contrast kind of look.
9. This part is really the essence of the black and white conversion process for me. The previous steps can be applied equally well to color images. I spend a lot of time playing with the different "grayscale mix" sliders. Each one controls the contribution of every color to the grayscale output. You can really fine tune how the colors appear in your image. For example I can turn down the green slider if I want to make grass look dark and not glow much, or I can crank up the same slider if I want grass that looks almost white.
10. I occasionally go for split toning, but it depends on the look of the image I'm going for.
11. I usually add at least a bit of vignette to almost every image. I know some photographers make a big deal about having no vignetting etc, but I find that I like the look especially if it is subtle. In some cases I make it not so subtle. Again, depends on the image.
12. Finally I tweak the preliminary sharpening settings. This is only the basic "in-camera" type sharpening and the final sharpening will be applied in the output stage during the export dialog. I use this mainly to make sure detailed parts of the image are looking reasonably crisp. It's important not to overdo it here otherwise after the second stage sharpening your image will look quite bad.
13. I double check the histogram to make sure there's no significant amount of undesired clipping.
14. Leave the image in my Lightroom catalog for a day or two.
15. Come back to look at it again, go through all the steps to tweak anything I don't like any more.
16. Leave it for a couple more hours, come back to it once more.
17. If I'm satisfied, export for web, post to my gallery.
Usually before print I'll go through the recheck process again, since I usually find things I'd like to tweak here and there. For print I also usually export to TIFF and make some minor edits in photoshop, although with Lightroom 2.0 this is hardly necessary due to the addition of the spot healing and brush tools....Show more →
Thank you for your addition Kamil. You sharing your workflow is helping all of us improve our conversion methods. See you around
Not so much to deem whether or not it is worthy, but just to re-evaluate the processing. I find I need to take some time away from a photograph to get good perspective on it. I usually don't download my photos right after a shoot but wait after that as well. I guess I'm a really slow photographer.
I actually picked up a lot of my ways of doing things by reading Freeman Patterson books. I highly recommend them if you're looking for inspiration.
Good suggestion Kamil. I step away from my images I'm working on as well. It's always good to come back another day to look at them. I've had days when I come back to view an image and think to myself, "what the heck was I thinking when I processed that". If I still love the image just the way it is after a few days, then I feel it's right.
Here is my basic workflow:
1. I Usually choose "Camera Standard" for the camera calibration.
2. Do all basic exposure, color and contrast edits in Lightroom, paying careful attention to the tone cure and black and highlight clipping. I try to get the color version looking as good as I can. If the image is a landscape or something other than a portrait I usually bump up the Clarity for added punch. I leave default sharpening for now.
3. I choose to Edit in PS4.
4. I run Levels and adjust the image so the levels are just off both black and white clipping. It depends on the image though. Sometimes I adjust the gamma slightly.
5. I run an action built from this method by Greg Gorman. This works especially well for People: http://www.gormanphotography.com/bw_conversion.pdf
There is also a variant call the Rob Carr method that is also very good. I'm evaluation Silver EFex Pro as well.
6. I sometimes run another curves adjustment, but mostly not.
7. The Gorman method runs a high pass filter that adds some midtone contrast which adds sharpness to a lot of images.
8. I save the image back to Lightroom and apply 9a. Other times I apply 9b in CS4 then save to Lightroom.
9a. I add sharpening in lightroom. I don't use them but I generally follow the settings in the portrait and landscape presets for the appropriate images.
9b. For sharpening I also very often use actions based on the Bruce Fraser book Real World Sharpening for Photoshop CS2. This is a great book and everything still applies to CS4.
10. That is mostly it, but sometimes I come back to an image later and apply additional light tone adjustments in Lightroom.
Some great workflow ideas.
I mainly use Capture Nx and once in a while I use Lightroom.
Save my files in .nef and than the ones I use for the web I save it as .jpg as well.
Kamil,
Interestingly, you've outlined my workflow as well. Although I suspect that each of us has our own way of adjusting the grayscale mix and working in curves.
Signed,
Another LR fan,
Scott
Apr 27, 2009 at 04:10 PM
Mark Metternich Offline • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
eric kim wrote:
5. Adjust tones of B/W by turning it to greyscale and adjusting specific color channel levels. (Adjust until it looks good to my eyes).
6. Open in CS3 and further add contrast, adjust shadows/highlights.
Got a question. How about adjusting it as a B+W in Raw (ACR...) and make it look as good as possible there using the color sliders, ect... but then bring it into PS as a COLOR image to then do Channel mixer, Calculations... in other words, why bring it into PS as a gray-scale? Seems, by leaving it in color it would allow more flexibility in PS.
mark70x70 wrote:
Got a question. How about adjusting it as a B+W in Raw (ACR...) and make it look as good as possible there using the color sliders, ect... but then bring it into PS as a COLOR image to then do Channel mixer, Calculations... in other words, why bring it into PS as a gray-scale? Seems, by leaving it in color it would allow more flexibility in PS.
Hey Mark. I have actually modified my b/w workflow since the last time I posted this. I have been just importing my photos to PS in color and doing my greyscale adjustments there.
1 Shoot RAW
2. Edit in PSE 6
3 Open and creat3 levels layer - click Ok
4 Create gradient map layer -click OK
5 open levels - adjust red (darken), green & blue (lighten)
6 Flatten image
7. Minor adjustments including dodging and burning as necessary
8 Convert mode to B&W
All the above per Scott Kelby "Photography Elements Book ...."
CS3 or 4 are frighteningly expensive in Rands and PSE cost me <$100 last year in the US and I doubt whether my hobyist status could ever justify it.
lazlo369 wrote:
Some great workflow ideas.
I mainly use Capture Nx and once in a while I use Lightroom.
Save my files in .nef and than the ones I use for the web I save it as .jpg as well.
Interesting - as an NX user also, do you use any 'sets' that are broadly applicable?
Which conversion workflow do you use? I'd like to pick your brain for everything NX - marvel at your work & site.
