It looks like the current edition of Paint Shop Photo X2 for Photographers has sold out (at least Amazon no longe seems to have copies). Which is great news, but not if you’re still trying to get hold of a copy. I have a handful personal copies which I’m happy to pass on, so If you want a copy, but can’t get hold of one from a retailer drop me an email
This short video shows you how to create a single image with a full range of tones from several bracketed exposures using Paint Shop Pro Photo X2’s HDR Photo Merge feature. If a single exposure results in an image with blown (pure white) highlights, or dense black shadows, then your subject will almost certainly benefit from the HDR process.
Here, it proved impossible to capture detail inside this building at the same time as retaining detail outside the windows. As this restaurant has a stunning interior as well as being in a fabulous beach location it was important to capture both. With the camera mounted on a tripod I made a series of bracketed exposures. It’s important to use the same aperture for bracketed HDR shots - otherwise the depth of field changes from shot to shot, which can make them difficult to merge. I made five exposures at f8 a stop apart starting at 1/8th of a second and ending at 1/125th.
If, having watched the tutorial you feel like having a try yourself, you can download these images here under Chapter 4.
Once we’ve removed all the colour from a photo, quite naturally, the next thing we want to do is put some back in. PSP’s Sepia Toning filter can be found on the Photo Effects sub-menu of the Effects menu. You can use it on colour photos, or photos from which the colour has been removed using the techniques in the previous tutorial..
To Use Sepia Toning select Effects>Photo Effects>Sepia Toning. Adjust the ‘Amount to Age’ or, as I like to call it, strength slider to your taste and click OK. The Sepia Toning filter is easy to use, but it’s a bit of a blunt instrument. You can have any colour you like – as long as it’s sepia and if you use it directly on a colour photo you have no control over the tonal rendition it can often produce rather muddy looking results.
Press Ctrl-Z to undo the Sepia Toning filter
For quick and easy tinting, Colorize probably offers the best trade off between flexibility and ease of use. You can apply Colorize directly to colour or mono (but not greyscale) photos. To open the Colorize dialogue box select Adjust>Hue and Saturation>Colorize (or press Shift-L). Check the Preview on Image box, drag the hue slider to change the tint colour and the saturation slider to change the strength of the tint. That’s all there is to it.
Hue Saturation/Lightness works in a very simialr fashion to Colorize, in fact Colorize is really just a simpler implementation of the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialogue box which you can open by selecting Adjust>Hue and Saturation>Hue/Saturation/lightness. Check the colorize box to apply an overall tint, adjust the tint colour with the Hue slider and the amount using the saturation slider.
While we’re on the subject of Hue/Saturation/Lightness and Colorize I should also mention that you can also use either of these to produce mono images from colour ones – just drag the saturation slider to zero. I wouldn’t recommend it though as you don’t have any control over the tones – it produces the same ‘average’ values as Image>Greyscale.
If you start out with a colour image, you can run in to the same problems with muddy tones that we experienced when using image>greyscale to convert to mono – you have no control over the tonal rendition. One way around this is to first create your mono image using the Channel mixer, then tone it.
Ordinarily, Colour balance is used to remove casts from colour images. These casts might arise for all sorts of reasons – you might have set the white balance incorrectly on you camera, or there might just be a preponderance of light of a particular colour in the scene. You can also use Colour Balance to tint mono photos.
Here’s a photo that I’ve already converted to mono using the channel mixer. To open the Colour Balance dialog box select Colour Balance from the Adjust menu. This is pretty simple – you just drag the slider to the right to introduce warm tones into the image or to the left to introduce cool tones. The further you drag, the stronger the tint.
You can extend the range of tones available by clicking the advanced checkbox. The simplest way to use these controls is to stick to the bottom two temperature and tint sliders. Use the top one as before to introduce warm or cool tints and the bottom one to make the image more green or purple.
By all means experiment with the top sliders, they can produce some interesting tint effects, but they are not that intuitive because they’re designed for removing casts from full colour images and not for tinting mono ones.
If you haven’t used them before you should aquaint yourself with adjustment layers. These allow you to apply some image adjustments in a non-destructive way and have many other advantages, some of which we’ll discover shortly.
Ordinarily, when you apply a global adjustment to a layer, let’s say you make a Levels adjustment, or convert a photo to mono using the Channel Mixer, the pixel values in that layer are altered for good. If you later decide that the adjustment wasn’t such a good idea, it’s too late to do anything about it, unless you used an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers apply global adjustments to underlying layers.
The available adjustment layers are:
Brightness/contrast
Channel Mixer
Colour Balance
Curves
Hue/Saturation/lightness
Invert
Levels
Posterize
Threshold
Adjustment layers are saved along with the file and, just like other layers, you can you can turn them off, delete them, or make changes to the settings at any time. This provides a great deal of editing flexibility.
Open a new image and select New Adjustment layer>Channel Mixer from the Layers palette menu. This channel mixer dialogue box works in exactly the same way as the earlier one but there are some additional adjustment layer features we won’t go into right now. The Source channel sliders can be found on the Adjustment tab, drag them as before to produce the desired tonal results and click OK
Just as before, you can create a desaturated image, this time by altering the opacity of the Channel Mixer adjustment layer – drag the opacity slider in layer palette. To toggle the Adjustment layer on and off click the layer visibility icon (the eye to the left of the layer thumbnail) and if you want to change the Channel Mixer setting at any time double-click the Adjustment Layer thumbnail to open the Channel Mixer dialog box.
You can also use an adjustment layer to tint the image. Make sure the top layer (Channel Mixer 1) is selected in the layers palette and select Layers>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Check the Preview on Image and colorize boxes and drag the saturation slider up to around 20. Now drag the Hue slider to change the tint colour.
The channel mixer adjustment layer provides your image with the best possible range of tones and the HSL adjustment layer provides the precise colour tint and strength. As before, you can alter the strength of the effect by changing the opacity of the adjustment layer. You can also change the blend mode (try colur dodge and burn) to produce some interesting graphic effects.
We’re now going to use a different process to tint a monochrome image produced using a channel mixer adjustment layer. First, here’s another neat trick with adjustment layers that will save you a lot of time. Open a new colour image in PSP and bring the one you’ve just been working on to the front. Drag the Channel Mixer 1 layer from the Layers palette and drop it onto the new image. The new image now has the exact same channel mixer adjustments applied to it as the old one.
Next, select Layers>New Adjustment Layer>Colour Balance. Check the Preview on Image box and, if it isn’t displayed, click the Adjustment tab. You’ll notice immediately that dialogue box for a colour balance adjustment layer bears very little resemblance to the one you get when you select Colour Balance from the Adjust menu. This one isn’t just more useful for applying tints to mono images, it’s better all round and I’d recommend you use it in preference to Adjust>colour balance, whatever your attempting.
The Adjustment tab has three sliders, one labelled Cyan/Red another labelled Meganta/Green and a third labelled Yellow/Blue. Drag the top slider to the right towards Red to produce a red tint.
You can use the sliders in any combination to produce different coloured tints, just be aware that adding equal amounts of Red, green and blue, or Yellow magenta and cyan will cancel each other out (try dragging all three sliders fully to the left or right and you’ll see what I mean).
A Colour Balance adjustment layer can be used to create split toning effects – applying different colours to different tonal ranges, the shadows and highlights for example.
Underneath the colour sliders you’ll see three radio buttons labelled Shadows, midtones and highlights which allow you to confine adjustments to these tonal ranges.
First, reset all the sliders to zero, then check the Shadows box, then drag the Cyan/Red slider to around the 50 mark. Now check the highlights radio box and drag the Yellow/Blue slider to around 50 blue. You now have a split-toned image with the shadow detail predominantly Red and the highlights predominantly blue. Experiment with the base colours and percentages to achieve the effect you want. Depending on the nature of your photo you can sometimes add a third colour to the midtones. Click the OK button when you like what you see.
Here’s one last method for producing a split-toned image. It doesn’t use adjustment layers, so it isn’t quite as flexible as the previous one, but it provides a lot more control over where the colour goes.
Here, I’ve reverted to the original colour image, duplicated the background layer twice. I’ve then applied the channel mixer directly to convert both of the duplicate layers to mono and renamed the lower one red and the upper one blue
Select the red layer and apply a red tint to it using any of the methods described earlier, I’ve done it using Colorize. Similarly, apply a a blue tint to the blue layer.
Now double-click the blue layer thumbnail in the layers palette to open the Layer Properties dialogue box. Check the Preview on Image box and select the Blend Ranges tab.Select Grey Channel from the Blend Channel pull-down menu and drag the top slider in the top grey ramp labelled ‘This layer’ to about the mid point.
What’s happing here is that you are masking pixels in the upper (blue) layer so that the red layer below shows through. The masked pixels are those in the tonal range defined by the slider, currently from mid-tone grey to black. As you drag the slider further to the right progressively more and more of the tonal range – eventually right into the highlights will be masked revealing the red layer beneath. The bottom slider controls smoothness, the closer you drag it to the top one the more abrupt the change from one layer, or colour to the other.
You can use this technique with multiple layers to produce tri and quad-tone effects.
You might think that the advent of digital photography would have spelled the end for black and white photos, but you’d be wrong. Sure, in the days of film, black and white was cheaper and easier to process, but, there’s also something special about the quality of monochromatic images. Removing colour makes things simpler and emphasises the tones and shapes in an scene revealing beauty that can’t be seen with the naked eye.
Many digital cameras on the market today provide black and white shooting modes and will even allow you to add special effects like sepia toning in the camera. What could be simpler? Just switch to black and white mode and fire away.
One problem with this approach is that it’s just like shooting with black and white film. If you subsequently decide the subject may have looked better in glorious colour, it’s too bad. Another drawback is that all of the processing is done in the camera and you have little or no control over it.
By shooting in full colour mode and converting to mono using Paint Shop Pro Photo XI you can decide which images will work in black and white and you have complete control over tonal rendition – how the colours in the photo are converted to grey tones. As we’ll see, this can make a huge difference to the final result. And Whether it turns out to be a monochromatic maspterpiece or not, you’ll always have the colour original to fall back on.
There’s one other big advantage to producing mono photos this way. You can re-introduce colour into the image – producing subtle desaturated hues, adding a colour wash or tint and creating split-toning effects.
In this workshop I’ll show you a number of different ways you can produce black and white photos in Paint Shop Pro Photo XI as well as some colouring and toning techniques.
Some of these techniques are covered in Chapter 3 of Paint Shop Pro Photo XI for Photographers.
Launch PSP and open up a photo that you want to convert to black and white. There’s one method of conversion that is straighforward and takes only a single step. Select Greyscale from the image menu. That’s it. Now press Ctrl-Z to undo and don’t bother with it again.
Image>Greyscale removes all of the colour information from your file, it throws it away and, once the file is saved you can never get it back. Not only is it a digital dead-end, it converts your colours to grey tones using an averaging ‘one size fits all’ process which often doesn’t produce the best results and over which you have no control.
Now duplicate the Background layer by selecting Duplicate from the Layers menu. Rename the new layer mono (click the name in the Layers palette and overwrite it, or right-click it and select rename from the context menu) and select Effects>Photo Effect>Black And White Film. In the filter dialogue box select none for filter colour.
Check the Preview on Image box to see the effect in the main picture window. This is much the same result as you’d get if you used Image>Greyscale, except the colour info is still in the file. It looks OK, but it’s a wash of similar grey tones and the tulip doesn’t really stand out from the background.
Now choose Green from the filter colour pull-down menu. Things are already looking much better. The tulip petals are a rich dark grey and all the background is all light tones.
To understand what’s happening it helps to look at a practical technique from the world of film photography which is based on basic colour theory. This filter is called Black And White Film because it emulates coloured glass filters used in black and white film photography. Black and white film responds to light of certain colours in a predictable way, producing a range of tones. By placing coloured filters over the lens you can alter the composition of the light and thereby change the tones.
The rule of thumb is that filters lighten the tones of same coloured objects and darken the tones of complementary colours in the scene you are photographing. Complementary colours are those on opposite sides of the colour wheel. Red and cyan are complimentary colours as are blue/yellow and green/magenta.
In practical terms what this means is that if you want to lighten reds (or darken cyans) you add a red filter. Adding a yellow filter to the lens will make yellow objects in your scene lighter and blue things darker. Yellow and orange filters were frequently used in film photography to darken the tone of blue skies and emphasise cloud detail.
Paint Shop Pro Photo XI emulates the glass filters of film photography by altering the mix of red, green and blue channels in the colour image to produce the mono one. Select Red from the Filter Colour pull-down menu and see the difference. you can alter the filter strength using the slider to the right. Go back to green, at the default strength of 70 and click OK to apply the filter.
By duplicating the layer prior to applying the filter effect you still have the original full colour image in the layer below. You can use this to produce a quick-and-easy desaturation effect simply by lowering the opacity of the mono layer. Drag the layer opacity slider to the left to re-introduce a little colour from the lower layer. If you know how to use layer masks you can introduce colour back into the image selectively, colouring the flower and laeving the background black and white, for example.
Now press Ctrl-Z to undo the filter and we’ll look at another way to create mono photos that provides you with more control over the finished result. Make sure the mono layer is selected and from the Adjust menu select Colour>Channel Mixer.
Check the Preview on image box in the Channel Mixer dialogue box and, if it’s not already checked, put a tick in the Monochrome box. The three sliders control the mix – each determines the percentage of the Red green and blue channels that is used to produce the monochrome image. The default setting uses 100% Red and no information from the green or blue channels. It produces the same effect as selecting the Red Black And White Film filter and, in this instance, doesn’t produce very useful results.
Drag the red slider to the left until the input field reads 0% (or just click in the input field and overwrite it). You’ll see the imge go black – that’s because there are currently no inputs, each channel is at 0%. Now drag the green slider to 100%. This is the same as applying the Green Black And White Film filter and produces a much better result.
If all the Channel mixer did was replicate the Black And White Film filters there wouldn’t be much point in using it. But there are only five Black and White Film filters, using the Channel Mixer’s three sliders you can create any colour filter you need. To create a yellow filter mix 50% red and 50% green.
If you’re thinking ‘How does red and green make yellow?’ you need to take another look at the colour wheel, but the beauty of live preview is that you don’t have to. You can immediately see the exact result of moving the Channel mixer sliders to create your own bespoke Black And White Film filters.
One thing you need to take care of with the Channel Mixer is that the total of the source channels adds up to around 100%. It doesn’t have to be spot on, but if it’s more than 100% the overall image brightness will increase and if it’s under, your image will get darker. Click the OK button to commit your channel Mixer settings.
If you’ve visited gopaintshoppro before you’ll notice a few changes. I’ve migrated the site from a static HTML-based one to Wordpress. This will make it much easier for me to update it and add new tutorials as well as giving you the oportunity to provide feedback and comment.
I’ve tried to duplicate the existing site structure, so most things, for example photos used in the book and tutorials, are in the same place as before. I’ve transferred the small number (two!) of step-by-step text tutorials on producing black and white images and tinting photos from the old site and in the next couple of days I’ll add the video tutorials on making cut-outs and HDR.
For those who are interested in things Wordpress-related, this site uses the Thematic theme framework designed by Ian Stewart. I’m new to WordPress and was looking for a highly customisable theme that lent itself to use in a CMS-style for so-called ’static’ (i.e. non-post) pages. Thematic is it.