Digital Daves alternative Mono conversion in CS3……
Well its been a long time since my last post but i think this deserves to be shared….Dave Sims (commonly known as Digital Dave @ work) is a superb photographer he’s also a member of Solihull Photographic Society, we also sit next to each other at work so the subject of photography & photoshop techniques crop up on a regular basis……(more so than our managers would like!)
Last week Dave took me through this alternative method for converting an image to Mono….I like it but the jury’s still out on whether its better than my current method or not.I like the way it converts the dark end but you still have to adjust your levels etc before you start.
So i thought id see what you lot think!
Here’s the step by step guide:-
1) Open the image you want to convert.
2) Create a duplicate layer
3) Then De saturate the duplicate layer (shift+Ctrl+U)
4) Go into the channels (RGB) bottom right hand corner & then do a Ctrl+left mouse click (this highlights the 50%greys.
5) Select Inverse (the select tab in the top tabs)
6) Then click “new fill layer” (7th selection down the layer tab) & select solid colour
7) Select the darkest area of black in the bottom LH corner.
8) Then go back to the RGB Layers tab in the right hand corner and change the mode from normal to either Overlay or softlight. You might want to play around with the opacity if you think the blacks are to dark………
That’s about it but you still need to adjust your levels and colour balance and mid tones in the curves if required…….
I like it and think it might work well with certain images….
What do you think??? Ive added two copies of the same image below with each method for guidance….
Cheers
Jon.
This image has had my normal mono conversion applied.....
This image has had Daves alternative conversion applied.........as described above.
Daves method ceratinly makes the blacks very black and creates a mono with more mood, but maybe theres trade off in foreground & shadow detail?? i hope some of you will give it a try and let me know what you think. As ever if you get stuck give me a bell and we can go through it in more detail……
Cheers
Jon Bowcutt.
