Photography blog: 8.5.09
Last time I showed you some photos of my new grandson and I said that I would tell you the best way to convert photos to black and white. You might think, oh that's easy, it's just black and white. But that's not so. There are many conversions that you can do.
There is no right or wrong way to do it and it all depends on what you like. How you change to black and white may well depend on what you have photographed.
A scene with lots of green trees and grass and blue skies will need a different conversion to a portrait for instance.
If someone has very red/pink skin you can make their skin look much better with the right conversion and truly awful with the wrong one.
You could buy some expensive software to do your black and white conversions but there is really no need to.
In fact one of the best bits of software for a beginner is something called Picasa which is a free download from Google.
In the old days photographers used filters on their lenses to create a specific black and white photo but nowadays we don't need to do that.
I've chosen this photo of my road after a rain storm and showing a rainbow because it's got lots of colours in and you'll be able to see the effect of different 'filters' on it.
When you first load Picasa and each time after you've downloaded photos to your computer it will chunter away adding all your photos to its database.
Once you've found the photo you want to work on, double click on it and you will see a screen like this.
See Rainbow1.
Click on the third tab on the left called Effects. Then choose Filtered B&W.
Picasa will automatically convert it to grayscale black and white which is ok but not very exciting.
On the left you will see a 'rainbow' box called Pick Colour. A dropper will appear as you hover over the colours, click on it and see how your picture changes.
Rainbow3 shows how the photo looks when I pointed to the red end of the range.
If you look at what was the red car in the foreground you will notice the difference the most in the greys.
Rainbow4 has a green filter. Now look at the car in the foreground and also at the trees
Now look at the effect a blue filter has on the trees in Rainbow5.
Next week the effect of different filters on portraits.
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Weather for Tring
Tuesday 07 February 2012
Today
Light snow
Temperature: -7 C to 2 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: -6 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: North east
