Special Effect Example 3

Here is and example of a soft, glowing Selective Black & White.

I will start off with this where I left off on the restoration of this same original photo (see previous posts).

This customer wanted a Selective Black & White version of this photo. She asked me to leave the flowers red and the eyes blue. So, after the restoration, I carefully selected the tulips, inverted the selection, and feathered it so that it would look like it glowed. I then inverted the selection to select the all of the photo except the flowers copied it.

After all of this, added a bright blue to the eyes instead of keeping them her natural blue, because blue can be difficult to see against shades of gray. I then used several different softening filters to create several different “glowing” versions of this photograph, presented them to my customer, and she chose this one.

To turn this into a Black & White, I used a completely different program. You can make perfectly acceptable Black & Whites using Adobe Photoshop Elements Adobe Photoshop Elements and absolutely incredible ones using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Photoshop CS3, but I prefer using another program altogether, called The Gimp. It has a great Channel Mixer, which allows you to choose the color “channels” you want to use to create your Black & White. There really is no “correct” combination of colors, it depends on the colors and lighting of your original photo, how many main colors there are, and how dramatic you want the final product to look.
To see this photo “Magically” become Black & White see www.GinisMagic.com http://www.ginismagic.com/.