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Hello everybody,
This is my first post. I am sorry if this question has been asked before. I searched the forum, and I could not find anything related to my question.
The question is: Does PP handle grayscale images?
Your answers will be greatly appreciated.
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I didn't know if it did or not so I just "greyscaled" an image and ran it thru PP and it worked fine.
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Thanks a lot for taking the time, Somnambulist!
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You are actually much better off running a photo through Portrait Professional before converting to greyscale if possible. This is because Portrait Professional uses the color information to get good results. You can convert pictures to black and white by sliding the Saturation slider in the Picture Controls all the way to the left.
Tony
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01-27-2011, 07:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-27-2011, 07:36 PM by macargu.)
Thank you, Tony.
I am sorry I was not more clear in my original posting.
My question refers to those cases when you do not have a color image to start out from, but a grayscale one, which is very common, at least in my case.
So far, only Somnambulist's specific answered received, I was hoping to receive a few more, which will be greatly appreciated.
Macargu
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In the case where you do not have a colored image to begin with, here are some tips:
PP uses color to help find skin, so if you are using a black and white image that is more likely to go wrong: so make sure the skin selection is ok by using "View/Edit Skin Area" (in v10).
PP also uses color a lot in the spot detector, so it's worth playing with different values of that to see if it's useful or if turning it off and using the touch-up brush is better.
Apart from that everything else should work similarly to how it does in the colored case. The occasional slider (like blemishes) works on color, so don't be surprised if some sliders have no affect on black and white images.
Hope that's more helpful!
Tony
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Thank you so much, Tony.
Your explanation was really helpful.
I am sure I will understand the details much better once I purchase and start using PP's latest version.
macargu
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I had some scans from black & white negatives and tried them on PPS 10. I found that many skin features I could not use as in color images. When blupainting the skin area, I got orange spots in some positions. And I had to disable the skin texture, as it messed up the skin area. Also, some of the skin sliders did completely mess up the skin area. By using only some of the sliders and using them very sparingly, I was able to get reasonable results. However, the face adjustments work well, just as with color. My problems were only with the skin adjustment.
I used an RGB file, even if its only monochrome. Maybe I should have used just a grayscale format? Or maybe I did something else wrong?
A special grayscale mode in future releases? Would be nice, but I doubt that there are enough users to justify this.
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Very informative posting, Lewin, thanks.
I fully second your feature request for a special grayscale mode!
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If you are doing grayscale images, make sure you have the latest version V10.1 (you can upgrade by going to Check For Updates in the help menu). V10.1 has significant improvement for grayscale images over V10.0.
The most important thing to know about grayscale images now is that the first thing you must do is make sure the skin is selected properly before using the sliders.
Tony
