PORTRAIT PRACTICE

I had a little free time to kill today so I did a little black & white conversion practice. I am not sure if I like what I ended up with or not. Any thoughts? Now that I look at it again, I think it is a bit dark.

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Where's the photo?

It looks somehwat flat to me. If the current conversion was my starting point, I would try gradient map and then final touches with levels.

I cannot say what I would do if I had the original because I didn't see it.

As for the background, if you try levels after the gradient map, and you try to bring up highlights a bit to make the face more 3D, the brighter spots of the background will burn.

Can you give me a quick lesson in gradient map? I just gave it a try—WOW! I guess I need to dig out that Photoshop book. I use Photoshop Elements 3.0. Any advice is appreciated.

Not much I can teach you beyond what you can discover in 10 minutes of experimenting. Remember to click on the window with the gradient to adjust it to your liking.

I do not always use it. In fact, I use it maybe in 30% of conversions, sometimes as a supplement to another technique.

I also noticed that it makes a difference how you pre-process the image in color before you start a conversion, and that changing B&W later gives different results. In other words, some changes I do in color, then the rest in B&W.

I read what was offered in my Photoshop books (not much). Like you said, it is something I will have to play around with in order to learn. Thank you for pointing me in that direction. It is a new tool in the tool box.