Flosse’s IT corner

Personally I am a huge fan of Black and White photos. Since I shoot mostly in RAW I can always still manipulate things after the shot but you should still go at a shot trying to visualize it in black and white before hand.

What a huge difference a few minutes in Photoshop can do to an image however, I will show you in this tutorial.

This is basically an extension to the previous tutorial with he black fill layer and we will use that layer here as well, amongst other things.So first off, open the following image of a nice carousel (in color) in Photoshop.

Next we will convert the image to greyscale by clicking the menu item IMAGE and then MODE -> GRAYSCALE as you can see here:

At this point you have 3 layers, the background, the black and white photo and the fill layer. Now we will give this picture an artistic touch and duplicate the photo click on the photo and use the shortcuts CMD+j on a mac or CTRL+J on a PC). Select the new photo layer and click on the menu item FILTERS -> BLUR -> GAUSSIAN BLUR and give it a radius of about 8 pixels. The resulting image is rather, well … blurry. So then select the blending mode of that layer and make sure it is on NORMAL and change the opacity to 50%. Notice how the image is starting to look dreamy? You can see the progress here:

Next we apply the softlight layer discussed in this tutorial.

Now for the last part. We will create a new Fill layer with a gradient as you can see here:

We use the following settings:

• Gradient is white to black
• Diamond style
• Angle is 0
• Scale is 120%
• Reverse is selected
• Align with Layer is selected

Now the resulting image looks dreamy and nice in black and white. Also the highlight is the actual carousel with the clouds. And what a change after just a few minutes with Photoshop. You can download both large versions by clicking on the image.