The evolution of one photograph, from digital RAW file to final file.
Unlike in my last article where I dealt with scanning a traditional negative ("Evolution of One Black and White Photograph"), in this example I am dealing with a digital photograph from a Canon EOS 20D. Although there is no difference in how I work with the image in Photoshop®, I will try to touch on a few things I did not in the last article. Particularly, conversion from colour to black and white.
On the right is the image I am working on. The first step is to convert from
colour to black and white. I have read of many ways of doing this. The simplest
(in Photoshop®) is to simply desaturate the photo, or convert it to grayscale.
While this can often be good enough I suppose, there are other ways to do it
as well. One way involves using the Channel Mixer (Image > Adjust > Channel
Mixer).
By checking the Monochrome box, the image is converted to black and white, and we are able to manipulate the RGB channels until we get tonal relationships close to what we are looking for.
I'm certain there are many other ways to convert a colour photograph to black and white; the channel mixer method is one I use often. There is also a very interesting Photoshop® plugin called Power Retouche Black and White Studio which has a lot of options in conversion to black and white, and uses traditional darkroom terminology that some of us find soothing (i.e. referring to paper grades).
Anyway, once converted to black and white, I end up with this:
The image is pretty flat, and whatever tonal adjustments I make, I'll have to be careful about not blowing the highlights (snow) to pure white. So, now begins the masking.
I covered the general idea of masking in my other article ("Evolution of One Black and White Photograph") so I don't have much to add. The only difference in this image is that I needed much more precise masking of the elements in the photograph, as I wanted to treat many areas independently. For this I used the Quick Mask in Photoshop®, and zoomed in very tightly, painstakingly painting in my mask.
Below are the various masks that I made (in red):
As previously, I used Adjustment Layers to individually tweak each of the selected areas to get the tones and tonal relationships that I wanted. Below is a comparison of the initial image as it looked after conversion to black and white, and the final image. You can click on the final image to see a larger version from my gallery. (The differences are often subtle, especially at web resolution, but hopefully you can get a sense of how each of the masked areas were adjusted).
