I have a project on the go but have hit a bit of a wall. I need to alter the attached picture to black and white in a way so that the lettering and the surrounding rings are in white and the entire remainder is plain black, this will then be loaded into my 3d app (Bryce) to be used as a heightmap. My partner is into photography so we have Photoshop CS3 (only just got it) so niether of us have the skill or knowledge of how to do this. The 2 handles in the centre need to disappear and the lettering behind reads "THETFORD". Can anyone do this for me or send me a step by step how to???????.

Cheers
GG

Since all you need are the two rings and the text in white on black, to be honest I'd be tempted to redraw it from scratch. You'll get a better result for the heightfield and it would be a lot quicker than trying to get this into perfect monochrome.

Well... What you want is possible, very possible even, but it will take some time to do it good. Since none of us have offered to have a go at it yet, (neither will I, sorry dude, but my time is money;-), I suggest you do the following;

Press ctrl+Shift+U (cmd+shift+U on mac) to make the image black and white. Then click ctrl (apple key on mac)+L to adjust the levels to get a nice greyscale image. If you only want black and white (no grey), use Filter;Sketch;Photocopy and adjust if needed.

Use the clone stamp to get rid of the handles. Selecting a similar area, pasting it over the handles and softening the edges with the Erase tool and  adjusting the colour/brightness would probably be better, but harder, so try the Clone Stamp tool first for that. Use alt+click to select the area you want to clone and then 'paint' over the handles.

As for the lettering... I would do that afterwards in Illustrator with the Type on a Path tool by placing the manipulated image and then create a circle and click on it with the type tool. I'm not sure how to do this in ps, but there must be a way, after all, there always is...

I kinda feel bad for brushing you off like this by sort of telling you to go figure it out yourself, but you're asking for quite a lot here. Most of us learned the trade by trial and error and I honestly believe that that's the best way to learn. So here's my final advice; lock yourself up inside for two or three days, google your *ss off, try, fail, try again, fail a couple a more times and you'll eventually get what you want, you'll see...

Good luck

I had already thought of that and my several attempts using different apps even Nero CD label creator would'nt do it. Tried with P/Shop, Illustrator,Word ,Excell and even Hexagon, searched for tuts as well. Thanx anyway.

Cheers
GG

@Mikewave. I must have been typeing as you were posting. Thanks for your input, I'm on a PC (no apologies) but I'm sure I can follow your suggestions. I thought it was going to not be that easy to do.Thanks once again.

Cheers
GG

Dunno if this is useful or not, but I toyed with the pic.

Image adjustments>channel mixer>monochrome adjustment

Filters>Other>Highpass

Image adjustments>Brightness & Contrast

I think those are it. Not quite separated into only black and white though, but might be useable for a heightmap as is. Played with threshold at first, but it doesn't antialias and some pixels in the bumpy spots just dropped out... So I fiddled a bit with other things instead.

Hmmm... Another thought occured, might be able to use select color-range and paint over it while selected to further enhance the contrast. You could try it with this version at least.