White Photos
How can I make my black and white photos more defined?
I was fortunate enough to be given a Rebel XT however, I have a lot of learning to do. I am on full auto and the pictures come out beautiful however, they are more shades of grey than they are black and white. My printer is an HP Photosmart C4100 series and I am using Kodak Photo Supreme paper.
I have the computer configured to "best" quality.
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
In Photoshop Elements, and probably Photoshop, you can simply remove all color by hitting [SHIFT]+[CTRL]+[U] and you will get a black and white image. I prefer not to do it this way, however. If you just hit [CTRL]+[U], you will get the Hue/Saturation adjustment screen. From this screen, you can cut all colors but the one you choose to favor to -100 and then take the Master saturation down to something like -80 until you get the desired effect. This will leave the bare slightest trace of a color in your picture and this is so much more interesting than actual black and white. When I was printing photos, I used to choose one paper or another for the native color of the paper. If I wanted stark black and white, there was an Agfa paper that was pretty good. Most other papers seemed to color the image somewhat in much the same way as Kodachrome made things more saturated and red while Ektachrome made things cooler and blue.
Adobe must have heard from other users, because Photoshop Elements 5.0 has a new feature that lets you do exactly what I used to do with the Hue/Saturation tools. Under the "Enhance" menu, there is an item called "Convert to Black and White." If you open up this menu, you will see a screen with eight samples of your image. The samples show more red, less red, more green, less green, more blue, less blue, more contrast and less contrast. You can adjust the intensity of the effect and there you go. They also offer presets for portrait, vivid landscape, scenic landscape, urban/snapshots, newspaper or infrared effect.
Once you have seen the final result, you will not be satisfied with plain old black and white from your digital photos. The desaturation technique for older versions of P.E. and the "Convert to Black and White" in P.E. 5.0 make much more realistic B&W prints, if that makes any sense at all. Like I said, you never really saw ACTUAL black and white prints from a darkroom anyhow and this copies that effect.
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