One of the ladies this morning wanted to convert a picture of her son to black and white. Let me be the first to admit that I’m not the best at achieving this in PSE manually, but I have a ton of actions that can do this for me, with a little tweaking. I’ll show you my before and after first, then scroll down to see my steps.
- I started with Squeaky Clean. Seriously people, download this action. (BTW, she just loaded a new action called “Berries and Cream.”)
- I then adjusted the skin tone (I went to adjust color for skin tone under enhance) – I then toned it down a little because it was too warm.
- I cropped and filled in the background by stretching the canvas (just use the marquee tool to select the area you want to stretch, click ctrl+T to do a free transform and stretch – Coffeeshop has a great tutorial on this).
- I used Pioneer Woman’s Bring Out the Eyes action and then dodged the eye just a little more to make it pop.
- At this point, I felt like the background was a little noisy. I selected the baby, then selected the inverse, created a new layer with just the background (ctrl+J), clicked filter and gaussian blur. I used a layer mask and then used a soft black brush to paint around the edges of the baby so the baby wasn’t blurred.
- I may have used a soft (like super soft, 10% opacity soft) vignette to finish out the look.
Now, to convert to B&W:
- I used Nelly Nero‘s Classic B&W action – you do need to tweak the layers just a little to get it right.
- I also dodged the eyes a little more to make them pop again since the action made them look black.
- I think I used Coffeeshop’s Baby Powder Room to soften just a little and lighten the area around his chest (it was also too dark).
