CHANNEL MIXER FOR BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Of late, I am spending time playing with the channel mixer tool to create black and white copies of digital images. I used to have an impression that black and white images are better off taken using film than digital images. Some of my black and white images I had come to liking were taken on film. The contrast provided by b&w film seemed to be good and digital images converted to grayscale appeared very pale. But after playing around with Channel mixer, I am planning to use digital media for my further attempts in b & w.

Channel mixer(Image - Adjustments - Channel Mixer in Photoshop) is an easy to use and understand tool and provides a lot of flexibility. It can provide excellent contrast to the images but needs a lot of practice and experience to get good output. I am now practicing using it on my old color images and it appears to me that not all images may be suitable to be converted to black and white. So it requires some understanding, practice and ability to predict the output when choosing images to be made into black and white. The best suitable images I think are buildings and architecture, rocky or sandy geography that offers good contrast and waterfall images.

Below is a sample I tried out with Channel mixer. See the comparison between converting to grayscale by discarding color information and using the Channel Mixer. Latter is definitely better, but I feel it can be improved much more

Original Image

Converted to grayscale(Image >> Mode >> Grayscale in Photoshp)

Using Channle Mixer