michelle a.

Elaine,

This method will work in PS Elements, it's in a slightly different place but it's essentially the same......First, go to your Standard Edit window.

Now with you image open click Filter> Adjustments> Gradient Map....

Make sure your default Gradient Map scheme is loaded.... if not then click on the little arrow and choose default. The default gradients will load and then choose the Black/White one.....

Hope that helps!

Very nice! Thank you Marc.... this couldn't have come at a better time. I have a large "we want them all in BW" orders to process and was dreading having to do all those conversions.

Just tried it out on a couple of them and it seems to work well enough. Thanks again.

As Marc and others have said this was a technically poor image to begin with as far as lighting etc,. And were it mine it would have gone in the trash. That being said, I did not bother with skin tones, shadows, etc..... as I didn't think this was part of your question. I assumed you were interested in creating smoother skin texture and removing blemishes.

As to technique on how I did this. I duplicated the first layer. Working on the duplicated layer, I used the healing brush to remove the large blemishes... then I selected the eyes with the lasso tool.... and inverted the selection. I then applied a gaussian blur of about a radius of 8 to the duplicated layer and it's selection.

I deselected and then added a layer mask to this same layer, and using the brush at different and various opacities (from about 15% to 100%) and the black color, I removed the blur. From the background and hair it was removed completely....

For the final step I kept the layer in Normal mode, but changed the opacity to about 70%.... It could go lower and still look good.....

This took me all of 5 minutes.... It actually took me longer to upload the correct image.

A light touch is needed when you do these things.... I always try the healing brush first for blemishes.

For this I used a duplicate layer over the original, gaussian blur and a layer mask.... opacity lowered to about 70% but could go lower for a more natural look.

I'm sure there are other ways to do this as well.....<div></div>

Plenty of male photographers shoot maternity Todd.... so being a guy shouldn't stop you from doing it. But you do need to feel comfortable doing it..... otherwise I think your clients will sense it, and it may show in the images.

On a side note, and speaking as a woman, many women might not feel as comfortable with a man as they would with a woman...

Todd if you're still looking for examples I do have a few up on my site to look at.

http://www.michelleamarante.com/maternity/index.html