Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/11/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Greetings all, I've been lurking quietly in the background, and mostly enjoying the wonderful work submitted, but felt now was time to offer up something. I see that there is all this consternation concerning Photoshop, and using black and white or color films, filters, etc. I thought I'd chirp in with something I have been doing of late that is proving most helpful to me. I shoot slide film in my M6: Velvia or Astia usually, but I love K64 also. I scan the images at 4000 DPI, 4x, with digital ICE, to get nice clean sharp files. These get leveled and spotted first, then saved as PSD files. This is where it gets fun: Do I want a black and white version or stay in color? If I want to see it in B&W, I also wonder what it would have looked like if filtered appropriately - ie. should I have used a green filter as Graham does so eloquently, or perhaps an orange or a red? I go to the layers/channels/paths window and select the channels window. >From there I turn off two of the color channels, to see what the picture >would look like in B&W shot with that color filter. In other words, with only red channel turned on, it's like a B&W shot with a red filter, green only is a like a green filter, etc. Look at each channel for a while and decide - does the whole image need to be in one color channel, or should the sky be filtered red, the ground green? Create a copy layer of the whole image. If the whole image is to be one filter color, it's very easy to get that - you just go to the pull down called image/adjustments/channel mixer and select that option. When the window opens you select the monochrome option in the lower left corner. Use the sliders to vary the amount of each color filtering you want for the whole image, trying to keep the totals for all the numbers at around 100%, more or less if you want to push the brightness up or down. By the way, if you slide the red way higher than 150%, and pull the green & blue below 0%, you start creating psuedo-IR effects for your image! Once you've done this, hit OK and the image will be rendered as you see it. If you want, you can do other manipulations from here, or go straight to print. If you flatten and then convert to Grayscale now it will reduce the file size by discarding other color data, but it will stay in the gray-scale you've put it into. If you don't convert to grayscale, it will be available to change later by re-opening the file and re-sliding the scales in that layer, or even deleting that layer and starting over. If the image needs to be filtered in parts, ie the sky orange and the ground green, make a copy layer containing only the part of the image that has to be differently filtered. Then do the above manipulations for each part. Flatten or not depending on whether you want to change later or leave as is. What this let's me do is find the sharpest, nicest color slide film I can, and shoot with that, then create a black and white that is almost as long in tonal scale as a well processed B&W negative, while preserving the color option. It's cheaper then a second M body for the alternative. It also eliminates the need for almost all the filters I used to carry for B&W shooting. Hope this helps you by providing some new ideas to play with, Best of light, Norm