Black and White Color Technique

Here is a nice photo of a gal looking into a mirror. An often shot wedding image that gives the viewer a look at a brides moment of contemplation and thought as she looks introspectively into the mirror. Strictly black and white images hold a very special affinity in and of there own. They are timeless and provide a sense of grounding in their own purity.

I will not be the one to slight the black and white purist but in the age of digital we have the ability to much more easily add an aspect color enhancement to the black and white image. So here we go.

This is really a quick effect on the black and white image. Four simple adjustment layers applied to the image and it takes on a whole different effect. First is a Solid Color adjustment layer set to a Color Burn blending mode. You can use what ever color you like but for this example I settled on a color of R:222, G:198, and B:144. The mask that comes with the adjustment layer get shot to black to block the effect and then a soft brush paints it joust over the skin area.

That could have been enough but I wanted to push the image a little further so I copied the  Adjustment layer by pressing Command-J and setting the masks all to black. You can tell by the red color in the adjustment layer icon that the lips were going to be really punchy so I dialed down the Fill Opacity to 26 so there would be just a hint of lip color. The Eyes adjustment layer may not have been necessary but it darkened the iris to give it a bit more depth.

Finally I wanted to add a vivid contrast to the whole image so I painted in at 10% opacity the blue eye shadow. Here is a big difference in opacity. When painting at a reduced opacity you are setting the brush opacity in the brush attributes bar just below the Photoshop menu bar. Buy using this method you can paint without releasing you mouse or pen and get a consistent "amount" of effect. When you repaint, you can build-up the effect by however much you have the brush opacity set until you reach 100% opacity. Once you have the effect painted in, it may look overdone as in this case. Here is where the layer opacity saves the day. You can see that Eye Shadow layer has an opacity of 68% attached to it. Having those value appear automatically would be nice but I type these values in so I can look at the layer stack and see all the settings at once.

So the final image gives a different depth to the original black and white image. Again, nothing against the original, just a different take.

Take care for today... Doug