5 Second Tip

I have my kids home for break for the next week, and we'll probably paint together. Ever let your kids paint with Crayola (pan) watercolors and you end up with an ugly, mixed-up pan of muddy colors?

Buy watercolors in a tube. A 12-color student set costs about $4. You just squeeze out a nub of each color on a disposable plate for your child to use. If he needs more, squirt another nub on the plate. When all of the painting is over, toss the plate.

If you have more than one child, each child gets his or her own plate and colors. So now you've saved yourself from either having to buy more pans or from one child wrecking the color for the other kid.

And just like pan watercolors, if the paint dries out, adding water brings it back to life. Easy-peasy.

Crazy Headgear

Well, about 4 months ago, I did a photo-shoot (I use this term extremely loosely) that I will most likely never in the foreseeable future be able to tell you about due to its top-secret condition, but it centered around the amazing headgear of one adorable Rosie (of Riveter fame).

I stumbled upon a Flickr page with a similar theme: documenting an adorable baby's adorable hats (this baby is a stranger to me).

Same day, different cruising-around-the-Internet session, I found my new favourite baby gifts: (click the photo)

(We all know I have an unhealthy obsession with sharks.) The best part is that they make the hats also big enough for adults. Not that I'm going to get one. The perfect one is the Orca, it has little baby harp seals on the end of the ties (Check out the details.) I could buy one and have my daughters share it between them (Thing 1 loves orcas while Thing 2 loves baby seals.)

B&W: Finally, Printing in Color

Occasionally thoughout this tutorial I've mentioned color when we all know I keep titling each post "B&W: Something or Other." Here lies our last big hurdle between B&W film photography and B&W digital: grey. Film and photographic paper has no problem reproducing a nice true grey. But a printer doesn't print in grey (well, not any printer that we normal people might have). It prints in black on white paper. This has a number of limitations that mostly boil down to the midtones, especially the lower midtones, being too dark and basically looking rather muddy. The opening shot is that exact same picture with all the color stripped away from it. The only difference is that the top one is printed in greyscale (only black ink) while the bottom pic is desaturated and printed in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK). In picture #1, notice how Kira has been letting Rosie work in the coal mines again.

What happens is, in greyscale, the lighter the shade of grey, the fewer the little specks of black ink, to the point that your printer can print so little that it's faint. In the darker tones, it's greyness is a measure of how much breathing space is between these crowded little points of blackness, and it's often not enough to really notice.

Remember this:
I want you to download it, and load it into Photoshop or Elements. Print it just as it is (might I recommend rotating it 90 degrees first?). Then convert it to Greyscale (Image--> Mode--> Grayscale). If it asks if you want to throw away your color information, say, "Yeah, what the heck." Print it again. Now compare the two. You'll notice that both look B&W, but the greyscale image will show a reduced number of greys. And the 50% grey border is significantly darker. Only the top 25% of the greys (the light greys) look right. This shows up only after you've printed. The image looked fine on your screen. This same problem will come up when you print your photos.

(A note here: when I say, "you print," this includes when you have someone do the printing for you. I only printed the Rosie the Riveters above so I could scan them in for example.)

So why is the color-printing of B&W better? There are no colors that your printer prints that could combine to make grey. So that isn't it. Remember how when we talked about tonal value, there was the idea of inherant value -- the yellow stripe was light and the blue stripe was dark? A B&W printed in color utilizes that principle. So the darkest grey might be mostly all black, the next grey has black and cyan points, the next increases the cyan and adds magenta, next increases the white spaces, etc until you get to the light shades of grey that the printer can handle fairly well with black alone. And the printer does all of the thinking for you!

So, what can you do about it?
#1: As we discussed earlier, tint the photo and then desaturate it to about 10%. Sure, if you desaturate it all the way to 0%, as long as you keep the image in RGB mode (don't actually work in CMYK), then the printer will manage the colors. But occasionally (read: nearly all the time) this will translate into a sort of noticable cast to your image. Often a weird pink (at least on my printer). If you pick the color that it leans towards, then you've basically picked the color-cast.

#2: You could always do a duotone or tritone. I did a whole write-up on this, but have ditched it because A) Elements can't do this, and B) most printing services that you're likely to use don't support this. Basically, in #1, we were taking advantage of the 4 inks that your printer can use to combine to make/approximate grey, well duotone does the same thing but limits itself to 2 (duotone) or 3 (tritone) inks (black plus something else typically). If you want to fiddle around with it, convert your image to greyscale (Image--> Mode--> Greyscale) Then under mode again, choose Duotone. In the dialog box, click Load. I recommend the Process colors because they are true to a CMYK printer. Play around with it.
#3: Imitate Duotone with RGB channels. Once again, Elements falls short. In RGB mode, Control-M for Curves. At the top you can change the dropdown menu for each color individually. You can then use Curves on each color (like in duotones) to make the colors stronger or weaker at different tonal values. A very brief note about RGB vs CMYK. Printers print in CMYK, but we almost always work in RGB, even if we know we're sending the work to a printer. The reason for this is that while you're working an image on your computer, you're viewing it in RGB (Red-Green-Blue). In digital, that's also how it took the picture. By working RGB, you are dealing with a basic standard for how the image looks right now. Many printers won't allow you to send them the image in CMYK because they have perfected the algorithm to convert for that specific printer. Converting it yourself, you take a big chance that the image won't look the same as it did on your RGB monitor. So stay in RGB.

You're done. Save that puppy in the lossless format you're using (PSD). Then save it again under a new final name in a format that you will need to share (JPG, TIFF, BMP, not GIF). Most likely it will be JPG. Upload it to the Internet to a webpage or print service, or pop it on your memory card and take it to ye olde Kodak Kiosk.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go drown myself in colour. Spelled with a "u".

B&W: Noise, Film Grain, Artifacting, etc

So, today, I'm going to be brief. (Ha!)

The graininess that you see in an analog B&W photo is from artifacting. This is inherent to the film itself. This is why you don't see it in a digital photo (as much -- more on that later).

Why do it? It makes your image look gritty and more authentic. Much like tinting your image sienna. (Sienna comes from the archiving chemicals used back in the day. The pictures that didn't have that treatment rarely survived, so we often don't see the range of other forms of monochrome that existed then.)

In my Rosie the Riveter picture, I didn't use film grain because I had used a very soft masking technique that also looks fairly authentic to the 1940's. So, you have to decide if you really want it. If you do, proceed with options 1-3, going from really cheap and fast all the way up to slow and quality.

#1: Just run the film grain filter on your picture. Don't do it right on your picture. Create a grey layer (remember, Layer-New-Layer-OK, then Edit-Fill (Layer)-Contents (dropdown) 50% Grey. Finally, set the layer blend mode to "Soft Light"). Then Filter-- Noise-- Add Noise... Click Gaussian and Click Monochromatic. Set the amount to something reasonable (look at the preview) like 5%. Ok. Now, before you freak out, go into Filter-- Blur-- Gaussian Blur... Fiddle with the radius (I used 1.0 px). I then moved the opacity of this layer down until I wasn't scared by the changes. Turn the layer on and off to see if you like what you've got.

#2: Granularity varies based on exposure amount and film speed (ASA or ISO). Underexposed film looks grainier than overexposed, but when the shadows get dark enough, you can't see that graininess. In short: the film grain really shows up best in the midtones, but different in the highlights and shadows. So, for more accurate grain, we need it to be stronger in the midtones. This is Photoshop specific: So, remember the steps to make a grey layer, but after you add your new blank layer (before you fill it), this time go to Select-- Color Range-- In the Select drop-down, choose midtones. NOW fill it with 50% grey, set blend to soft light, and go through the steps in #1 with the noise and the blur. Repeat for the Highlights (blend mode: linear light) and Shadows (blend mode: vivid light). Tweak the Opacity as needed.

#2B: In Elements, it's a bit more complicated, but still doable. Create your blank layer (blend mode - soft light). The click on the image layer (with your photo in it) to make it active. Select the Magic Wand tool, set the tolerance to 50, pick a place in the image that looks to be about 50% grey and click on it. Now activate the new blank layer, go into Edit-- Fill Layer-- 50% Grey. It will fill the selection. Don't deselect yet. Create another new layer, activate it (blend mode-soft light). Go into Select-- Inverse, then fill this selection with 50% grey. Do your noise and blur thing on each grey layer. Turn down the opacity on the 2nd (shadows and highlights) ton something lower than your midtones layer.

#3: Some people complain that the grain pattern is too small. You could create your layer(s) of grain in a smaller copy of the original, then copy and paste the grain layer into the full-sized original, stretching it to fit, in effect blowing up the grain particles. At this point, just download some free Photoshop/Elements Actions, and have the computer do it for you. (no example of this)

As usual, play with it. See what you like and remember that what works in one picture may not suit your fancy in another.

Black and White: Photography - part 3

Rosie the Riveter

Okay, so you've made it this far. Below, I will discuss what I did to make this photo look like it does. There are lots of ways to go about things (probably easier ways), and each picture will need individual tweaking. There are many Photoshop Actions to convert a photo to Black and White, but they don't take into account what each picture needs, and I like to be fairly hands-on and in control when I edit a photo. You'll notice that I don't give hard and fast settings for most things. You will need to look at your image and decide when an effect to too much or just right. Every step of the way these programs show you exactly what's going on either in actual changes or in preview. And feel free to undo something and try it again.

A nice way to keep things clean: work all of your changes on new, progressive layers. Open the image, and copy the layer (in the layers palette, drag Layer One to the "New Layer" icon.) Make a change to Layer 2, then copy that layer. Make your next change in Layer 3, copy, etc. Then you'll have a record of what you've done, and you can toggle the little Eye icon next to the top layer to see the changes. Feel free to download the picture in Step 2 (where it's been touched-up) so you can play along).

	Photoshop	Elements
1	Load the picture. Immediately save in some sort of happy lossless format, preferrably the one that your programs supports (PSD for Adobe). This way the image does not degrade and the program enjoys maximum compatibility.	Load the picture. Immediately save in some sort of happy lossless format, preferrably the one that your programs supports (PSD for Adobe). This way the image does not degrade and the program enjoys maximum compatibility.
2	Clean up the photo. (I used the healing brush and a lovely masking technique.)	Clean up the photo.
3	Increase contrast with curves: Image--> Adjustments--Curves... We're making an S out of a straight line, turning up the highlights and turning down the shadows	Enhance--> Adjust color--> Adjust color curves -- Then Advanced Options We're making an S out of a straight line, turning up the highlights and turning down the shadows.
Remember yesterday and the awful tonal value example? Remember how the 1st B&W was almost completely solid while the 2nd B&W showed the various shades of grey from the same values? Well, the first example was desaturated, so it showed straight value. The second was converted to greyscale, so it showed luminosity (perceived value) Here is where we can go two ways. I prefer to desaturate. But preserving the luminosity of the color is nice too. I might do both, just for kicks. But here's Saturation:
4	Image--> Adjustments--> Hue/Saturation (Cntl-U) No B&W photo is really black, white, and neutral grey. It will have some tint to it. Check the "Colorize" option. Slide the Saturation down to around 10 or lower. Then move the Hue slider until you get a color you like. Tweak until you're happy. Press OK.	Enhance--> Adjust Color--> Adjust Hue/Saturation (Cntl-U) No B&W photo is really black, white, and neutral grey. It will have some tint to it. Check the "Colorize" option. Slide the Saturation down to around 10 or lower. Then move the Hue slider until you get a color you like. Tweak until you're happy. Press OK.
5	Go back and mess with the curves again. Really juice up the contrast. Don't be afraid to have true white and true black on your image. Bland is boring. If the color tint (sienna in this case) is too strong, repeat step 4, turning down the saturation again.
6	Crop. Create a layer with 50% Grey. Layer--> New Layer--> OK Edit--> Fill--> Pick 50% Grey and OK Set blend mode to soft light (in the layers palette). Use the paintbrush set to a large soft brush (hardness turned down to zero), the brush mode set to Normal, the opacity and flow set to something low (like 30%). Press D to reset your default colors, making black the paint color. Now start painting the edges one brush stroke at a time. Keep Undo (Cntl-Z) handy. Go over it a few times until you're happy. If things get too dark in some areas, Press X to swap the fore- and background, and make 50% grey (#808080) your top color. Paint with grey to restore the too-dark areas. Press X to swap back and forth.

Tomorrow I'll talk about why it's important that you don't leave your images in pure neutral B&W if you ever want them to be printed. Also, how to prepare your image for printing -- duotones and more. And I'll get around to a nice cheat for film grain/artifacting.

Thanks to Kira for having the most beautiful baby ever.

Black and White: Photography - Part 2

Ok, since yesterday's post, I have two corrections (and two notes) to make:

First, when I mentioned recreating "film grain and color-filtering" what I meant was "B&W film and color-filtering." The film grain is optional (though I will talk about it).

Secondly, I went and checked out a lot of free online photo-editing places (including Photoshop Express) and was unimpressed, so just shell out the $100 to get PS Elements (or if you're M, wait for your sis-in-law to get off her lazy butt and send you her copy).

Note 1: In case I didn't make this clear (and I don't think I did), this tutorial will be for your digital pictures, not matter what kind of camera you have. I hope that I didn't give anyone the impression that you have to have some sort of expensive D-SLR with an equally expensive lens. Point-and-shoot pictures are great. Heck, even a scan of a print will be just fine. It just needs to be digital. And in color.

Note 2: Today I will try something new: spell colour/color in the shorter, spell-check friendlier American fashion.

Yay! Here we go! I'm going to bombard you with lots of facts that you may not care to know, but I think it's nice to know the why's of what you're doing.

Remember how I said we need the color information and also that we're going to pretend that we have a saucy color-filter attached to our camera's? Pretend you remember.

The color-filter on a traditional, analog/film SLR (the kind with the big removable lenses and color-filters) sounds like something you don't need. Thanks, but no thanks. But it does magical things. An orange filter makes people look nicer, reducing blemishes and the such (good for taking pictures of freckly red-heads). A yellow filter is just generally nice. A red filter gives drama, lightening warm tones and darkening cool tones.

A B&W photo speaks to you, not with color but with tonal value. But when you take a picture, looking through your viewfinder, you see the colors, and may not recognize the range (or lack thereof) of tonal value. Have a look at this picture:

	As foul as it is, it seems pretty busy with lots of distint rectangles going on. Now, let's remove the color, but leave the tonal values.
	Suddenly, everything disappears because each of the colors was of the same value. (Technically, I cheated a bit. Color also has a perceived value. That's represented in the final pic.)
	But what a color filter would do is change the tonal value of specific colors. A red filter diminishes red and makes blue and green much darker (remember the secret decorder glasses that let you see the blue message hidden behind the red squiggles on the side of specially marked cereal boxes?) Okay, this is probably vastly more information than you wanted. There's about 47 ways to achieve this contrast push that we'd get from a color filter, and I'm going to talk about maybe 3.

The other thing going for B&W analog photography is the film itself. It has a special triple emulsion, so it has three different sensitivities with each exposure -- one each for highlights, shadows, and midtones.

So load your photo-editing program. Open your picture. And tune in tomorrow. I promise, no ugly pictures in Part 3.

Black and White: Photography - part 1

Okay, so did anyone notice that in my post about B&W art there was no photography? No Ansel Adams? No Dorothea Lange? Shame on you.

The next few posts are the culmination of my series on Black and White. I'm not going to showcase the great B&W photographic artists, I'm going to help you showcase your B&W photo skills. Digitally.

In 1999, we had our first child, and additionally, we bought our first digital camera. Digicams were a new-fangled item, and ours was huge and fairly low-tech. It wasn't an amazing advancement in photography in our household. That same year, Nikon came out with the D1, the first practical Digital SLR (single lens reflex) camera, and at $5000 and 2.7MP, it was a wonder to behold, but most professional photographer eyed it warily and with distrust. Since then, we've bought more digital cameras than we have children, and our current Canon ELPHs (we have 2) are the size of a credit card, taking 6 MP pictures. The D-SLR gave the traditional film SLR a run for its money, and most professionals went digital. Heck, George Lucas filmed Episodes 1-3 of Star Wars in digital. But B&W photogs stuck to their traditional film, even as B&W film and B&W processing became more and more difficult to find. Why? because there is nothing in the world quite like a B&W taken on film, and digital has a very difficult time recreating that.

When producing digital B&W's, there are two major things that you will be recreating post-production to achieve that authentic film feel: film grain and color-filtering.

I'll be using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe PS Elements for all of my post-production work. (Alas, I don't have Adobe's Lightroom, but if you use Lightroom, you probably don't need any help from me anyway). But before you can load any photos into your program, you have to take the pictures.

Rules for taking B&W digital pictures:
#1: Take pictures at the highest quality that your camera allows. Some people set the quality to a medium setting because it saves them space on the memory card. Why the heck did you buy a 6 MP camera and then only take 3.2MP pictures?!? Don't be miserly with your memory card. If it won't hold more than 100 top quality digital shots, buy a bigger one. I prefer a 2G card. My hubby prefers two 1G cards, but I worry that when I need to switch to the fresh card, that will be the moment when the alien craft flies overhead. Anyway, take top quality pictures.
#2: Take a lot of pictures. Notice how with you digital camera you aren't having to buy film anymore? Notice how your memory card is reusable? Yes, take a lot of pictures. Take 5-10 shots (mix them up a bit) for every one you want to get. This, of course, requires that you have a good-sized memory card.
#3: Take full-colour photos. Many digital camera's have a B&W setting. Basically, the camera throws away the color information. I don't know why anyone would do this. The greyscale image does take up less space on your memory card, but as we've already discussed: don't be stingy with your memory. Or maybe people enjoy this feature because it lets them see the picture on the LCD screen in B&W so they can tell if it's worth taking. What?!? A) the image that you take (and see on the screen) is never going to be what it looks like finished, B) it's always worth taking. Remember, it costs you nothing to take a picture and then delete it later, C) you need the colour information for processing later, and D) if you're not careful, you'll take a whole slew of B&W photos of the annual flower show because you forgot to switch back to colour.
Note about #3: if you are taking RAW images with a D-SLR, you technically _can_ take them in B&W mode because RAW keeps all the colour information. But, still, there is no real advantage to this.
#4: Avoid the flash. No, not The Flash -- the flash. Flash makes pictures crappy. Obviously, if you can't help it, go for it. But you probably won't be framing that picture later. (There are exceptions, but I'm not running a flash tutorial right now.)
#5: Save lossless. Some cameras don't have this option, so if your camera will only save as a JPG (lossy), don't fret. But if you can, go ahead and save as lossless (RAW, GIF, PNG, or TIFF). Secret confession: On the Nikon, I save as JPG instead of RAW because I can get take about 3 times as many pix, plus it increases the number of pix per second I can take. This make Ariel crazy.
#6: You will need a photo-editing program. I am an Adobe fan-girl, so that's what I use. Much of what I discuss later will be in basic image-lingo, so though the tool itself will change from program to program, if you use Picasa, Picnik, FlauntR, etc, you should be able to get the gist of it. I will not be giving a tutorial on how to run proprietary Photoshop actions, so don't worry too much.
#7: Rid yourself of the foolish notion that a B&W picture is just a colour picture with the colour stripped away. Look, greyscale colour pix suck. End of story. Don't believe me? Tune in to Part 2.

B&W: Food

Even lazier today, you get to click over to another blog to read today's celebration of Black and White!

Black and White: Fashion

Okay, I admit it. This post should actually be titled, "B&W: I'm really tired." I broke my DH's computer this morning, learned all about mobo's, chipsets, Northbridges and Southbridges, and all sorts of things that sound like vacation locations, but actually have a lot to do with why I spent the morning in a state of fear. I have fixed the computer (so my marriage is saved), but I was a bit wary to get back on, so now you can enjoy a nearly text-free post.

DH went to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, for work a few months ago. He actually found the place to be rather pleasant, and while he was there he went to a fashion exhibit. No joke.

So here we have B&W -- as fashion -- as art.

Does this make my butt look big?

Black and White: Art

B&W is about contrast. It strikes a chord visually because it reduces an image down to the most basic design elements: line, shape, texture. There is no fussing about with frue-frue things like color and temperature.

Our PAL-to-NTSC television converter was feeling touchy for a few days and would only broadcast in B&W. The girls still watched their weekend cartoons faithfully, and when we fixed it, they requested that we put it back to B&W. It makes us look at what's truly there, and see the hard edge of things.

So here's a bit on B&W art that I dig. From about day-one, I've loved Aubrey Beardsley:

The silhouette is such a powerful image that iTunes based their whole ad campaign around it (yes, that's a llama).

I adore this bowl from Diana Fayt over at Etsy. (I really dig her color stuff too, but that's for a different time.)

Finally, here's Paul Morrison. Click on the picture below to see his webpage at Alison Jacques Gallery, and you'll see that not only does he do these bold images that resemble woodcut prints, but his giant steel silhouettes are pretty rocking too. That is one honkin' dandelion.