clipped from www.digital-monochrome.co.ukSky Editing plus Channel Mixer settings to imitate film responce
Sky Editing
For me huge and important part of landscape photography, how many times do we see a great picture with nice land features but no control in the sky areas, bland, blown highlights and featureless, well there's ways around this and in this short tutorial I will show you how to achieve dramatic skies that will improve the look and impact of most landscapes.
Importantly the exposure must be right when the shot is taken as blown highlights are virtually impossible to retrieve, so control at taking stage is of paramount importance, the colour image below was taken in Raw and I used a grey graduate filter to reduce the contrast.
The first image below is unedited in the Photoshop raw converter, as you can see the exposure has given a nice tonal range but there is a slight over exposure between the trees and the white balance needs correction.
In the example below I have made corrections to get the colour right as this is important in BW as much as in colour work, because in conversion we will be working with colour channels to get the desired effect,I have also made adjustments to the auto settings by reducing all the settings slightly to give a more saturated image, but made no adjustment to the saturation slider. The importance of working with Raw files can be seen as adjustments like this are easy to carry out.
Next the image can now be opened into PS for conversion, I used the Channel mixer to convert, settings as example below, I have used 100% Red for a more dramatic look.
This is the converted image with no editing to the sky apart from conversion, you might think this looks OK but theres more work to apply to it to bring out detail and contrast.
First copy the image then go filter~unsharpe mask, set Amount to 54 Radius to 50 and Threshold to 0, now the contrast has increased but their are problems between the trees with blown highlights and haloing to the edges.
Image with USM applied
On example three I have applied a layer mask by pressing Alt and the add layer mask icon in the layers palette, this will hide the USM effect, in the tools palette select a soft brush and make your foreground colour white, what needs to be done now is to paint the USM effect back avoiding the areas where the highlights have blown and the edge haloing has occurred.
You can see that in example three that the highlights have returned and no edge haloing has occurred.
To put a final finish to the image is subjective but I will darken the sky a touch by adjusting the middle gamma slider in Levels, add 20% more USM at the same settings set previously using the add layer mask and painting the effect back but avoiding the areas mentioned above, and then use the Dodge and Burn tools to selectively lighten and darken parts of the sky, when using the D&B tools the Dodge tool should always have the "range" set to highlights and when using the Burn tool the Range set to shadows,vary the brush opacity and its best not to go above 13% exposure for both, always work on a copied layer then fine adjustments can be carried out with the opacity slider in the layers palette, below is the finished image.
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Suggested Channel mixer settings
Here's a selection of settings to apply in Channel mixer to give colour response using different B&W films
Please note for newcomers using Channel Mixer the Ist number =Red channel 2nd number = Green channel 3rd number = Blue channel
Here's a selection of C/M settings to imitate film
Agfa 200X: 18,41,41
Agfapan 25: 25,39,36
Agfapan 100: 21,40,39
Agfapan 400: 20,41,39
Ilford Delta 100: 21,42,37
Ilford Delta 400: 22,42,36
Ilford Delta 400 Pro: 31,36,33
& 3200
Ilford FP4: 28,41,31
Ilford HP5: 23,37,40
Ilford Pan F: 33,36,31
Ilford SFX: 36,31,33
Ilford XP2 Super: 21,42,37
Kodak Tmax 100: 24,37,39
Kodak Tmax 400: 27,36,37
Kodak Tri-X: 25,35,40
And these basic ones:
Normal Contrast: 43,33,30
High Contrast: 40,34,60
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