Guy Tal
Red Castle Peak, Uinta Mountains, UT
A red filter preset in Adobe Photoshop CS3 darkened the sky, and extra saturation given to blues in Hue/ Saturation darkened it still more. Tripod-mounted Canon EOS 5D with 17–40mm f/4L Canon EF lens. Exposure, 1/6 sec at f/22. ISO 100. Tinted with Pantone Warm Gray 7C.
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Step 3: CONVERT TO MONOCHROME
If you have Photoshop CS3 or later, you can use the versatile Black & White adjustment layer. This allows you not only to convert your color image, but also to select from a number of filter presets, and adjust the blending amounts of various colors and shades.
Have an older version of Photoshop? Instead, use the Channel Mixer adjustment layer by checking the Monochrome box and adjusting the percentage of each color channel used in the conversion. For example, 100% of the Red channel and 0% of the Blue and Green channels is equivalent to a red filter effect. I don’t recommend converting the image using the Grayscale mode, as this will discard its original color information. (For the same reason I don’t recommend using the b&w modes built into most digital cameras.)
Step 4:SHOOT RAW FILES FOR THE BEST RESULTS
Fine adjustments are much easier to apply when converting from RAW in the digital darkroom, rather than making decisions in the field based on readings in the camera’s LCD.
Take white balance, for instance. You may think that WB during processing is irrelevant when you’re converting to b&w, but that’s not so. Varying the WB setting also varies the relative amounts of red, green, and blue used to render each pixel. Thus, an image with an overall blue cast will appear dark if you use a red filter when converting to b&w, or bright if you use a blue filter.
In extreme situations, individual color channels may be clipped—a clipped red channel, for example, will result in loss of shadow or highlight detail if the image is converted to b&w using either a red or blue filter.
Varying the WB setting can direct more image detail to a clipped channel from a nonclipped one. You can see this effect by watching how the individual color histograms change relative to each other under different color temperatures or WB presets. To keep a color channel from clipping, make sure that its individual histogram does not spill over the left or right edge.
Yet another reason I recommend capturing RAW instead of JPEG images in the field? If your camera has a b&w setting, shooting RAW lets you see a monochromatic preview in the LCD without actually losing the benefits of all that color information.
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