In today's video we are going to see how to
convert a color portrait to black and white.
Hello, friends?
My name is Emilio Hernandez.
Well, as I told you at the beginning of this video, today we are going to see
how to convert a portrait to black and white starting from that color portrait.
Well, there are many many techniques to go through,
to convert a color photo to black and white.
Each of these techniques will be better or worse, depending on the image.
In our example today we are going to use a technique
in which we apply or use
the 'lab mode' of photography.
And well, we're going to mess.
Well, we are already in Photoshop.
This would be the work done on this photo.
already converted to black and white, and this would be the starting photo.
I'm going to delete the group that contains all the layers to create the effect.
I delete and we stay
just with the photo.
With the photo of our model.
The first thing I want is a copy of this image.
But I don't want a copy on another layer of this same document.
What I want is to have a copy of the document.
I come to image.
Duplicate tells me a name, I don't care about
the name because I'm not going to use it at all.
Then we will delete it.
I now have two documents with the same image.
Ok, let's go to the second document, the one we created by copying.
In this document the first thing I do is convert the image to
LAB mode.
As you can see, in principle there is no change in our image.
The only thing that changes is the way Photoshop is going to work with the colors.
And I'm going to come over to the channel palette.
In the channel palette what I have is the 'luminosity' layer
of our image. And then we have a layer 'a'
and a layer 'b' that store color information.
Then we have another layer where is the sum
of all these layers, just like the RGB mode.
Remember, we would have a red channel, a blue channel and a green channel.
And also a channel appeared that was the sum of all, which was the 'RGB' channel.
Well, in this case we also have:
the luminosity channel - 'L', channel 'A', channel 'B' and the channel 'lab'.
What I'm going to do is position it over the Luminosity channel.
I'm going to hit 'Ctrl-A' to select the whole image and I'm going to hit 'Ctrl-C'.
In this way I just copied this image to the computer's memory.
I go to the other initial document, I go to the tab
‘layers’ and on the layers press ‘Ctrl-V’.
As you can see, a new layer has been created for me with what we
had copied in the other document: the luminosity channel layer.
And as you can see we already have the photo converted to black and white.
But man, let's give this black and white a little more depth.
Let's give it more contrast.
I will come to the channels.
If you position yourself on any channel you will
see that they all show the same information.
Therefore, positioned on any of them, with the key
'Control' held down, I'm going to click on the thumbnail of the channel.
Photoshop has created a selection.
A selection of illuminations.
But I don't want a selection of the
highlights, I want a selection of the shadows.
So by pressing 'Ctrl-Shift-I' I invert that selection.
Now I do have a selection of shadows.
I position myself on the RGB channel, I go back to layers and as
I am positioned on the black and white layer that we have brought
from the other document, I'm going to create a new solid color layer.
And I'm going to select the color black.
I click 'OK', and as you can see now I do have deep blacks on this image.
The photo has gained a lot in depth.
Well, we see how the black colors are too intense.
What I'm going to do now is change the blending mode.
I'm going to put a blending mode on it.
Overlay or if I want something softer,
select the soft light blending mode.
In this way we see that the blacks are still very intense.
I'm going to lower the opacity of the layer a little bit.
I'm going to leave it around 80%.
Let the stripes show.
The stripes of the hat begin to be seen.
But I want the blacks, for example
on the jackets, to remain a deep black.
On the other hand, by making this black and white with this
technique, we can give a certain shade of color to our image.
If we reopen the solid color layer
by double-clicking on its thumbnail,
We change the color of this layer and see how we
can give it certain shades of red, for example.
Go towards the greens or towards
the blues, depending on what we want.
In my case, for example, we are going to take the photo instead
of black and white, we are going to convert it to a sepia tone.
So I would leave it there more or less
with that orange and now I would play
with the darkness of the cape and we could leave it there.
We give okay?
And as you can see, we have given it a certain sepia tone
to our image, which was initially in black and white.
And well, we would have finished converting
our color image to black and white.
You have seen that it is very easy to use the 'color
lab' mode, we use the luminosity layer that we generate
in a different document than the one we are working on.
We bring that layer of luminosity over our image.
We paste that layer of luminosity.
We go to the channels and select the dark areas.
We create a selection of dark areas and
I create a solid color layer for it, which will have a mask with the selection.
In this way we make the blacks blacker, deeper.
is added a
depth and volume to the image.
Or we can give it certain color nuances, as has
been the case that we have left it in a sepia tone.
In the example photo, which I had previously prepared, I had
not made this change and the photo was in black and white.
I had not done this
toned to sepia tones.
Finally, it occurs to me that we could do this since it would be an extra.
We have the photo, I like it better in black and white.
I'm going to change our image again.
I'm going to take her to the blacks.
With the black and white photo, I will obtain a result image
of all the images we have so far: pressing 'Shift-Ctrl-Alt-E'.
There is.
And on this image, we are going to come to 'filter',
'others', 'high pass'.
In step something we are going to give it a radius, so that the
textures of the beard, of the skin of our model are more noticeable.
'Okay'.
We are going to put this layer in blending mode, the 'soft light'.
As you can see, with this layer what we do is give more focus to the image.
And well, here is today's video.
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And I wait for you in the next video. See you soon.