Photoshop tricks and treats

[kim-i]

Hey guys!

So, today I would like to share with you how I transformed this image into a nice high contrast black and white.

A few days ago I got inspired by looking at this wallpaper I found in one of those wallpaper apps used by android phones. I found this cool monochrome of a tiger on a black background and I wanted to try to make a similar one.

As you can see my original image isnt great, the colors are too week and the light direction is creating some wierd looking hue on his chest. This is a image of a Sumatran Tiger I took it in Sydney Taronga Zoo in december 2009.

Before

After

Here is how I did it:

1. Crop in lightroom

2. Clicked on "create a new layer" in the layers palette - named it "black"

3. Clicked on paint bucket tool and filled it with black

4. Went back onto background layer, clicked CTRL-A to select all. Clicked on the Channels tab and selected the Red channel, then pressed CTRL-C to copy then click back on RGB and selected the layers tab and pressed CTRL-V to paste. This gave me a new black and white layer above all the other layers - which I named "b&w"


5. Added a layer mask on my b&w layer

6. From the brushes I picked a large soft brush (black) with oppacity 100% and roughly went around my tiger, painting over the background in the layer mask to hide it.

7. Still using the soft black brush I zoomed in to 100% to draw a more acurate line around the tiger changing the oppacity up and down untill it looks right

8. Then I went to my layers palette, clicked on curves and made "S" shape line to create more contrast

9. Next I created a new layer with grey fill 50% by clicking SHIFT-BACKSPACE - picked overlay mode


10. Next I used Dodge and burn tool and started to draw into my "invisible" grey fill

11. With the dodge and burn tool I had my oppacity on around 30%. I dodge all the light, white areas of the tiger and made them even whiter and burned all the dark, black stripe areas of the tiger.

12.Then I have merged all the layers together by clicking CTRL-SHIFT-C to copy and CTRL-V to paste, this way I created a new merged document of all of my layers and still keep all of my original ones separate

And that is it , I have my image (o.O)

Cheers!

[tjc]

Very interesting. Your process has certainly changed the image a huge amount.

Good work.

Thanks for posting.

[arry gman]

wow...a real good lesson and tutorial....I will try it for sure.
Great job Kim-i

Thanks for sharing