Well, it happens very often that you take some cool photographs and they look cool in your camera display but when you’re back home and look at them on your screen,
they’re pretty flat and not so vibrant.
In the next steps I’ll show you how you can spice up such an image.



The work mentioned below can be done with any image editing software which supports layer techniques and layer blending modes. Adobe Photoshop is my choice but you can do this
with Gimp or PaintShop Pro as well.
Please keep in mind that in Gimp or PaintShop Pro the blending modes have different names.
Consult your software manual or grab the internet for appropriate instructions.


OK, let’s start.

1. We load our basic image




2. After duplicating the layer, we do a brightness/contrast adjustment.
In this case I took the contrast +30 and added +10 brightness, so the image is not too dark.




3. Now we duplicate the adjusted layer and desaturate it with ctrl+shift+u.



After that, we set the blending mode to overlay and set the opacity to 50%




4. Well, we normally could finish here but let’s tweak the image a bit more.
We add a new layer, set the blending mode to overlay and use a big soft brush with 20% opacity and paint with black color the edges, in fact we paint a slight vignette to focus the main subject.
As the result, the waterdrops are now more accentuated.




5. The color friends stop here and the B&W friends follow me with the next steps.
We add a gradient layer and choose the black/white gradient.




6. After that we add another layer. This time we choose the levels layer and adjust the mids and blacks to boost the overall contrast.



Now your image is ready for print. If you intend to publish online, then flatten the image,
assign the sRGB color profile, resize for web, sharpen and you’re done.

A working file with all the steps above is available for download as a zipped layered tiff.


Download

Have fun processing. Feedback is very much appreciated. :)

Cheers, Vernon Trent

Thanks for posting this excellent guide here, Vernon!

/ Jacob

Great how-to, concise and to the point.

Thx a lot Vernon for your work!

cheers
André

Thank you very much, Vernon! I've never worked with layers so far but I'll give it a try now.

I used this tutorial on "The ballerinas"



Thank you very much Vernon!

Thanks for this article, it was a big help.

I have so much to learn, thanks vt , this is great! Always, Cile

thanks for the step by step- you are a great and patient teacher not to mention a not-so-bad photographer (said tongue in cheek) :-))

Thank you very much for sharing this idea. A great tutorial. It really did the trick on my new upload, since I finally had one accepted after a long period of rejections. So, thanks again.
Regards U.M.

glad to read that it has helped a bit :-)

thanks

Today is the first day i have stepped foot in the 'articles Forum' and I'm so glad I did.
There is oodles of info and tips here which I am looking forward to reading. Thank You Vernon :)

Well, thanks to Tracy too lol, as I followed the "new post" and ended up here. This will come in so handy. thanks Vernon

for those who have missed the download file
it's working again now :-))

The trick which copies a layer, desaturates it and sets blend mode to overlay has become one of my favourites and has been helpful more times than I can remember. Thanks again Vernon!

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

:-)

I believe I did understand it just reading once. :-D

Very useful and very clear! Thank you Vernon!

Nice tutorial Vernon thanks! Be giving it a try this evening. Oh no, even more Black and White images.... kidding! ;-)

great Vernon, many thanks!

cool that it's useful for you all :-)))

Thank you so much Vernon ! Tutorials like this are extremely helpful ! I really appreciate !

I just wanted to mention, that 'similar' result can be achieved in Picasa in much easier way.
Of course there is no point in comparing Picasa to PS, but this can be useful for someone who (like me, for example :) ) does not have PS (I use gimp). Picasa is free.

And it took only about half a minute.
This is what I did:

Effects: B&W
Effects: Sharpen
Basic Fixes: autocontrast
Tuning: Shadows set on about 3/4 of scale

Here's the final effect (of course a played with base.jpg):


(if the photo did not appear, here's the url: http://peyo.omega.pl/temp/base_picasa.jpg)

I still prefer effect made by Vernon (skintones on right hand), but if Picasa not so bad at this.
(but the biggest disadvantage of Picasa here is, that for example when I set shadow on about 3/4 of scale, there are no numbers, just a bar, so it is almost impossible to repeat exactly the same operation).

Peyo

You know Vernon, so far we've made a photo book, but maybe it should be considered to make a technical book filled with all your photoshop tricks and even the more important tricks of actual shooting. Just an idea, but I think it could be a good one.

Hi Vernon, thanks for the tutorial. It is really helpful :)

Hey, VT, nice tutorial, you work almost the same way I do on a lot of shots!! The difference in my layers stack would be that the layer you have labeled "adjusted layer b/c" would be with transfer mode Soft light and it would have saturation at about 25% of original.

Thanks for sharing this!!

Thanks a lot for this!!!!!

Greetings Robert

fantastic! thanks so much for sharing - i'm going to try this out now!

What might be the equivalent process in GIMP? Are the saturation and opacity percentages the same or does the software differ in the way they each process similar techniques? I don't have access to PS so I have nothing to compare to.

I have no idea what you mean by this:

"6. After that we add another layer. This time we choose the levels layer and adjust the mids and blacks to boost the overall contrast."

Is this a PS specific step?


Thanks VT.

level adjustment layer. adjust the middle and black tones.
not sure how that works in gimp.

there is a gimp version called gimpshop.
is has the same menu structure and commands like photoshop. :)

Thanks for sharing! I'm new to all this but I'm going to try it out. Your explenation is clear, even for me ; ) It's really helpfull. I'll let you know how it turned out.

I used to do something similar but your way of operating is undoubtely more clean and simple. Thank you very much for sharing!

nice tutorial ;)

Thanks so much sharing that

Great work.Thank you.
Could you write a litte tutorial about textures?
Would appriciate it.
Bye and thanks again, Hannes

Good work.. One of the best way to establish this aesthetic view...

Thank you very much for this tutorial. I've used your first method of overlaying a desatruated image and I find the results to be quite pleasing.

Thanks for the tips,
Nathan

This is so cool...can't wait to try it your way!

Thanks!

This is very cool!!

Thank you very much for this tutorial, Vernon.

Great tutorial. Thanks.

very useful tutorial, thank you !!

thank you very much my friend.

thanks for sharing, nice tutorial to follow

Thks a lot for sharing!!

Such a lot of work! I am too lazy for all that. I prefer to get the image right when taking the shot, not afterwards.

Remind me, how do you get the contrast right in the camera when taking a street shot?

Excellent, thank you so much

simple and excellent tutorial,thank you so much!

I'm photography student and I really appreciate that you share this with us :-)

Thank you Vernon

This is helpful!!! Thank you so so much!!!

this is awesome! thank you very much.

Very simple and nice method to make the subject pop. Thanks !

Very useful tips on boosting the photos. Thank you for sharing...

Thank you for the work!