DHolman opened this issue on Feb 25, 2005 ยท 7 posts
DHolman posted Fri, 25 February 2005 at 3:01 PM
Postwork for me starts at RAW image conversion. I use Phase One's Capture One DSLR Pro v3.6 to convert.
I already know that I want these to be in B&W, so I am using a version of C1 that I have applied a B&W color profile to. It lets me see the images as B&W from start to finish. But now I know I want this to be toned too and have a bit of a diffused look (I've worked the look out over a hundred or so earlier images).
I start by adjusting my black and white points. I then adjust my color temperature, tint, exposure and contrast to get the B&W image that looks best to me. In doing the contrast, I only give a slight increase. I want the image to be a little flat as I know that will work best when I add my toning and diffusion technique to it.
Image is converted and in Photoshop. I do some slight blemish removal with the healing brush. I like skin texture and blemishes work in some images, but I will remove them (freckles or moles or whatever) if I think they distract from the overall image.
With blemishes taken care of, image is ready for toning. I use a curve layer to tone the image. Gives me control over not only the tone color, but also extremely fine control of the tone across shadows, midtones and highlights if I need it.
With tone layer in place, I create a new layer above them all and "merge visible" to that layer. I then gaussian blurred that layer with a 20-30 pixel radius.
The blending mode of the layer is then changed to overlay and opacity adjusted to what I like. Doing this not only adds a soft diffusion look, but pulls up the contrast almost to where I want, giving deeper shadows and richer tone.
Finally, added a small contrast enhancing S-curve above it all. An S-curve is a curve where you lock down the center (so input 128 has an output of 128). You then pull a bit of the shadows low and the highlights high (so input 50 might become input 47 and input 202 might become 205). This stretches the difference between the highlighs and shadows a bit, while protecting the mids, giving you increase contrast. The name comes from the fact that the curve takes on an "S" shaped.
Done.