Brad Haynes / Blog

I’m not sure how this differs from how most people create digital black and white images, but I’m pretty happy with the results from this method. It’s pretty easy and fast and gives you plenty of flexibility along the way. This method does assume you have photoshop and a colour image. I’m not sure if Photoshop Elements has all the bits needed.

1. Take a look at the red green and blue channels to work out which holds the most and nicest information.
2. Create a channel mixer adjustment layer and mix the channels into monochrome remembering which channel had the most information from step 1.
3. Add a curves layer and make the curve into an ‘S’ shape so that there is plenty of contrast in the midtones.
4. The image will be looking pretty stark at this point, so fade the Curves layer until the image looks good and you are getting the most detail.
5. Apply an unsharp mask to the image layer, I find that setting the threshold to 0 or 1, and the radius to between 0.8 and 1 works well. Adjust the percentage until the image is as sharp as you can make it before it starts to look too rugged.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Photography, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.