Converting photos to black&white

Today I was finally giving b&w photography a serious try, or rather: converting normal photos to b&w using my trusty Photoshop elements (and iPhoto). Why should you want to do more than press the "b&w" button or use the "desaturate" function? Because when you lose all the colors you need some level of control over the process to e.g. turn unimportant stuff darker or highlight the important parts.

An excellent resource on how to do that is available at cambridgeincolour.com. And although most of the techniques require the full Adobe Photoshop, one works beautifully with Photoshop Elements 4.0. And it gives you just enough control over the process to make experimentation fun .

How do you do it? You create two hue/saturation adjustment layers. Here's how to do it (shamelessly copied from camebridgeincolour.com. See this site, it's great!)

1. Create a layer with Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation...
2. Set the mode of this layer from "Normal" to "Color" - I first did not read this completely, and as a result nothing happened at all :-).
3. Set the saturation of this layer to "-100". The image turns black & white.
4. Create another layer. Make sure this layer is between the first one and the background layer containing the actual image.
5. Now you can play around with the hue slider and watch the effects this has on your image. You can adjust the effect by increasing the saturation. If you're very daring or want to achieve a special effect, you can also edit specific color channels this way.

I was, frankly, amazed about what this technique can do. Below you see three images of the "Frauenkirche" in Dresden. Left: the original color image. Observe how the different stones have their own texture and their own color. The next image shows this image turned b/w using iPhoto's b&w effect. Much of the texture is lost. The last image shows the same image turned to b/w with some adjustment using the technique above. Quite a difference, right?

The original image

Automatic conversion; much of the detail is lost

Conversion with the "layer method". Much more structure is retained.

What really matters in digital Photography, part 2

3. Important for many more people than you'd think: sensor size

Yes, that's sensor size. Yes, that sounds like "hardware details I don't care about". But did you ever wonder why all those digital cameras offer ISO settings 50, 100, 200, 400, where 400 and even 200 are completely unusable because they create an ugly noisy mess of a photo?

Left: small part of a grey sky, Canon EOS 300D at ISO 400
Right: small part of an evening sky, Canon Powershot S2IS at ISO 400
Notice all the unwanted specks and dots of the right part?

And have you ever seen an ISO 400 shot of a DSLR? If yes, believe me, you'd want one from that point in time. The reason is that the sensors of all normal consumer cameras (including the "mega zoom" ones like the S2IS, S3IS, ...) are TINY. Hardly ever a photon makes the way into these sensors in the evening :-). But the actual sensor size is typically not mentioned in tech specs of cameras, and actually I did not know for a long time that all my cameras have sensors that have 13 times less sensor area than those of DSLRs. Yes, 13 times. 13 times less light will hit a sensor of my S2IS in 1/60 of a second than it would if I had a DSLR.

"Why do I need to care about that?" you ask? You need the higher ISO levels in situations when there is less light available as on a bright day. Example: pictures in churches, evening snapshots, forests. Less light hits the sensor, and either you crank up the ISO setting, or you live with dark photos, hoping that Photoshop will recover most of the details (and believe me, that little flashlight that cameras feature are the best way to make ugly photos. As I've never made a good photo with a built-in flash and I've never seen anybody else managing this I've plainly given up on those flashes).

Some consumer cameras like my S2IS have image stabilizers to compensate for some of this - I can take good photos down to 1/13th of a second with my S2IS. But then, people tend to move around, and in 1/13th of a second, they move more than you think...

Martin Luthers Grave in Wittenberg, Germany
With image stabilization, people look like ghosts.

Additionally to the pure ISO noise issues it seems to me that typical problems of small digicams like "purple fringing" are mostly caused by the small sensor's. I've never seen all those frustrating effects in DSLR images.

Unfortunately, sensor size is more or less the same with all non-SLR cameras. Either you get a small, convenient camera with a tiny sensor, or you get a big, expensive SLR that is painful to carry around with a much larger sensor.

What really matters in digital Photography

Currently I'm spending quite some time brooding over the question which digital SLR (and which lenses) I should buy. One thing is clear: I need a DSLR. :-). But when I think longer about it, I find it rather strange that most of the things that really are crucial when deciding which digital camera (and not only DSLR) to buy are only rarely mentioned in reviews or tech specs.

So here's my list of things that are important but never mentioned:

1. Important for everybody: autofocus lag.

My first digital camera was a Canon Digital Ixus, my second one a Digital Ixus 400 (US: powershot s400). Both got great reviews at the time. And I made same pretty cool photos with them. I have some nice photos of sunsets, some amazing flowers, and even a few photos of elderly people that look good. And I might have taken excellent shots of snails (although I didn't as I find snails too unattractive to be photographed).

But when it comes to things that move like animals or even kids, I don't have a single good shot. And how could I - my cameras took about 2 seconds from the moment I pressed the button until the photo actually was taken. My greatest moments in this respect were when I was spending some time in Bengaluru and tried to take photos of holy cows that were hanging around next to the road while I was in a moving car. I've never taken so many shots of unoccupied spots of road. But not a single holy cow. After a couple of these situations I decided that I need a Canon Powershot S2IS which has an excellent autofocus time. I've never regretted that move.

Traffic madness in Bangalore (now: Bengaluru)
You can't do this with 90% of digital cameras

By the way, the reviews at dpreview.com contain incredibly detailed info about these kind of timing issues. You might want to take a look before you buy a camera.

2. Important for anybody remotely seriously interested in making good fotos: big zoom + control over aperture

Problem:
a) if you take a foto of somebody you want the background to be fuzzy.
b) with a 3-times optical zoom + no control over your aperture you will never make that happen (actually it's a bit more complicated, as I learnt recently, but the point stays the same).

Solution: buy a camera with an at least 8x optical zoom, and make sure it has a mode where you can control aperture or time.

Here I was very unhappy with my small cameras, and I was extremely happy with my Powershot S2IS. Actually in this respect you don't really need a DSLR. Canon's powershot (and similar products from Nikon and the others) allow you to take excellent portraits with a well focused subject and a nice blurry background.

See? That's what I mean. Imagine how this would look like
if the background was just as sharp and focused as the butterfly...

... to be continued ...