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March 08, 2007
[ LET'S HEAR IT FOR GOOD OLD BLACK & WHITE ]
WHEN IT COMES TO PORTRAITS there is a lot to be said for black and white.
Looking over the work of a great portrait photographer like Arnold Newman we are reminded that his monochrome portraits often have more attention-grabbing impact than his coloured images.
So, when we saw the impressive quality of black and white reproduction on the new Hewlett Packard Photosmart Studio at Camera House we decided to try our hand at creating a book of monotone portraits. Well, not quite monotone -- of which more in a moment.
The easiest way to take black and white images with a digital camera is to set the camera to do it. The second easiest way is to convert a coloured image in-camera and save the new image -- some cameras have this facility.
Once the image is out of the camera and in an editing program it can be changed to greyscale, which simply discards all the colour information. This is a bit rough and ready and Photoshop Elements 5 has a conversion routine that allows the user to experiment with less or more exposure in the separate red, blue and green channels. Contrast can also be changed in the conversion panel.
Paintshop Pro has a dedicated conversion routine under Effects/Photo Effects/Black and white film. Red, green, orange and blue filter effects can be simulated.
In Photoshop CS we find that the best way to convert to monochrome is with Fred Miranda’s BW Workflow plug-in. It costs US $30. This little plugin gives the user control over the conversion process that produces much better results than the simple convert-to-greyscale mode.
Now it so happens that monochrome isn’t necessarily monochrome. Our book of Arnold Newman portraits is printed in duotone, or perhaps even tri-tone. This is a process used in printing photographic books to reduce the starkness of black and white images by introducing another tone to the image -- think sepia, but not as pronounced. (See the Luminous Landscape site for a useful article on duotones)
In Fred Miranda’s plug-in the duotone (or tri- or quad-) process is simulated. Images can be given a tone ranging from steely cold to warm brown. The most subtle of the second tones is “warm grey” which gives the photographs a light brown toning similar to the old Agfa Portriga Rapid paper and, as it happens, similar to the duotones in the Newman book.
Paintshop Pro has a routine for creating duotones built in and the instructions are in the Help file. In Photoshop CS you convert to greyscale and then choose Mode/Duotone and Load the presets to access the Adobe “warm grey” combination. Change the image Mode back to RGB to save as a jpeg.
We converted our images in the FM Photoshop plug-in and added a “warm grey” second tone. Returning to the Photoshop screen there is still a little tweaking of contrast and brightness to be done and the photo is saved as an RGB file, not greyscale.
We took 22 images on a CD to Camera House, selected a black cover and plain white pages from the Hewlett Packard options, chose one picture per page and pressed the go button. The results are sensational.
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Posted by terry at March 8, 2007 09:40 PM
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Comments
I’ve been trying to change my perspectives toward photography lately. I wanted to go monochromatic because they look so classic and timeless. One thing that I noticed about black and white photos is that it’s easy to hide face blemishes. Lucky me huh! But it’s always like that every time I change the color of my photos.
Posted by: portrait from photo at June 9, 2007 06:56 AM