I'd like to take a poll to see what everyone is using as far as software for working with their pictures. I use Photoshop CS2.

As you can see, a lot of my photos are black & white. What techniques do you use for converting your colour pictures to black and white? I've gone through quite a few different techniques over the years. I have just found this really great way and thought I'd share it with you. The link is below. I suggest that you create and Action for this, that way you can have a one click conversion, with a couple tweaks afterwords. I've found this to be a great conversion 95% of the time.

The conversion is closer to the bottom of the page, but it's quite interesting to read the whole page.

I hope you enjoy this all as much as I do.

http://www.designbyfire.com/?p=17

Cheers,
Rob

Primary I use Adobe LightRoom (beta 4.1) for image processing and management (Rather than Photoshop CS2 with Bridge). It has the core features of Photoshop I use (Namely Camera RAW), but adds a nice interface and easier image management (with a 22K image library.. it becomes an issue quickly)

For black and white processing, rather than letting it do it by hand, i play with the desaturation functions and loose the colours until I'm happier .

However, with lightroom i can cheat, and apply different image filters, so instead of a black/white split, I can have Yellow/Blue split, which gives a nicer tonal range

Thanks for your input Kevin, I'll look into Lightroom. Sounds like a great product.

Rob

have a look at this page on photoblog It shows how I used lightroom with filters

Also look at Adobe Labs to see and try LightRoom (if they're still allowing downloads of it)

Kevin

I just downloaded The Gimp, an excellent piece of freeware, that is said to be just as good as photoshop.

In order to install The Gimp, you've got to have GTK Runtime Evirionment, which you can download here.

Mostly, the only retouching I do on my pictures, are contrast and saturation changes. The Gimp allows my to change saturaion for each particular color and not just the overall saturation, has very good marking tools, and a lot of good-for-nothing-but-very-entertaining effects, if you just like to play around, or do advanced retouching.

Example of the saturation-effect for a particular color (click to enlarge):

I currently use the Gimp on Linux.. but some photos I will upload were processed in PS7 (I did it when I was using Windows).

I use the gimp on linux along with jpegtran, a commandline tool for rotating and cropping jpegs without recompression. There's also a script called jpegautotran that automatically rotates images according to the orientation tag in the exif data, which is very handy if your camera has an orientation sensor. Another nice tool is jhead, which can transplant exif data from one file to another in case it is lost somewhere along the processing.

I have PSPXI. Still learning how to use. I had no idea what I was doing when I bought it, and still have no idea, how to effectively use it. Other than cropping, a little levels and curves, sharpening, simple stuff.
I would really like to learn how to change/eliminate backgrounds, and do de-saturation then adding slight color back. As you can see I know some of the lingo but that's not getting me very far. Does anyone know of a live course in PSPXI. I have seen many courses for Photoshop, but none for this. If anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated. Thank You.

I tried GIMP once, kept crashing on my machine, that was a while ago so I should probably give it another go - it did look impressive.

stakato - you can do that in photo shop, in the saturation dialogue there's a drop down menu where you can select individual colours. Not sure you get all the options shown above, but similar.

I'd thought I'd update on what I do and how I do it (this more of a work-flow with Digital Darkroom processing in the centre of it)

Post Image taking - image is backed up to a portable hard disk (I use a Jobo Giga One for storage)

Image review stage 1 - Images are plugged straight into Adobe Lightroom (Version 1 release). Inital tonal corrections are made (or reversed) and images thumb-nailed out. Masters archived onto main computer for storage and backup purposes

Review Stage 2 - Image review and critque, throwing out copies of images that are not required or don't meet my needs (commonly reducing a set of 100 down to a set of 30)

Proccess: This is when I set the image up to the correct colour/creative balances, crop, red-eye and dust reduce using Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (built into LightRoom). A mixture of colour corrections

Web destined files: files that are heading for the net are resized to a maximum of 1000 by 1000 (with a crop ratio as appropriate) to minimise download times and protect the full sized images

Export to Photoshop and Print: For images that are destined for printers, this is when an image pumped out at full resolution, and a template is used in Photoshop to expand it to the destination sized paper (10 by 8 for example is a common destination for me, so I have a 10 by 8 template, with borders set). This is then pumped into a high quality JPG and then goes off to the printers.

I don't tend to print at home: Its one less disaster to worry about, so I send my work to a local lab (round the corner from where I live who also process my 120 film), or ship it up to Photobox/Snapfish for mass processing (if its a bulk job)

Phew!

A friend turned me on to Adobe Lightroom about 4 months ago , i've used it ever since . The software has been updated and i'll tell ya i think it totally rocks . As well i use it with PS2 and its changed my post production entirely .

I have Gimp and have used it for other projects. The pics I have here are straight from my SD card. If it aint broke dont try to fix it, it might come out real bad (lol).

Gimp, all the way! It rocks, I use it for digital graphics, stiching together photos, logos, projects, photo editing, desaturating (Black and White effect), and anything else. These are extensive free add ons, and can be adapted to use Adobe Photoshop componants. Nothing beats the Gimp!