Handpainting a black and white photo with Adobe Photoshop CS3

When I was a baby my Mum entered herself and me in a Mother & Daughter portrait competition and won second-runner up. As a prize she was given a framed photo of me that was black and white and hand painted. When I was younger I used to look at the image and wondered how it would be done and loved looking at other vintage photos that had been lovingly hand painted for an intriguing effect.

As a member of Fix My Pic group on Flickr I like to turn my hand to using Photoshop (and other programs) to 'fix' or alter the photo of someone who has submitted their photo to be 'fixed' .

This week I came across a black and white photo and the brief from the photographer was:

I know it seems silly to ask to have this one fixed if its in black and white, but i thought maybe someone could come up with a killer idea?

Here's the photo to be fixed:

"checking in" by Today4u [?]
 

and here is my fix:

"Today4u notmypic fixmypic photoshopped" by vanessapr [?]
 

And here is how I did it.

If you have taken a photo in low light you may have noticed a halo or fringing to your photos.

I first noticed them with my macro flower photography. There is a way to reduce fringing using Adobe Photoshop's Hue Saturation.

1. Use the lassoo tool to select the affected area

2. Select Hue/Saturation from the Image > Adjustments menu as shown in the screen capture below

Most of the photos straight from my digital camera are lacking one thing to make them stand out - contrast. Just a subtle difference in contrast or exposure can make a world of difference.

Before - not anything special. The colour temperature of the afternoon light caused a blue tinge to the white background.

I opened the image in Adobe Photoshop CS2 and selected Image>Adustments>Curves

Which then brings up the curves dialog box. I moved the dot from the middle

After

Next I open up the Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation dialog box and increase the lightness of the image filtered by cyan. This increases the lightness of the cyan pixels so that the background becomes white.

Final result

Next - using a Photoshop Action to speed up things

Converting from colour to sepia or black and white using photoshop

(aka Black and White - more than just desaturation)

So you have a colour photo that you want to convert to black and white, monotone or duotone.
There are so many ways to do it, those listed below are just a few, listed in reverse order of my personal preference.

Image>Adjustments>Desaturate

Now you may want to desaturate an image but this is a quick and easy, very rough method.

Image>Adjustment>Desaturate

This just removes all colour from an image without filtering by channels (R, G and B) and often looks a little flat. You can't tweak the way certain colours represent in the black and white result as with other methods. It usually gets an OK result but wait until you see the other methods. If you are creating a Duotone image (two tones, not just black and white but black and another colour) then you will be using the desaturate adjustment in order to switch to Duotone mode - more on that later. If at all possible try using the other methods, especially the Image>Adjustments Black and White feature that started in the CS range (CS, CS2, CS3). This is my least favourite method of converting Colour to B&W.

Black and White (B&W) via Channels

One of the quickest ways is to select the Channels pallette and click to the right of the name of the colour (red, blue or green)