"red filter" effect in Photoshop for B&W pictures

I'm trying out B&W photography on digital. With my film cameras, I

almost always used a red 25a filter to get contrast in the sky. How

do I get that same effect in digital? Using photoshop, I tried

increasing the red channel and then converting to grayscale, but it

didn't really seem to do what I expected. Am I following the rights

steps/order?

 

I'm not really a big fan of the burn-in tool.

 

Thanks in advance!

One of the disadvantages of shooting B&W with digital cameras seems to be in the range of contrast it can produce. It's just not as wide as B&W film.

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You should read the photo.net article on getting better B&W digital photographs, it can provide some decent tips (be sure to read the comments as well):<p>

<a href="http://www.photo.net/digital/editing/bwconvert/">http://www.photo.net/digital/editing/bwconvert/</a>

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B.t.w. you should become a fan of the burn in tool, it's just not applicable in this situation. :)

Hi Adnan, You might try: www.fredmiranda.com/actions He has one for B&W that simulate several different colored filters in Photoshop and one of those is red. He also has a Tri-X simulator too. They're not expensive - I think it's around $15 USD. If that's too much to spend, try using the Channel Mixer in Photoshop - something like Red +150 Green -25 Blue -25 and check monochrome box. It's best for the 3 values to add up to 100 percent - you might have to play around with them for best results. FM's Actions will probably work quicker and cleaner though.

 

I hardly ever use the burn tool either. Try this: Select Layer, New Layer, Under Mode, select Overlay, Then check the box below that says Fill With Neutral Grey. (That box will be greyed out until you select the Overlay option) Now, select the paintbrush tool. With a low opacity used in the toolbar (say 10 percent) paint with Black selected as your foreground to burn, or white to dodge. If the effect is too strong, lower opacity or change the foreground color to a darker (for burning) or lighter (for dodging) grey. I find this works quite a bit better than the Burn tool, personally. Best wishes . . .

Go to Image/Adjust/Channel Mixer. Now slide the RED bar to 100% and the Blue and Green to 0%, Luminosity at 0. Check the "Monotone" box at the bottom. Presto, a B&W red channel only version of your color image. Now you can fine-adjust the R,B,G and luminosity channels to tweak your image to exactly what you want it to look like.

 

Cheers,

I use a Tri-X pluging from www.silveroxide.com. It does a very good job emulating Tri-X in Photoshop, good enough for publication. It also emulates the use of red, green and yellow filters, and works with 16 bit/channel images.

 

The latter is important with B&W, since 8 bits/channel just doesn't room for a good gray scale. That's true for scanning B&W too.

 

This filter doesn't do anything that you can't do using Photoshop controls, but it's fast, easy and effective. Life's too short to do everything from scratch.

I found that by increasing the blue channel the image seems closer to that of BW film due, I think, to films greater sensitvity to blue light. Try adjusting the blue first and see if you like it and then doing the red.

Go to the "Channels" tab, and select the Red channel. Select all (ctrl+A) and copy (ctrl+c). Create a new image and paste. Voila.

 

Alterately, you could do the same for the other two channels and then adjust their relative opacities to get the effect you want.

 

(If your color channels aren't showing up greyscale, go into options and turn off the "Color channels in color" option.)