My first attempt at doing greyscale portraits

[Dantheman4334]

Don't do that. Take the color photos, open them up in Photoshop, dump the color channels:

Open a curves layer, switch to the A channel, and click on the lower left "dot" (this is your greenest of green), and set the Output to 0. Do the same in the upper right corner (this is your magenta of. . .uhm magenta) and set the output to 0. Switch to the B channel and do the same. Boom, all color drained from the photo (which is, to me, more pleasing then a simple desaturated or RBG Channel Mixed image). Then pop over to the L channel, and adjust your L-curve as you see fit (since you are only adjusting the brightness levels of the photograph, it better handles transitions between blacks/whites). Profit.

Oops. I tried doing what you said, and the photo just came out all black. it was like the brightness had gone from it.

 

[ANDS!]

About the only way it can go all black, is if after you have made a new Curves Adjustment Layers, you are working in the "L" channel (LAB has three channels, luminosity aka "brightness", A - Green/Red, and B - Blue/Yellow), and you set the upper right corner Output to 0. I'm pretty sure thats what you did no?

 

[rdzmzda]

ummm first off why is every portrait cropped to landscape and secondly blur out the background just takes away big time

 

[ANDS!]

I'm gonna buy you some punctuation for your birthday.

 

[rdzmzda]

hmmmm.punctuation.huh.well.just.be.glad.i.put.spaces.on.the.last.one.i.guess.i.didnt.read.where.this.was.a.gramar.forum.thats.my.bad.oh.hey.did.i.use.enough.punctuation.for.you.now?

 

[ANDS!]

Then, because you've been such a good well behaved lil' man, I'm gonna get you the Red Rider BB gun you've wanted all year. You betcha.

To answer your question: Because the OP wanted to shoot it landscaped?

 

[rdzmzda]

sweet mommy said i would always poke my eye out with that thing.....oh but let me rephrase then i believe that the landscape look does not work for portraits and as such they are appropriately called landscape and portrait funny how that works isnt it

 

[ANDS!]

You've never seen landscape ORIENTED portrait shots, or portraited ORIENTED landscape shots? Goodness me, you really need to crack open a few magazines. Might I suggest a quick trip to FLICKR.com so that you may disabuse yourself of these Photography Golden Rules? I think you'll be a better composer for it.

 

[rdzmzda]

haha.....fair enough i agree completely sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt and generalyl i dont like the golden rules....however when the background is some nasty a$$ art cabinet or whatever that is in the background it doesnt work and if u think so i would say maybe you should go check out flickr cause your compositions would benefit from it

 

[rdzmzda]

just outta curiousity ands! does this mean we cant be friends?

 

[ANDS!]

Sure. Just as soon as you show us some work so that we can see how its done.

 

[GeneralBenson]

i find the background very distracting.

the contrast on my monitor looks a bit much, but that could very well be an equipment issue at my end.

I agree. I find the BG rather disrtacting. Could have drop the background another 2 stops, or found somewhere with less busy white space going on. But the background is only slightly darker than teh fore and has just as much color variance and activity going on.

 

[Dantheman4334]

well there wasn't much I could do for the background on such short notice. I'm sure if I had more time I could have found a better place to take them. I also didn't bring my normal lens or a tripod (again, short notice), so thats out too.

 

[dtornabene1]

I'll take any help I can get. But what do you mean "lack of variation in the color channels"?

ANDS is correct to a point. LAB color corrections is not going to work for every conversion, this is a misconception. However, working in the LAB color space will work in this case.

One more however... Please take no offense by this, it sounds as though you are newer to B/W (black and white) conversion. With that said, using the RGB color space and using the channel mixer is a much easier way to achieve what I believe you are looking for with these photographs.

This is what I meant by lack of variation in color channels. Do your homework before working in the LAB color space, it does have its limitations and can be difficult to use and understand. This is not to say never use it, but it should not be used for every photograph.

I am an Adobe Certified Expert and have been for over six years, but don't take my word for it. I just want you to start in a way that will work for all images. Do your homework.

No matter what any of us believe, one thing we will not disagree on is using the camera's B/W function. This is simply a bad idea. Use the color image and convert later.

Hope this helps.

-Nick