Black and white images blurred

[almarobert]

Hello,

I have been trying to convert to B&W some of my images. I only

desaturated and adjusted the levels of a jpg file (didn't have the

RAW file) the result is a too soft image, almost blurred. Did this

happen because I am working with jpg?

For what I have been reading, I realize that working with the

different channels is better than desaturating, but I don't think

that this should be the reason for the blurred images.

Any ideas are welcome.

[beauh44]

Hi Alma - would it be possible for you to post a before and after shot?

[mikep]

First off. Are you saving as jpgs? Everytime you ope a jpg and save as same you will loose quality. If you don' have originals in another non-lossy format (tiff,psd,etc) I would save as tiff, then open up and work on. Just converting to B&W will not make the image soft. From your words I believe you are talking about digital capture. If you have an original JPG from your camera instead of the RAW file, you should make sure the capture is sharp first. Are you interpolating? (making image larger). Is there a setting on your digital camera for unsharp mask? There seems to be something else going on.

[holmsten]

Your "blurring" could be caused by the conversion to b&w - it could also be related to jpeg artifacts as suggested by others.

 

First off, don't use the desaturate to convert. With that you have no control. Should red areas look darker than blue? or the other way around? There are many ways to do the conversion, adobe offers this tutorial for max control: http://studio.adobe.com/us/tips/tip.jsp?p=1&id=100694&xml=phs8bwconversion

 

How can blur be caused by the conversion? The things that give the crispness to a photo are, of course, a certain color. If you change the way color is represented in b&w you can get a softer (blur like) or crisper (sharper) look. That's my theory, anyway. If you experiment you'll probably find one look is sharper than the next.

 

cheers,

Don

[almarobert]

Thank you all for the very useful comments.

Beau, I will look for the images tonight and post them.

I think probably there is more than one reason why this happened. Mike, I have original jpg files from the camera. I borrowed it for the shooting and only had a few minutes to get used to it. At the time I wasn't at all used to shoot digital so I didn't realize that I was shooting jpg until it was too late. I have been working on the image on and off and everytime I save the jpg again and again. So this is probably one of the main reasons of the blurr. I didn't interpolate, so this is not an issue.

Don, thanks a lot for the link to the tutorial.

I will take all the good advice, go back to work on the original image, and hopefully things will get better.

bye for now

Alma

[j_sevigny]

Alma,

 

I've recently started using the aforementioned Adobe recommendation to convert digital filed

to b/w and I can testify that it's the best method I've found so far. It takes a little longer, of

course, and depending on your Photoshop skills, it might take you a while to get the hang of

it, but it's definitely worth it.

 

Best of luck.