Free Stock Photography

adigitaldreamer.com has free royalty free stock photography available for download. This is a great resource for anyone wanting to build a website or magazine on the cheap. The stuff I've seen is pretty high quality, which is rare from a free stock photo site, so I thought they were worth a highlight. Go give them a look.

Convert RGB to Black and White

There is no one "right" way to convert color photographs from color to black and white. In fact there are tons of ways to do it, and they all have their advocates. If you want to see some other methods, I'd recommend taking a look at a tutorial at digital Photography School entitled How to Convert Color Digital Images into Black and White Ones, or at another one from GimpGuru.org entitled Converting Color Images to B&W using the GIMP. Both of these detail several different methods, all with their own merits.

I've been researching the subject quite a bit, and I think I've settled on a favorite method of my own, and I'm going to detail it for you now. We'll be using lessons learned in the last couple of posts on luminosity masking, so if you haven't read those yet, you might want to at least skim them to get the idea.

The photograph for today is another CC licensed shot, originally posted to flickr by user J. Star. Thank you J. for this truly amazing photograph.

Okay, let's get on with it.

1. The first thing we're going to do is decompose to LAB to get the luminosity layer, so click Image>Mode>Decompose. Select LAB, make sure decompose to layers is checked, and click OK.
   
   Discard the A and B layers, and just set that aside for a few minutes.
2. Go back to the original color shot and click Filters>Colors>Channel Mixer. Check both of the boxes for Monochrome and Preserve luminosity.
   
   You do not actually have to check the preserve luminosity box. What this box is supposed to do is make the sliders dynamically adjust so they all add up to 100%. I have not found this to be the case, but maybe I'm just doing it wrong. If anyone can shed some light on that subject, I'd be very appreciative. I recommend checking it anyway just to be sure.
3. Step three is highly subjective, and will probably differ from image to image, so use your judgement here and pick values that look good to you. I'm picking Red - 70, Green - 25, and Blue - 5. I'm doing this because there's obviously a lot of red, not much green and very little blue in this photograph.
   
4. You may at this point decide that you are finished. The channel mixer is a pretty powerful tool, and you can get very good results with it. I personally think the highlights on her back are a little too high, and the darkness on the back of his hand is a little too dark, so I'm going to use that luminosity layer to create some masks and adjust those areas a bit. Please see Monday's post on luminosity masking to get an idea on how to do that.
   

Here is the final result:

I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial. Please remember there are many many ways to convert photographs from color to black and white, and I highly encourage you to research the subject to find your method of choice. Thank you for following along.

Edit: I realize the EXIF data on the photograph says it was edited with Photoshop Elements 3.0. I assure you that was done by the original artist. All the work done in this tutorial is done in the Gimp.

Gimp Users flickr Group

Just bumped into the Gimp Users flickr group. (Thanks again Charles.) From their description:

Just to let the world know that some of us prefer to use "free software".

They've got over 1,100 members in the group. Check them out!

LightZone for Linux

Charles Tilford (a.k.a. listentoreason) sent me a tip about another photograph editor called LightZone for Linux. I haven't had much time to experiment with it, but it looks to be a pretty sweet little package. This is $250 software on Windows or Macintosh but free for nerds linux users. Score! Here's a quote from their homepage:

Drawing on principles behind the photographic Zone System and traditional darkroom film photography, LightZone 2.1 makes it simple and easy to bring out the true tone, color and contrast often hidden in digital images. Designed by photographers for photographers, LightZone 2.1 offers a rich set of powerful, yet easy to use digital editing tools. LightZone's editing tools help reduce the noise often found in high-ISO digital images, correct color shifts and white balance errors, selectively sharpen or blur images or parts of images, remove dust spots and boost overall color to create beautiful, breath-taking images, letting the true talent of the photographer shine though.

Note: it's not open source, but it is free. Take that for what you will. I'll be checking it out sometime this week depending on my free time.

Open Source Photography (OSP)

For all you shutterbugs out there, there's a flickr group out there just for you called Open Source Photography (OSP) I'll just post the summary they have up:

This group deals with the usage of open source software to process photography. It intends to be a forum to share experiences and advances in the area of OSP. Image pos-processing using gimp, experiences with plug-ins, different open source for Tone mapping and HDRs, and much more …

That is all.

Fake Tilt Shift

Note there are several updates to this entry at the bottom.

Today's tutorial is an adaptation of Christopher Phin's Fake Model Photography tutorial for Photoshop CS, and it's all about faking tilt-shift photography.



I'll be using another CC licensed photograph today. This one was originally posted by flickr user pietroizzo. Thank you very much!

Okay, let's get started.

1. The most important part of this process is picking a good photo. There are basically 2 key components: aerial photography and strong lighting. You want this to look like you took the picture standing next to a model that's lit by a shop lamp.
2. Open your photo and create a new transparent layer named Mask.
3. Right click the new layer and select "Add layer mask"
4. Reset your colors by pressing the [d] key. You should have black as foreground and white as background now.
   
5. Grab the gradient tool, select the FG to BG (RGB) gradient, and set the shape to Bi-linear.
6. Now pick out an imaginary focal point somewhere on your picture. When you take real closeup pictures of small objects with a nice camera, the focal point will be in sharp focus while the rest will be out of focus.
   
7. Once you've got your focal point, click and drag the gradient in a vertical path starting from the focal point. It doesn't matter if it's perfect. This may take you a few tries to get just the way you want it. Note that you won't be able to see the gradient in your image, just in the mask thumbnail in the layers dialog.
   
   
8. Right click the Mask layer, and select "Mask to selection". Now you'll see some marching ants in a rectangle, but don't be deceived. The selection area indicated by the ants only indicates pixels that are more than 50% selected. If you take a look at the Selection Editor dialog, you'll see what the selection really looks like. (By the way, if anyone knows a better way to simulate Photoshop's quick mask, I'd love to hear it.)
   
9. Activate the Background layer and click Filters>Blur>Gaussian blur. I used a 15 pixel radius, but you'll probably want to experiment with different levels of blur. Press [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[a] to deselect.
   
10. Now for the color. Again, you'll probably want to experiment as the values in this step are highly subjective. Here's what I did: click Layer>Colors>Brightness-Contrast and bump the contrast up to 15. Then I bumped the color up a bit in the curves dialog (Layer>Colors>Curves).
    

Here's the before and after comparison:




That's pretty much it. I mentioned several times that you'll want to experiment, and I'll say it again. This isn't a formula so much as a guideline. The values for any of the above steps will need to be adjusted to taste for any photo, unless you pick this exact photo and you want it to look exactly like I made it look.

I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial adaptation. Thank you for following along.

Update: I realized after reading Alexanders comment that we could eliminate a couple of steps, so the article has been modified.

Update 2: Commenter Achim has pointed out the Focus Blur plugin made by Kyoichiro Suda. This really is a nice plugin, and I've been having fun with it today, but you must be using linux and you must have the libgimp2.0-dev package installed. For those reasons, I'm not going to include a tutorial for it because I think it's just too exclusionary. If you're savvy and you want a more powerful blur option, I highly recommend it.

Here's the same photo blurred with the Focus Blur plugin:



Update 3: I was looking through the keyboard shortcut options and found the Quickmask! It's [Shift]+[Q]. There is also a tiny little button in the lower-left corner of the image window that toggles the quickmask. I may do some short tutorials on its use in the future.

Orton Effect

For today's adaptation, I'm not going to single out any one particular tutorial because there are many good ones, and they're all a bit different. If you want the Photoshop method, I advise you to do what I did, and google it.

So, here we go.

Lomography

Today I'm going to give you another simple but effective technique. We're going to simulate lomography with a few simple steps. The original Photoshop tutorial I'm adapting was done by Denny Tang and can be found here. We'll be using another CC licensed photograph originally posted to flickr by user Bob Jones. Many thanks to Mr. Jones.

So, here we go.

Great Photography Site

In my search for photo's with liberal licensing, I've run across yotophoto.com, which I am now absolutely in love with. I just wanted to mention it here in case any of you were looking for some photo's you can use for just about anything. Always be sure to check the licenses for anything you publish.

Update: On second thought, flickr's Creative Commons search is much much better.