Kelticman...your image is coming along great!
The real trick to successful monochrome conversions (to me at least) is selective contrast enhancement.
'One click' across the board solutions very rarely work successfully unless you get immaculate lighting at time of shooting.
Bring out the luminance in selected parts of a shot, especially landscapes and your'e onto a winner.
BTW... there's a great alternative to the traditional PS dodge and burn tools to bring out detail in the shadows.
Create a new layer above the image by holding down the ALT key then clicking the new layer icon on the layers palette.
This will open a layer dialogue box where you can select the blending mode. Set that to 'overlay' and tick the tickbox that then appears for 'fill with overlay-neatral colour (50% grey).
This will create a new layer filled with 50% grey in overlay mode.
Use a low opacity soft brush to paint on that layer...white will dodge or lift dark areas, black will burn or darken areas. if you make a mistake, create a 50% grey foreground colour by clicking on the foreground colour pallete and in the colour picker menu that appears and where it says H, S, B:
enter 50% in the 'B' section and paint away your mistakes to restore the image.
You will be amazed at how much detail it can lift from the darkest of shadows. If there's any detail there at all, this method will bring it out.
The shadow/highlight tool applies the effect across the entire image which is not always what you want and the traditional dodge and burn tools can look patchy and over-processed.
You may need to protect the areas around the detail you are bringing out by masking it with a selection.
Try it peeps...it's a great tool!
I'll be adding a video tutorial on this in the near future
onders:
ive tried in vain sammy!! lol :banghead: im beginning to think i should have went for a different shot but im too busy this week to look at anything, ahh well! thanks for opinion!! :thumb:
