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Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Tutorial #1 Pushing your Black and White Conversions!

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Good morning! These tutorials are written for the person who has taken an interest in photography, but doesn't know where to start! Or maybe you take photos for fun, play around in Picnik, but want to learn some different techniques. I hope my upcoming blogs may be of some help in pushing your work to new levels.

There are always multiples ways to do any editing or processing technique with your images. I am going to show you one method using a really interesting, free software called Picnik. If you want more advanced options, Picnik does offer, at cost, a premium software. I'll try to provide tutorials for both interfaces.

Give it a try, ask questions, and if you have a finished image using this tutorial, post a link to share your work! Have fun!

NOTE:

With tutorials- each is just a baseline to retrain the eye and get you going in the right direction. More often than not, you will have to adjust the settings to your personal work. It's impossible to use the same exact percentages for every photo because we all shoot our images with varying exposures, lighting situations, etc. So, while you're running through the tuts, make sure you play with the settings and adjust accordingly.

Happy editing/processing!


PICNIK (BASIC)


  • Open image, Under the EDIT tab, Go to Exposure>Contrast (I bumped it up to 7).

  • Go to CREATE>EFFECTS>Convert to BW.

  • This will place you on a greyscale BW.

  • We still need that pop, so while still under EFFECTS, go to BOOST. I placed my % to roughly 23%.

  • Return to the EDIT tab and select EXPOSURE again. I reduced the exposure by 1-3 and increase the contrast by 2.


For the basic program, this should take your BW's to a new level! Let's see your work!!

basic bw The extra boost:






PICNIK (PREMIUM)


  • Open image, Go to EDIT tab>Exposure>Contrast (I bumped it up to 7). I also opened the advanced feature and moved the Highlights slider to 5.

  • Go to CREATE>EFFECTS>Convert to BW.

  • This will place you on a greyscale BW.

  • We still need that pop, so while still under EFFECTS, go to BOOST. I placed my % to roughly 10%.

  • While still under the CREATE tab, click on the ADVANCED option. Select CURVES.

  • You will want to do a modest “S” curve here:



Premium affords a little more logical flexibility with your conversions, let's compare:


Simple BW: Picnik Basic: Picnik Premium:


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