Love to play around with B&W but can never get those rich tones that I see in a lot of other peoples shots. Can anyone throw me a bone here. I took this shot of Jesse (in colour) and had a play with B&W but am still not 100% happy with the end result. Here is the colour version and my attempt at B&W.
Any help greater appreciated. (After 12 months - am still trying to come to grips with this bloody Photo shop - sheeeew)
colour version
B&W version
I opened the color image, lightened it dramatically, and made a clean selection of the BG and saved it. I went to tone mapping in photomatix pro to recover shadow values and control bright skin values, then opened the result in PS7 and pasted the TM version as a layer over the original. You could have used CS2 shadow/highlight instead of tone mapping I think, but I don't have that.
Now I have a color version with decent tonal values but a busy BG. I load the BG selection and use a levels adjustment layer to make the BG dark again. I now open a hue/sat adjustment layer but make no changes, then a color gradient layer with a black-to cream gradient for me B/W conversion.
I go back to the underlying hue?sat layer and play with the sliders to vary the appearance of the duotone black/cream image.
When I had everything else the way I wanted it, I did my sharpening, and there you have it: one B/W workflow process.
Hmm both look good but i kinda like Krafty's version a little better, the last one seems a tad over sharpened? cheeks seem a little harsh too, theres a softer feel to krafty's i think.
