Here’s a quick before and after that adds some punch in black and white. On one of my many Cleveland Zoo visits, I found this incredible talking bird. Well, the bird didn’t really talk but seemed to do everything else.
She carefully followed the stage handler, walking back and forth on a small wooden plank. At one point, she started to mimic or perhaps mock, depending on your point of view, the event by raising her foot every time the handler raised her hand.
Hello, right hand up, right foot up, wild applause and then a healthy dose of bird feed. You get the idea.
| Before | After |
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| Click to Enlarge | |
Later, in the lab, I messed around with the channel mixer and apply image to get this textured black and white.
The major change was adding the contrasty blue channel to the red and green ones. Usually, the blue channel is pretty noisy but since I shot this at ISO 100, that wasn’t a problem.You can do this by image/apply image/ and then select the blue channel with blending set to normal and opacity 60% or layer/new adjustment layer/channel mixer/ and decrease the red and green channels from 100% to 40% with increasing the blue to 60%. Either gets the same result. Afterwards, I used one more channel mixer adjustment and checked the monochrome box to get a black and white.
Some final burning and dodging took out the background and gave the bird a portrait look.
Now down to the lake for some cool water…
| Time to cool off |
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| Click to Enlarge |
[Excerpted from Photography Insights, Volume 2, by Scott Ober, MD, Copyright © 2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED]
