Looks good, in CS2/PS do you add a layer and desat the image as I do (then pull RGB chan etc), some convert to grayscale? Thats a mate's XJR snapped with the 5d, heres mine snapped with 40d
There are half a dozen ways to make a B&W in CS2, the most popular being Channel Mixer. I'm not a lover of it myself and use it as a tweak after the event, as it were. Going from colour to monochrome is going to flatten your contrast and I find channel mixer can blow some of the more subtle shadow and highlight detail just in the conversion, If you don't do a 'before' and 'after' you might not even notice. With an RGB file you have 8 or 12 bits of colour data in each of the red, green and blue channels. Remember that this colour data is also your tone data, so if you just grayscale your file, making it a single channel, you're dumping two thirds of your tonal information before you start. Because of this, I tend to use 'Desaturate' and use the tweak tools best suited to what I'm trying to pull out of the image. In this case, I desaturated, made a duplicate layer and changed the blending option to 'Multiply'. This piled on the contrast. Because I wanted to acentuate the chrome, I sharpened it more than I would normally, to make it 'ping'. Then I did use the dreaded channel mixer, left the red channel well alone and backed off the green and blue channel to separate out the mid tones better. Years of shooting black & white film through colour filters pays off here. Lastly, because you can't help but blow highlights adding this much contrast I blew over the white bits with the history brush indexed to before the channel mixer point to reveal any detail I might have burned off there.
Cool, same path as me I-ish, desat the image with a new layer etc Yeah that image is hosted by myalbum.co.uk and its crap and old snap, norm use photobucket but that one was to hand on the old online album Looks cool though..
Oddly it looks crap on my 'tool box' monitor. When I slide it over to my Eizo, I even impress myself.
It's typical as I have Vista on my main edit PC and the ver of LR is for 7+ so I have LR on my Mac...but no PS on the Mac (rolls eyes) sooo I may have to run 7 64 on my edit PC but it's an older board with dual SLI cards with old drivers YAWN....soooo..... well, you know....yawns again....lol
Hmmm, you're going to need to j...ji...jiggle some stuff around then bud. 7 is the way to go. Much better than Vista and so much less infuriating than 8. A lot of variables... You need something to tip the decision balance one way or the other.
Yeah I know, I have it no problem, the issue is the system is cool, she flys and all that, BUT I have a few bits of hardware that the driver development fell apart after Vista, its got to be done but as you say some...unplugging is required, plus I can shovel some more ram in the old girl too, no big deal, just friken reinstall nightmare, goto get a new boot disk too, save balling up my old boot disk, maybe a hybrid SSD oh how you gotta love it...
Lightroom is great for batch processing. Take 300 images run through them, select the ones you want then boost vibrancy in each one with a single click, likewise white balance. I still use PS if I really want to get to work on an image mainly because I haven't cracked layer masks in LR
Yeah, the majority of my professional customers have switched to Lightroom, particularly the press gang and social photographers. They're the most likely to hose down an event and want to make the same correction to every one. Then the keen amateurs (clubbers) see it as a cheap alternative to PS that has most of the toys they're likely to need. Hence my decision to run it alongside it's big brother, so I can learn my way around it prior to the inevitable phone call... It seems to render colour in a different way to PS, or, it might just be thrombosis of the viewfinder. I don't know, and I could do with getting to the bottom of it to avoid tears at bedtime.
I can't use photoshop at all, i tried it once...too complicated for me! Lightroom is easier as far as simple editing goes, but complicated stuff goes way over my head. I find it easier getting it right "in camera" first off, and applying little tweaks if the image needs it.
My desktop pc is about 3 years old now, although when I buy kit I spec it to last a few years. Upped the ram and changed to SSDs and it flys along quite happily on Windows 8.1, not SR71 fast but definitely fast jet. Very weird when the only noise you here from it is the cooling fan, but I can forgive the lack of total silence as it is quite old and if it bothered me that much I could just swap it. It has Lightroom 5.2 and adobe Photoshop/Premiere Elements 12 which is a lot more than I need, but if I need something else I can just install gimp.
It's horse for courses, definitely. My work is more about damage limitation and restoration in this area. In a perfect world I wouldn't even need to look at a client's work before I print it, but in reality there's sizing, colour, exposure and a myriad of of issues with a file that need to be addressed before ink hits paper. That's where I gain the benefit from Photoshop or GIMP. When I started I had a diary full of photographers, who were then making the painful transition from analogue photography, where all their grading was done in absentia at the lab and suddenly were having to process their own work and one or two artists, who only new their own medium and didn't have the remotest idea how to translate their work to a different one. Now, it's completely the other way around. The current generation of phots accept the post processing workflow as part of the shoot, so I only do repeat work for about half a dozen professional photographers scattered all over the country, but I'm up to my eyeballs with artists desparate for prints but with no idea how to make them. Bless...
