June 2008

Troy bought an old manual zoom lens from Ebay last year. This week, he decided to shoot with it. He had already taken several fantastic shots in Sand Park when he realized that the white balance was set to incandescent lighting. “So that’s why!” “I was wondering why my photos had a bluish tint. Not to worry,” he said. “You can fix it in Photoshop, right?” “Sure,” I thought, quite smugly.

Well, instead of color correcting the photos, I decided to convert them to B&W and experiment with Photoshop’s Channel Mixer. The Channel mixer is equivalent to using color filters in your camera. I just finished reading the module on Filters for my NYIP course and I was very eager to put my new knowledge to practice.

Why color filters in B&W, when it’s “black” and “white” and colors don’t actually matter? Because sometimes you may want to enhance a certain element in your photo by increasing the contrast of your gray tones. You do this by using the right color filter to make one color stand out. This particular color will appear lighter than the other colors in your B&W image, thus increasing contrast.

In this picture, I wanted the water, especially the droplets, to stand out – so I increased the blue channel (equivalent to using a blue filter). This also corrected Rinoa’s skin tone, giving it a sun-kissed glow.

For this next picture, I increased both the red and green channels (equivalent to using an orange filter). The orange filter gave the photo a nice tonal range and defined the action that was captured.

(1) A blue filter would have drowned the splash of water and weakened the action shot while (2) a red filter would have made the water murky and given Rinoa a bad complexion – I don’t want it to look like an episode from Jaws!

And for this last picture, I used a yellow filter (an unequal increase in the red and green channels) to soften my skin tone.

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