Create Stunning Black & White Images: Infinite B&W Photoshop Plugin in Action

hey everyone my name is pratique Nik and I've been a retoucher for over 10 years and the thing that I love about Black and Whites is the ability for it to truly show emotion when IID visit galleries I would always notice the black and white images or an old photo books and I was truly incredibly Amazed by the beauty of it the way the grain was interesting the conversion the tonal values and it was something that was so envious of because I could never truly grasp that and apply to my images so I said you know what let's make a tool that allows you to truly explore the infinite tonal possibilities of an image and so infinite black and white was born and as you can see here from the images in the background all created by our incredible photographer user base you can see that it applies to a variety of images across a spectrum of different genres as well and that's what I love about everything from Landscapes to portraits to Beauty you can see the tonal values are all very very different and it shows me that no matter what you shoot you're able to make Something Beautiful using the panel so let me give you a an example we have an image here by J Mayu who's a phenomenal portrait photographer TR Allstar has really grown her career ever since um I've known her and ever since this Photograph um and the way this works is that if you haven't seen the way infinite color panel Works check out our website at infinite col panel.com and you can see how the infinite color panel works it works very similarly if you'd like some a refresher or a analogous example but very simply put very simply when you hit the create button right what happens is you end up getting this folder called infinite black and white and within the folder you get these four adjustment layers just like this well the magic is also not just in the adjustment layers but how they're stacked the algorithms that are used to create it and the settings we use to analyze um what uh would be a good output to create a good black and white image image what I mean by that is we structurally um stacked this layer stack so that we have the channel mixer first then we have selective color next and then the black and white and then a curve so channel mixer um just very very vaguely is a combination of red green and blue which are the primary channels of an image that make up an image and when you modify the channels and keep it to 100% what happens is if I turn all the other ones off here you'll see channel mixure is the only one on if I hit create again you'll notice that let me bring the intensity up for a second you'll notice that the image changes colors in a way that isn't really necessarily pleasing for a color image but the magic happens when I turn this black and white on and I randomize chall mixer you can see that there's tonal variations happening so in a black and white setting if I shuffle this you can see me shuffling using the shuffle icon you can see there's tonal variations happening very subtly but enough where there's a difference so that's great and all and you can see that every time I hit Shuffle the total constant stays 100 typically what happens is when you modify these channels you end up actually pushing things too much and everything gets brighter or darker so things have to stay 100 when I hit Shuffle it will shuffle all the values but 100 will stay constant and it shuffles them through red green and blue at the same time so it's coming up with something really interesting but that's just the beginning when I enable selective color black and white as well and then I hit create what you'll notice is that the tonality starts building in a way that is very interesting and very natural you can see that even the Highlight to Shadow transitions is very natural but still every single one is completely different every single transition's different every time it create it comes up with something very unique every single time and lastly I can enable curves on top for an additional variable impact it takes it to another level entirely that's my absolute favorite we can take a look at this an an example um with another image for example I come over here and stormmy Sloan who is a phenomenal whoar photographer has this image um as well that we're going to use for it and I hit create you'll notice that let's zoom into the face here you'll see that the difference for every single application is unique the Shadows change of the midtones and the midtones of the highlights and so forth it's very interesting and you can come with something very unique to actually get what you want now there a couple other settings I want to show you when I right click over here you'll see that you're able to change the name of the group you can change the color of the group so if I change it to red and I call this black and white and I can keep my opacity 100 I can add a mask to the group I can make sure the group will always stay on top of your layer stack and now when I hit back I'm going to go ahead and delete this for a second and hit create you'll notice that the color itself changes the name changes and the mask is added and this is great because you can easily help you identify and organize what you're doing also we have the ability to add your um black and white adjustments as a saved layers stack so you don't even need to um put this into libraries or you figure out how to make it into an action if you like what you've created if you like this conversion you can save it now this will only be applicable and available the tool section over here where you can save your user looks this will only be there in Photoshop 2021 and above basically anywhere where you have this plugins menu then you're good to go if you have something TW like 2020 or less you can still use infinite black and white but you just won't have this functionality um because this is uh specifically created with tools that are available in 2021 and above but basically how it works is that you can rightclick and uh actually not right click you can expand the folder make sure the folder name is selected here and then hold shift and then select the first layer within the folder then come over to the plus sign hit plus and it'll say right click for setup so once the button is there you're going to right click you're going to call this whatever you want you're going maybe um B BW red series I think that's a cool name I'll say okay that worked thank you very much and there it is BW red series I could delete the layers here click on it again and there we go it's all there for you even cooler is that we have the ability to backup and import so if you want to send this to someone you click on the uh wheel here and then say backup and then it allow you to back up and then you send that file to someone and they can just click on import and it'll import all your color grades and black and white grades and all that stuff and if you don't want to save locally you can use our Internet cloud you click on open Infinite Cloud click on plus and then I'll just go and and edit this name I'll just say uh black and white and hit save and then it will save everything that is included in your uh tool section as well so you don't have to physically have a physical copy of it it's a good like secondary backup as well finally we have the tools section over here at the bottom and this bottom part is cool because there's this option called regions the bottom left left and what regions does is if you click on Shadows you can increase or decrease the Shadows over here and what it's doing is it's adding this curve and it's making sure that only applies to the shadow regions and so if you don't see this area here just go to window and properties and it's going to pop up with this window here and once you click on the shadow curve not the mask but the curve itself you will then see this option to adjust the brightness of the Shadows the same thing goes for midtones I can do that too and I can do the highlights as well but you typically want to go ahead and bring the highlights down from this point on the right like that and same thing with the Shadows uh you want to go to the left over here and increase this point as well if you want to fade that so you can have a really interesting super customized black and white conversion and so if I bring that together you can see what a difference we've made once the base is established so there we go we can see the before and after here very very interesting alternatively they have other options too like we have a grain option which is digital noise and digital noise and grain I like call them the same thing even though they're not but you know what I mean you have the ability to increase the noise as well and I always think that you know having that greediness in a black and white image looks really interesting and also we've ensured that the black and white itself or the uh the grain itself or digital noise whatever you want to call it becomes more Progressive into the Shadows so you have more of that being applied into the Shadows than the highlights so if you look in the back you see the bright area here there's less of that noisiness comp compared to the Shadows because when you have film you'll notice the same thing is that noise or grain is a lot less apparent in the highlights and the shadows and we want to replicate that realistic effect we also have ability to add contrast should you want more contrast you can keep on clicking it it'll just keep adding more contrast or you can click on the bottom right which is fade and fade will allow you to fade out the Shadows even more with those options I I truly hope gives you good idea of how all this works please check out our website at infinite col panel.com and you can see exactly all the videos and uh a bunch of other things on how to use our our tools so I'm excited to see what you do with it and we also feature a lot of photographers and creatives so check out our Instagram and our Facebook groups as well and join our community and we can't wait to see you and hopefully feature your work

Channel: Infinite Color Panel

Views: 1,333

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Id: 4QAbTNb3EG4

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024