My workflow procedure as requested by Rob.

[ANSORB]

With much apologies to Antonio for neglecting to answer his question. Since both you and John has the same query I'll try to answer it both on one pass.

John, your idea sounds good. In fact, some would probably do it that way. However, on all my images, I always make my edit depending on what the image tells me. Should I make it shouting with detail and sharpness or should I make it subdued? This is the reason why a straight b&w conversion doesn't work for me. You can easily make a straight conversion just by hitting the black and white tool in photoshop (I think it started to appear from CS3 onwards) but it won't give you that much pop and punch since the contrast is the same. However, since you have all this specific color sliders available to you during the creative black and white conversion you can emphasize and de-emphasize the colors depending on your b&w edit. That is what I do. I add a level adjustment to it to use all the available contrast on the image and further push it by adding another curve adjustment layer. The curve adjustment layer is more versatile since you can adjust only a selected range of tone by using multiple points on the adjustment curve.

I have the old Silver Effects Pro version 1 with me so sometimes I use that on my b&w layer. At times, I like the versatility of the lightroom sliders so I use it, too, import it in photoshop as a totally independent layer of the original colored image. As they say, there are many ways to skin a cat. My process is just one of the ways, your suggestion is another way, too. In the end, what matters is if it is easier for you to use that technique and if it goes along with your intended effect. Hope this helps.

Thanks Jiro. I thought it was something like that but there are so many possibilities I thought I might be missing something else. The interesting thing is that they all produce different black and white renditions and consequently different effects on the final colour image. One of my favourits is to look and see if I can get a head start by a channel blend into a duplicate layer (eg red channel to darken blues or green channel to put more detail into faces) and then setting that layer to luminosity mode but there are many possible variations. Using channels for luminosity blends and for making accurate masks taught me a lot about how Photoshop works as well as being useful but I sometimes wonder how many other people use them that way. You don't often here them mentioned.

Channel ops are a bit of a hobby horse so I won't go on.

[Brownbear]

Thank you for this. Very informative and helpful for those learning to post process their images. Truly appreciated.

Hello, Rob. I decided to post your request as a new thread so others can benefit from it as well (if they find it useful, LOL!). OK, here goes:

NOTE: All images uploaded are just screen captures. The original file is saved as 16-bit .tiff files for my archive.

1. This is a new image that I am going to edit for this tutorial. I will call this shot - The colorful bird. This is the shot "Straight Out Of Camera" or as what they name as SOOC.


As you can see, it is acceptable but barely. It needs some adjustments to make it pop!

2. First thing that I normally do is to concentrate on how I would want to crop the image. Since I was greatly influenced by Donald recently, I decided to go with the 5X4 crop ratio. This is the cropped version from the SOOC image:



Now, it looks more "balanced" to me. This is where the fun begins... doing the adjustment in LR!

3. This is the adjustments that I did inside Lightroom:



As you can see,

3a. I bumped the exposure a little bit to increase the brightness of the image.
3b. I recovered some of the highlights by adjusting the Recovery Slider a little bit.
3c. I want the lower midtones to have some "body" in it so I bumped up the fill light a bit.
3d. The blacks are not that saturated so I adjusted the black slider up a bit to saturate them.
3e. The Clarity and Vibrance Sliders was bumped up to increase the contrast on the midtone areas.
3f. The HSL Sliders was adjusted to either saturate or desaturate some of the colors individually based on my personal taste.
3g. Then, I corrected any lens anomalies by activating the Lens Profile Correction feature for the lens that I used to take this shot.
3h. Last but not the least, I applied luminance and color noise reduction on the image.

It is interesting to note that I did not apply any sharpening at all during the whole editing on LR. I will apply the sharpening on the last part of the whole process but not in this state.

4. Now, the final LR edited image is exported to Photoshop for final tweaking.

4a. Upon export, I did a b&w conversion copy of the image. This is the b&w version with some further adjustments on the contrast and brightness levels.



5. Now, selecting the b&w layer, I changed the blending mode of this layer from Normal to LUMINOSITY. Here is the result of the blending mode change:



This is the thing that makes the whole image look sharper and with full tonal contrast. Unfortunately, for this shot, it's a bit too bright so I decided to do some selective dodging and burning for some "drama".

6. Here is the result after the selective dodging and burning.



Does it look better now? I think so. The image is already sharper because of the high contrast effect of the blended b&w layer so I will not introduce any more sharpening on this image. I forgot to mention, while doing all of this, I am working on the 16-bit version of the image the whole time.

7. Since I only share my images via the web, I convert it to 8-bit jpeg file and I usually set the largest side to about 1500 pixels. this somehow works for me when Flickr further downsizes it to 1024 pixels as their largest dimension for a free user account holder. This is the final image with the border and signature:



Hope this helps, Rob. Cheers.

[ShaneS]

Great results with this technique - thank you for sharing it Jiro!