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If you want to convert a color photograph to black & white in Photoshop, there are a bunch of ways you can do it. For the longest time, I used the Hue/Saturation dialog—taking the saturation down to -100. The shortcut for this is: Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate. This works well, but I found a new technique in the oct/nov issue of Photoshop User that I'm hooked on called ring-around. I won't go into the gorey how-to details, but it uses "Channel Mixer" adjustment layers to produce twelve separate images with different settings from the source color channels.



It's hard to tell from these tiny images, but each one is slightly different. (Take a look at the dot in the center of the clock.) Each image is a blend of color channels in different percentages. One is 100% red, another is 75% red and 25% green, and so on. Using a Photoshop action, this whole process is automated. So I create the 12 images with a click, and then I can go through each one to see which had the best conversion. From there, I go back to the original image and mix it to blue 75%, red 25% (or whatever) in the channel mixer with the output set to Gray. (If the final output is print, you could print all of the samples to see which looked best in its final form.) It takes a bit longer than hitting Desaturate, but I like the extra control over the conversion.

My dad has an impressive collection of antique radios. While I was there last week, I took a bunch of photos of the dials. I'm always amazed at the wide varieties of styles that used to exist because radios made today pretty much all look the same.

I love the fonts they used and wonder if they were standard or designed specifically for the radio. In their day, these boxes were high-technology for the home user.

When I took photos of the dials a couple years ago, I converted the images to black and white: Radio Dials. This time I have a better camera, and I think the colors turned out well in the photos.

My late discovery of Camera Raw format continues. I picked up Camera Raw with Photoshop, and I'm learning quite a bit about how to adjust raw files. As a bonus, I'm learning about how digital cameras work. (I'm going to call my camera a photon recorder from now on, because it sounds like something from Star Trek.) I learned early in my digital photography experience to underexpose everything, and bump up the midtones later in Photoshop. I could almost always salvage an underexposed photo, but if highlights were blown out there was no saving the photo. Camera Raw works differently, though. Completely blown highlights are still trouble, but if you expose the shot toward the right-end of the histogram, you can bring the exposure down in Photoshop and get more detail in the photo. So far I've learned that getting correct exposure when I take the photo is even more critical with raw, but that erring on the overexposed side can have good results. Even learning that the human eye sees shadow-detail better than highlights has me thinking about exposing for shadow-tones as I take photos. (Instead of thinking that the shadows will be all or mostly black in the final photo.)

This book has already taught me a lot about reading histograms, white balance, and color balance. It's written for people who know their way around Photoshop, but I think novices will pick up quite a bit of digital darkroom theory. Reading this has been like watching over the shoulder of a Camera Raw pro as they fine-tune their photos, while they explain why they're making each adjustment, step by step.

Hey Oregon amateur photographers, you may be interested in this photo contest: Photo of the Year. There's a $15 submission fee that goes directly to the Multnomah Outdoor School.

After reading this article about the RAW image format—Raw Advantage (click this title on the lefthand menu)—I decided to try shooting some photos in RAW instead of JPEG. After playing around with it, I feel like I have a new camera. When you bring up a RAW file in Photoshop, you get a RAW import dialog that lets you make level/color adjustments:



The adjustments here seem much more flexible than the standard levels dialog. One drawback is a much larger file size—RAW files on my camera take up around 5MB per photo instead of the 1-2MB JPEGs. Another is that the built-in thumbnail viewer in XP doesn't understand RAW files, so if I make the switch I'll have to go with a 3rd party thumbnail viewer. This article at Microsoft, Managing Your Digital Camera's RAW Files, recommends IMatch so I'm trying it out now. I don't necessarily need all of the image-catalog stuff that goes along with it. Any other good (hopefully free) RAW thumbnail-viewing programs out there? And, of course, going through this import with each photo will add more time to the whole process, but it seems like it'll be worth it.