Technical articles etc.

This article deals with some of the ways in which Photoshop can convert an image to monochrome. In Photoshop there are many ways to achieve the effect you desire, monochrome conversion is no exception.

The first thing to accept is don’t shoot in monochrome. Sure you will get a monochrome image but why let your camera make decisions for you? Shouldn’t you be taking charge of the creative process? The best monochrome images are made by shooting RAW, colour, images. This provides the maximum amount of tonal and colour information and, as we shall see, colour can be very important to a monochrome image.

The simplest way to convert an image to monochrome is to desaturate it. Although Photoshop provides this process it is not a satisfactory way to convert whole images if you want the best from your photograph.

Hue and saturation
Conversion by means of a hue and saturation adjustment layer is one of the lesser used conversion methods. It is however very useful in certain circumstances. I tend to employ it where there are large blocks of colours; cars, clothing etc. can all be converted to different tonal values using this method.

I have an action set up in Photoshop, which creates four hue and saturation adjustment layers. The first three are created with no adjustment at all initially, the fourth is set to fully desaturate only. This allows me to see how the conversion is looking as later work progresses and to easily switch between mono and colour. After creating the layers I reopen each one in turn and adjusting the settings. My action of creating the layers names each one in turn, “ground”, “subject”, “grass” and of course “desat.” I can lighten or darken the yellow/green of the grass, the subject’s tones and the sky. On other occasions, such as the image of racing cars, I may use each separate layer for a different car. It is a versatile technique for which there are as many uses as a fertile mind can imagine.

CMYK conversion

I have had no practical success with this method which involves converting the psd or tiff file to CMYK and then adjusting the individual tones to taste. It does seem to have some potential and needs more time to be put in to assess the potential. Whether I shall find the time to do this given that other methods are currently giving me the results I desire remains to be seen. All I can say at the moment is that my mind is still open.

Multiple RAW exports.

One of the finest ways to covert tonally rich monochrome images is by using multiple raw exports. In a raw editor change the settings to greyscale (or whatever your converter calls mono) and then adjust the settings to maximise the tonal range in the sky (by which I mean the most pleasing, not necessarily the most contrast or indeed from full black to full white). Do the same for the midground and again for the foreground and if necessary for any particular feature in any area.

Use all the tools available at each stage, exposure, brightness, contrast, colour temperature and the lightness, or darkness, of each colour. This last can make a huge difference. Watch that your settings at each stage do not introduce noise. If present in all areas a limited amount of noise can be very reminiscent of film but it looks entirely un-natural if it is present in one area only.

Export each stage as a separate TIFF or PSD file. Open the ground layer and then open, copy and paste each of the other layers onto the first. I suggest you give each an individual name appropriate to its part in the final picture (sky, ground, castle, or whatever). All that then remains is to blend, using masks, each of the layers to take its part in the final image. The image is then finished using the usual tools including curves, dodge and burn etc.

Channel mixer / Contrast grading

Contrast grading using the channel mixer to convert produces excellent mono images and I must immediately refer the reader to the technical excellence in this method displayed by Martin Henson of Digital Monochrome. Through his tutorials and the friendly forum he runs at;
www.runboard.com/bthedigitalmonochromeforum I have learnt much to improve my own techniques.

The excellent mono images are made by exporting multiple RAW colour files (in a similar way to that outlined above but exporting colour images not mono at that stage) and then blending these into a colour master followed by use of channel mixer.

The colour master is then converted to mono by use of the channel mixer applied separately to each of the key areas in the picture. It is usual to convert the sky and the land as two separate areas but an entirely separate treatment may be required for areas of water, buildings etc. Lasso the sky, select a soft feather, perhaps 100 to 150 pixels and use that selection to add a channel mixer layer. For the sky I usually use the red channel and vary the green and blue until the result pleases then darken or lighten if necessary whilst for the land start with the green. It is often said that all the numbers in the boxes in channel mixer should add up to 100. This is a useful guide but by no means essential in every case.

Once all the areas have been converted the desaturation facility in Photoshop comes into it’s own. It is quite possible that in lassoing areas to process with the channel mixer a small area has not been fully converted. Now you can use desaturation to remove the last vestiges of colour. There are several other stages to finish the image, I recommend getting Martin Henson’s contrast grading tutorial on DVD if you wish to take this further.

Software plug-ins and standalone monochrome software

I regularly use and can recommend Nik Silver Efex Pro. This software creates a new layer in Photoshop onto which it applies the conversion to mono. It has a considerable number of pre-set conversions, allows the user to filter by colour, adjust brightness, contrast, structure and other factors as well as toning etc. It is immensely powerful and relatively quick to use. It is important to adopt the use of this software with care however otherwise it becomes a blunt instrument. Very rarely will a single run through produce the best possible overall effect.

It is worth noting that the sensitivity slider (sensitivity to individual colours) is an extremely powerful and important part of this programme.

Topaz Labs detail plug-in is very useful for improving detail and sharpening. It contains numerous pre-sets, most of which are horrendous, do not let that put you off trying it. Unlike Nik this plug-in does not create a new layer for itself so remember to create one before using this tool.

FINISHING OFF

All the above methods can usually be improved by judicious application of sharpening. This can be either a finish sharpen prior to printing or use of unsharp mask at higher settings to boost contrast.

Throughout all stages of conversion I urge you to keep an eye on the histogram, small amounts of full black or blown whites are quite acceptable but larger areas, which the viewer can see are not. The sooner you spot them the easier they are to deal with and so the less noticeable any rectification is.

Dodge and burn

Dodge and burn tools should be used judiciously, at low settings, on a copy layer. It is all too easy to go too far and not realise it until later. Done on a new layer that layer can be discarded and all you hard work prior to this is saved. An alternative method I employ to the dodge and burn tools is the creation of a new 50% grey layer, set to overlay, on which to paint using white and black (or shades of grey) to darken or lighten parts as required. Again it is easy to delete these adjustments if you do not feel the final result is perfect, without losing the other stages.

Selective colour

Selective colour, in a monochrome image? The settings within the tool include blacks, neutrals and whites. I quite often tweak the whites, lightening highlight to add a bit more sparkle to an image. Another useful tool which, to the inexperienced may seem irrelevant to monochrome work, is select / colour range. Here too it is possible to select highlights, mid-tones or shadows to give adjustments.



"Watching me watching ewe" was created from two original colour images, the one shown and one exposed about three stops darker to get a correct exposure for the sky and then converted to monochrome by me using a mixture of these techniques.

"ART is the process or product of deliberately and creatively arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. In its narrow sense, the word art most often refers specifically to the visual arts, including media such as painting, sculpture, and printmaking." (Wikipedia)

If you think about that definition sufficiently you will see it is an extremely well put together sentence that answers this question. If we examine the meaning of some of the words which themselves are contained within the definition such as, process, product, arranging, these are all words which have connotations more of manufacture than art. The key to it is the word “creatively”.

It is the means by which a photograph is created that are usually given as the reason “art lovers” disregard photography as an art form so lets look again to our definition of words;

"PHOTOGRAPHY …. Is the process, activity and art of creating … pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium…"(Wikipedia).

You could paraphrase this along the lines “Henry Moore sculptures were created by recording the blows of a hammer and chisel on granite.” A process with connotations every bit as mechanical as that of photography. Or you could look at screen prints a process very closely aligned with modern photographic ink jet printers, or giclée printers as they are often called, and for which the origin of the image used to produce the screen was in many cases a photograph. This includes many of the most celebrated screen prints.

We should extend this examination and look at paintings. Paintings, by which definition I will include, oil, watercolour, pastel, acrylic, sketches and any image created by man or woman are, at the end of the day produced by means of transferring material from brush to paper, or whatever, as required by the medium being used.

It is my belief that whether or not photography is an art depends first upon the person making the photograph and then on the person seeing the photograph. Here it is important to reflect on the difference between simply taking a photograph and making a photograph and to consider the reason for which the image was recorded.

Photographs of the people around us, our immediate environment and the items within it, are often made as a record and as such need to be accurate as to shape, proportions and colour or they do not fulfil the purpose for which they were made. These “record shots” (another much misused and mis-understood term, which we can maybe examine in another article) are not in my opinion art. This is the photograph we “take*”. They lack the element of creativity.

So if the photographer adds an element of creativity, in my opinion, the photograph becomes art. Whether it is perceived as such by the viewer will depend upon many things. These include whether the viewer can see the creativity contained in the image, the viewer’s personal taste and prejudice.

Personal taste is, to a large extent I believe, impacted upon by our own ability to see the creativity imparted to the work by the artist. Do you think Tracey Emin’s unmade bed is art? Do you think Damien Hirst’s cow in formaldehyde is art? Well it is indeed personal taste, you will have your views and I have mine, and yes, they are personal so I’m not telling you. I’m going out with my camera.


* Why mankind has ever referred to taking a photograph is one of the mysteries of the mis-use of language. In recording an image nothing is taken, since the light would not have been available to re-use later on. Oh well, perhaps I really am becoming a grumpy old man.

How to focus to ensure as much of the image as possible is sharp.


We regard a lens as focusing light to a point (on the film or sensor) but this is not strictly true. A perfect camera lens does not exist and most of the light is focussed down to a tiny circle, the so called "circle of confusion". This tiny circle is so small the eye regards it as a point and we consider it to be sharp.

If you focus a lens on any point then both that point and a certain distance in front of and behind that point will appear to the eye to be sharp. The distance that appears sharp extends roughly twice as far beyond the focus point as it does in front.

How do we apply this knowledge? Well in the good old days lenses were supplied with f numbers engraved on the barrel and a focus scale so you could set this up instantly. A few years ago Canon built in an electronic equivalent to some of their cameras, but not now. So how do we use it?

Focus on infinity, look through the camera and find the nearest point that is sharp ( take a picture and zoom in on the screen if you have time, just to make sure), refocus on that and you are now certain everything up to infinity is sharp and also half the distance from the focus point to infinity will also be acceptably sharp in front of the focus point. Why? because you have focused on exactly the hyperfocal distance!

And one word of warning, just in case your eyes are not as sharp as you would like (as mine) close the lens down a stop just before taking the picture, depth of field increases with smaller apertures. This will extend the depth of sharpness a bit more, then when you print it large you won't be disappointed because your eyes were not seeing clearly through the camera.

The following simple depth of field table shows how to obtain maximum depth of field for most images using different apertures for different lenses / focal lengths.

Depth of Field Guide

Focal
Length		Aperture		Focus		DoF (ft)
mm				at (ft)		From	To
17		8		4		2.0	infinity
28		11		7.67		3.8	infinity
40		16		11.1		5.54	infinity
70		22		23.9		12.0	infinity

Follow link for an online depth of field calculator

And just as importantly how much is too little!



I am often asked where the line is drawn between good image enhancement and excessive manipulation. Photography is not a football field, it is not as simple as in or out, so where do we start?

Well inevitably, if we are to manipulate an image, we are going down the route of changing what was there to our vision, how we interpret it, or would like others to see it. This is taking us down the route of art so firstly let me refer you to the article IS PHOTOGRAPHY ART ? in which I noted Photographs of the people around us, our immediate environment and the items within it, are often made as a record and as such need to be accurate as to shape, proportions and colour or they do not fulfil the purpose for which they were made. This is particularly true of wildlife shots; most people would agree that any manipulation, beyond that which is inevitably required to correct the lack of sharpness and vibrancy in a RAW image file *, is not acceptable ain a wildlife shot. It may well make good art but is definitely not a wildlife shot and will not be accepted by most viewers, competition judges etc. as being such.

At extremes, image manipulation can result in a variety of unwanted deformities including blocking of shadows and blowing of highlights (no detail, either totally black or white) artifacts, banding etc. which arise where the changes to the basic information, as recorded, can not be accommodated in the file without resulting in damage. Even here however it is possible to use some of these effects to create an arty effect and indeed I have distorted one image of a classic car to the extent the colour changes banded and at the edges created an effect like fractals. Was this successful? Well I liked it and so did a motor magazine, which devoted a page to it! Strangely this excess gives us a key to finding the answer but for the moment I will digress a bit.

My philosophy in image making is to produce something that pleases me first and hopefully other viewers. Why do I seek to please myself first? Because I know what I like but cannot be sure what will appeal to others. It is therefore the most accurate assessment I can make of what is right; I like it, therefore it is right. Yes, maybe it can be improved and I welcome and, where I feel it appropriate to my ends, willingly use creative criticism.

How many times have you been out on a nice day and started taking photographs? The sun is warm, the sky is blue and the flowers are all nodding their approval in the sweet breeze blowing over the fields. Later you look at the photographs and disappointment floods over you. Why? Because you were trying to capture the mood you were feeling but you were photographing what you saw not what you felt. Oh yes. I have been there many times and still fall into the same trap occasionally.

I have two sticks I lean on when making photographs, less is more and I dont do subtle. Let me explain these.

By less is more I mean experience has taught me that most of the photographs I take please me more if they concentrate on a part of the view rather than the whole. Reduce what you see down to the simplest elements, which a viewer can fix upon, these will retain the eye and interest in the scene. This is not to say I do not take broad view landscapes. I do this a lot, look around my images. Most good landscape views will however have a strong foreground interest. Another photographer provided me with a good way to explain this technique as Find a really nice view and then put something even better in (the) front of it! I like that and it brings us straight back to simplifying the image, less is more.

I dont do subtle is not perhaps the most accurate way of explaining my intentions, every image does not have to have high saturation nor a high contrast. What it must have is as much appeal as I can give it. This may be contrast or saturation it may require a vignette to constrain the viewers eye in the frame or mist* to obscure the unimportant parts and maximise the main subject’s appeal. Horses for courses.

What does this have to do with image manipulation, yes we are back on track! Quite simply I will manipulate any image as much as is necessary to maximise the impact and appeal to the viewer. At the point where the manipulation, in my opinion, starts to detract from the appeal to the viewer, that is too much.

You may well have a different opinion. Fine, you are making your images, they need your treatment. In making your images you need to decide, before you press the shutter button, what you want to include. The more impact your initial subject selection, viewpoint and framing has the less manipulation your image will require. Then when you develop the image you can refine the framing, and add just enough, colour, contrast or other manipulation to make it pop.

The photographs on the warm day that did not work… just add that mood back in, they will be wonderful memories for the rest of our life. How you do that, well that is down to your vision. I can not tell you exactly which slider to move nor how far, it varies from picture to picture but with experience gained through practice it becomes intuitive.


* Separate articles to follow.

Many landscape photographs are disappointing because the brightness range exceeds what the film or sensor is capable of recording. This results in too bright skies with little detail and “blown whites”. By reducing the amount of light hitting the recording medium the sky can be correctly recorded but the shadows become totally black or “blocked”.

The professionals solution is to use graduated neural density filters which reduce the light recorded from the sky whilst not affecting the remainder of the image. If you don’t have filters or do not have them with you all is not lost providing your camera has a manual exposure control and, ideally, a tripod.

The solution is to take one exposure to record the ground and another (usually at two or the stops less exposure, but experience or the meter will tell you how much) to correctly record the sky. These can then be blended together later in photo editing software. When you make the exposures it is best to leave the aperture setting the same and reduce the shutter speed. Changing the aperture will slightly alter the proportions of the scene and could result in making the blend between the two more difficult.

If your camera can shoot RAW files then do so, often a single RAW file will have enough information from a single file to produce one copy exposed for the land and another for the sky which can then be blended in Photoshop ensuring perfect register.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 for image editing and the following is how I blend two images together using that software.
• Open both images
• Select all of the image of the sky and copy it
• Go to the image of the landscape and paste
• Add a layer mask to the top layer; if you Alt Click the mask icon the mask will be pre-filled black
• With a large soft white brush paint back on the mask the areas of the top layer you want to retain.

This is definitely a technique where practice makes perfect, do not try to use too fine a brush, this almost always results in the edit being visible, large soft brushes gently applied, or the use of a gradient, will make gentle transitions that will not be evident to the viewer. Have a really good look and make sure you are happy with the edit before you flatten to one layer again.

Another use for this technique is to use it for blending different colourways from a single exposure. In the following examples I have produced two different files from the RAW. The yellow tones of evening light and a brighter but bluer one which I am going to use for the far bank of the lake. In the first image they are both visible, side by side on my desktop.




















In picture two I have stacked what was the left hand version on top of the other, added a mask (you can see the black square with a white stripe through it at the right of the pane) and I am about to crop to the final size.




















In the third picture I have zoomed in to show the mask more clearly.






















Happy editing!

“Should I shoot RAW or JPEG’s?”
Many new photographers ask the question “Should I shoot RAW or JPEG’s?”
Or “If newspaper photographers shoot JPEG’s why am I so often told I should shoot in RAW?”

These are just two of the many file formats that are available for image files, each of which has a special purpose. The newspaper photographer needs an image he can edit quickly and of a small enough size to transmit rapidly and easily to the paper. Newspaper print quality is very poor, and a high quality, high definition image would not look any better at the low resolution used by newsprint. JPEG’s are therefore ideal for this purpose.

An understanding of the different file formats and knowing the correct one to use will save a lot of time and heartache over poor quality.

The most common formats are:

Formats for taking images;

JPEG devised by the Joint Photography Expert Group. JPEG files compress the image data and reduce file size to about ten percent of the original size (the amount of compression varies from image to image). There is a relatively small loss in quality. JPEG files are converted by software in the camera to present the viewer with a standardised processing of all images which, results in a generally appealing degree of tones, contrast and saturation. Since the processing is entirely automatic it does not necessarily (or indeed ever?) maximise the potential of any image.

RAW images are simply what the camera saw. Whatever was there is recorded on the memory card for processing later. Viewed in this state RAW files lack sharpness and are not very pleasing to the eye. They need development. The file size is far larger than a JPEG, requiring more or larger memory cards in the camera and eating up more hard drive space on the computer. Because the files are much larger they take longer for the camera to record on the memory card which can be critical in fast moving situations such as sport photography.

Many professional photographers use JPEG’s most of the time; the reason is they take great care to control what is recorded by altering the lighting, using filters etc. As a result the image is right in the camera and no processing is required, saving time. This is no different than the discipline required when shooting film. Nonetheless I would urge you to record in RAW whenever you can. It allows maximum control after the event and with the many excellent RAW processing software programmes available image enhancement is quicker and easier than ever before.

Formats for processing, printing and presentation

JPEG is ideal for web use you can control the quality standard by selecting different settings. To display a large picture a setting of 9 or 10 should be chosen whereas to improve load speed, or for small mages a setting of 3 or 4. May be more suitable.

GIF is the Graphic Interchange Format. GIF is a compression format particularly suited to simple, graphic images and is restricted to 216 colours. This makes it ideal for graphic or posterised or simple images only, it is not suitable for photographs.

PSD, the proprietary Adobe Photoshop format, now an established format in it’s own right is designed for high quality image processing and to print.

TIFF is the Tagged Image File Format and is another excellent choice for image manipulation and print.

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics, widely tipped to replace GIF but slow to be adopted.

DNG is a relatively new concept that has much merit. Each camera manufacturer’s RAW file format is different and varies from model to model. Each is opened with its own proprietary software. One of the big drawbacks with RAW files is that in the not too distant future many people will find they no longer have the software to open old images, which are therefore totally lost. The digital negative format is still a RAW format, retaining all the original data and capable of being read and edited by any modern software which is intended to be future proof. Personally I am converting all my RAW files to DNG for the purposes of creating permanent backups and I recommend you do the same.

Finally which RAW processor do I recommend?

I have used one for some time now, Adobe Lightroom. With the upgrade by Adobe to Lightroom 2 it is now such a competent product, both for processing and cataloguing images I have never needed to consider anything else!