Red Heads + Black & White

I recently took a few pictures at a family party. The picture below is one of a
series I took of my daughter Katie. I tried to convert it to black and white,
but her freckels turned quite black in the process and the end result was
not as I, or Katie would have wished.




Anyone tried black and white with 'red-heads'

The full size pic is here if you want to have a go, it also shows how sharp my new Sigma 105 macro is !!!

http://idisk.mac.com/john_md-Public/Katie-1.jpg

It's about 3.3 MB and you will want to squeeze those black-heads.

It's a sharp lens all right, but sharp lenses are not necessarily the best choice for portraits. It's a good thing Katie's complexion is as near flawless as it is.

I think the pic is slightly over-sharpened - look around the eyes - but it's beautifully exposed.

I'd get a softer lens and shoot some more, with more interesting lighting. You've got a good model.

G

no other touchups except the b+w conversion.
I was told (as a kid) that I was standing behind the screendoor when the outhouse blew up.....
javascript:emoticon('')
Have tried using the "despecle" filter on photos of me with no luck.
I posted a howto on b+w's a while back, that allowed you to work each color seperately, trick here (done in monochrome mixer in Aperture) was to lighten the reds and bring down the blues....slight sepia tint as an afterthought.
Beautiful child, by the way...

Thanks George, I understand your points. I had other 'better' pics of Katie, I just used
this one for my black and white question, as it was 'as-shot'.

Don, Katie loves you !!! She hates her freckels and you made them disappear !
When I tried the b&w conversion if I lost the freckels, her hair went funny, as it's
nearly the same colour as the freckels, and then the whole picture seemed false.

You have managed to keep the eyes and hair looking 'real' which keeps the face
looking 'real'.

You couldn't do me a step by step guide, on how you did it ?

i.e. did you select different parts of the pic for adjustment ?

PS, I hope your are intent on leaving those beautiful green eyes in color on your final image! please post to show us how they turn out?

what editing program are you using?

I'm using Elements-3 and Photoshop-7 on my iMac G-5.

It was last week, at my son's 18th birthday party that the photo's were taken, this
was Katie's favourite,




but I had a wee bit of a play with some of the pictures in Photoshop, and
this is the one everybody wants a copy of, ( my son is the tall one ), more
a graphic than a photo I know.




(To George -- reducing the size of the picture for the web, seems to
increased the perception of sharpening - certainly on my screen)

I don't know how you converted to BW, but try Channel Mixer in PS7. It starts out as 100% red by default, and this on its own could have most of the effect you need, but just mess around with the sliders, probably reducing blue and adjusting red and green until you have the right result.

Here's another effort......combination of the history brush, spot healing and blur tool.

JR covered what I'd suggest with photoshop.
For what it's worth, that first image took me all of ten seconds in Aperture.

Thanks guy's, I see it can be done.

I'm no Photoshop expert, and I don't use all the facilities available.
I just tried removing the colour and increased the contrast a little, this
made the freckels go a bit dark, poor Katie looked like the pock-marked kid.

We all have our comfort zones and to venture out to other area's sometimes takes a bit of a push.
Thanks Don and John, I'll venture a few steps further.

I did have a go with Adobe Lightroom when it was in Beta, and I quite liked it,
I'm going to have a go with Aperture, ( the trial version ), have you tried both Don ?
Do you prefer Aperture ? I would like to stick with Apple software if it does the job.

I'm very much in favor of aperture.
there's not much difference between the two, but aperture does integrate with other ilife programs, automator and applescript.
Check the apple website for compatibility, as aperture doesn't recognize the raw files from my ds2! although the k's and ds are recognized!
here's something to read up on:

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/aperture/

Galoot, isn't there a way to 're-map' colours in the software you are using?

In lightroom, there are settings for b&w images to change the shade for red, orange, yellow etc, would this be useful?

I'll have a go with you image if I may?

Here is my attempt.

The first image is just a straight conversion to grayscale in LightRoom








The second is adjustments to the grayscale conversion to lighten the freckles by adjusting red, orange and yellow values.