1. Suck the colour out

Bulling all the colour out using the Desaturate tool will certainly give you a monochrome image, but all colours are treated equally, and the result can be flat.

Try it: Image > Desaturate

2. Let Photoshop suck the colour out.

This lets Photoshop make a pre-set guess at the value of the various colours in the image to create shades of black and white.

Try it: Image > Mode > Grayscale

3. Control how the colour gets sucked out.

By setting the intensity of colours as you convert to Black and White, you control the tones in the monochrome image. There are 2 ways to do this, depending on which version of Photoshop you have.

Try it: Image > Adjustments > Black and White. (There are some fun presets in here to look at too.)
For older versions of Photoshop, try Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer. Be sure to check the “Monochrome” option.

These three methods are just scratching the surface, but will give you the fundamentals for understanding how colours in an image will affect the final tones and composition of a black and white image.

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September 2009 Newsletter

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June 2009 Newsletter - page 1

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May Newsletter - Page 1 (1.2MB PDF)

May Newsletter - Page 2 (256kb PDF)

This is the first “how to” workshop for 2009. Club expert, Bill Millar, will guide you on the fundamentals of taking a well exposed picture. If you’ve ever asked “How come my picture is so light/dark/not right”, or then this is workshop is for you.

Other experienced club members will be on hand to help you work out how Bill’s excellent teaching will apply in the use of your particular camera.

Date: Saturday June 20th at 1.00pm til 3.30pm
Place: Coldstream Community Centre
Cost: $FREE
Bring: Your camera and its manual! (yes, that wad of paper that came with the camera!) and paper/pen.

October Newsletter 2008

Open Photoshop and open the image you wish to resize.

Now, in the top margin go to Image>Image Size and a box will appear with information of the width and height of the image in pixels at the top and in cm/inches at a certain resolution below. We want to resize in PIXELS.

At the bottom of this box are three tick boxes, tick these three boxes. The middle of this is ‘Constraint proportions’, this ensures the ratio of height to width stays the same, otherwise the image will get squashed and look strange.

Now, where it says ‘Pixel Dimensions’ and there are numbers in Height and Width, choose the ‘Height’ box and type in 768 in this box. This will mean you image will be resized to be 768 pixels high.

Hit OK and its done!

One last critical step - go to File>Save As and save the image as a different name, preferably in a totally different folder so you do not ruin your original. Renaming images at this point is a good idea, please use “1 Your Name” (and for subsequent images “2 Your Name” etc so we know who’s images they are when loaded onto the laptop at camera club). Photoshop will give you the option of what file type you want to save it as, choose JPEG, then in ‘JPEG Options’, slide the Quality scale up to 10. Hit OK.

How to do it - Resizing in FastStone

Open FastStone, selet an image on the thumbnails (so it has a blue ring around it to show its selected).

On the top menu bar go to Tools>Batch convert selected images . There will be a bunch of files names etc, dont worry about any of that, just go to the bottom right of this box where it says “output format”.

Output format, click on the up/down arrows and select JPEG images.*jpg as you want to save the image as a JPEG

Below this is Output folder, I would very strongly suggest you select a folder other than the one the image currently sits in (you can hit ‘Select’ and then ‘create’ to make a new one). This is where the image will be saved to.

Next is Resize. Tick the box and click Advanced Options. This will open a box that allows you to do a bunch of different things. We want the first page/tab “resize”. Tick the box which will open the resizing info. You now have 3 options to resize in pixels, in percentage or based on one side. Select Pixels. Below the pixel info there are 5 tick boxes, tick the middle on only (Preserve Aspect Ratio), leave the others unticked. Now type 768 in the ‘New Height’ box. OR, you can click the up/down arrows of the
box and select 1024×768 Hit OK

Tick Rename if you would like to change the name of the image and name it “# Your Name” and set the counter to 1. Note, if you selected more than one image at the very start of this process, all images selected will be resized and seubsequently named 2 Your Name, 3 Your Name etc.

Dont worry about the other tick boxes. Hit Start. Job is done.

Some further explanation that may help - from Feb 2005 Newsletter - resizing for email and printing

Using a JPEG file format is only half of the way towards getting your image file sizes down to something manageable. The other thing to consider is the image’s physical size (in cm) and how much detail there is, or the image’s resolution in dpi (dots or pixels per inch).

Physical size. When looking at a computer monitor, it is easy to forget that the image we are looking at has an actual physical size – we usually just blow it up till it fills the screen and that’s about it. However if we are looking to email an image, there is no point sending one that is a metre square, when a 17” computer monitor is only about 25×32cm (bit bigger for those with 19” screens, but you get the idea). So one way of reducing file size is to reduce the physical size of the image down to the size of our monitor. How do we know if the image is filling the screen or not? Usually somewhere around the margin of the image there will be a % figure which increases as you blow up the image. You may have noticed that if you increase an image in size it eventually ‘goes pixelly’ – so individual pixels can be seen. At this point you have just gone over 100% so the image no longer has the resolution to match the size you want the image to be. What you want for email is to have the image at 100% and just fill the screen. If it is filling the screen at 25%, then the image is 4 times larger than it needs to be – both in physical size, but also in kb needed (ie big file size!).

Resolution. The other issue is how much detail your monitor can produce, and therefore how much to give it. Just as there is no point sending a huge image to a small screen, there is no point having amazing resolution (lots of dots/pixels per inch) when your monitor can only ‘see’ a small amount. Most computer monitors are set to about 65 to 75 dpi, so there is no point sending an image with a resolution higher than that.

Most of what I have mentioned thus far is for emailing images. If you want to print an image, the process is exactly the same, except you need to set the size and resolution for the print you are about to do. If the print is to be an 8×10”, then set the size at 8×10” (20×26cm). The only difference is the resolution that a printer is able to ‘read’ and use is much greater than your computer screen. Most printers can print at about 300dpi, so set the resolution figure to that (check your instructions to find out what is actually is, or err on the higher side, say 350 or 400dpi). Easy!