Patrick

Charla

Here is a shot of my 7 year old son Patrick taken on Sunday. We were at the lake having a great time when I noticed him floating around with this rather serious expression on his face, I guess he was just lost in his own little world. The original is very colorful with bright oranges and yellows that I didn't think meshed well with his expression and pose. I decided to convert it to B&W but I'm not sure if there is enough tonal range here to make a good image (I don't usually do B&W). Anyone care to share their opinions?

Thanks
Charla

John Desjarlais

Hi Charla - nice pensive shot of your son in his natural state. It's a good shot, and I think the BW was a good idea. If you're looking for alternatives, you can mess around with the BW tones using a channel mixer. For people, I usually begin with about 60/40/0 for R/G/B contributions, then play around some to find the right balance of tones, then I fiddle with "curves" to further bring out the look I'm after (or more realistically, hoping to stumble upon). For young ones, I often find that I like a higher key effect - brings out their more angelic nature. On the other hand, for working with the color version, I'm finding I like the look a lot better when I desaturate slighty - usually around -20 or -30. Hope this helps!

Charla

John Desjarlais wrote:

Hi Charla - nice pensive shot of your son in his natural state. It's a good shot, and I think the BW was a good idea. If you're looking for alternatives, you can mess around with the BW tones using a channel mixer. For people, I usually begin with about 60/40/0 for R/G/B contributions, then play around some to find the right balance of tones, then I fiddle with "curves" to further bring out the look I'm after (or more realistically, hoping to stumble upon). For young ones, I often find that I like a higher key effect - brings out their more angelic nature. On the other hand, for working with the color version, I'm finding I like the look a lot better when I desaturate slighty - usually around -20 or -30. Hope this helps!

Thanks for the tips John, I will do a little more tinkering with this shot to see if I can make some improvements. Last night all I did for PP was crop, desaturate, and bump up the contrast a little. I really like this shot so I think it's worth some time to try to improve :

Thanks,
Charla

John Desjarlais

Charla,

One thing I learned a while back is that desaturating actually loses a ton of tonal ranges, hence my advice to use the channel mixture instead. Here's a great tutorial (at Bob Johnson's Earthbound Light site) on using the channel mixer:

http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/black-and-white-photoshop.html?search=channel+mixer&bool=and

I too take a lot of pics of my kids, and I agree it's worth the extra time to preserve the more special images.

Have fun!

photofreak

I love this shot, Charla! I'm partial to "pensive shots." I tend to get carried away with them in my photo shoots and, have to remember not everyone likes those.
I can't offer anything as far as the conversion, other than I think it looks great! I'm still trying to perfect my b/w conversions, myself.
Thanks, for sharing the shot!
Mandi
www.mandraleephotography.com

John Desjarlais

Mandi,

I'm glad you said that about pensive shots. I too am a sucker for those, particularly with my kids, but they never seem to register with my wife (she likes them smiling). Here's one I took of my son about a year ago (I was sitting right in front of him with my macro lens), and it remains my favorite shot of him. It's amazing how pensive a 3-yr old can look!

Charla

I like pensive shots as well if you hadn't already guessed but I get harrassed by my parents (the grandparents) if I don't show happy kid shots. I did a series of super close-up (eyes, nose, mouth) and expected to catch heck for those! Surprisingly they went over pretty well.

Thanks for the encouragement Mandi, and John the tutorial you linked was very helpful. Thanks for taking the time to offer some help. Your son is little cutie, don't you have a shot of him smiling??? Just kidding, love the pensive shot.

Here's a reworked version of the B&W (I hope it's an improvement!) and the original shot for reference.

Thanks Again
Charla

frg

The B & W does work better for this shot.... nce one

germaine_sba

After seeing the original, I think the b&w works best on this picture.

I think the desaturation worked well on this shot.

IMHO, how you convert to b&w depends on the original picture (and maybe what mood you are in when you do the conversion ). Right now, I tend to go into the channels pallette, try the red, green, and blue channels to see which one gives me the "feel" that I want. Then I convert to gray scale and begin playing around with levels and curves.

At any rate, I think in this shot you managed to get the smooth skin tones that young children have.

Thanks for sharing.

Charla

germaine_sba wrote:

After seeing the original, I think the b&w works best on this picture.

I think the desaturation worked well on this shot.

IMHO, how you convert to b&w depends on the original picture (and maybe what mood you are in when you do the conversion ). Right now, I tend to go into the channels pallette, try the red, green, and blue channels to see which one gives me the "feel" that I want. Then I convert to gray scale and begin playing around with levels and curves.

At any rate, I think in this shot you managed to get the smooth skin tones that young children have.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks so much for the comments. I still have so much to learn about Photoshop. Everytime I read a post I think "Oh you can do that??? Cool!" Unfortunately I'm working on a very old computer with a very old version of PSE, so things don't always quite work the same for me. Hopefully sometime in the next year I'll be able to upgrade. Until then I'll keep pluggin away with what I have.

Charla

Charla

frg wrote:

The B & W does work better for this shot.... nce one

Thank you, I definitely like the B&W better also.
Charla

ian408

B&W really worked for this one (as did your crop)!

System

ian408 wrote:

B&W really worked for this one (as did your crop)!

Agreed.

As an aside, for B&W I tend to mix down my color channels RAW (as well as play with the exposure and black levels in Lightroom) and then save a jpeg to retouch in PS.

Charla

Thanks Ian & Truth. I appreciate the comments. :

Charla