Black and white

[Marydh]

Hi gang.  I just received this cutie to work on.  I  haven't done many black and white and I was wondering how you would approach the "color correction".  Do you still do levels and/or curve adjustment?  Do you think I should do it in sepia?  Would appreciate your feedback before I dive in.
Thanks,
Mary

[Jo Ann Snover]

When the edge of the photo is yellowed as well as the whites in the image, I assume it's a faded black and white - they often go yellow as they age. I wouldn't do as sepia - that's trivial to add as a post processing step to a perfect black and white, so it's always an option later.

It's really important to get the tones right, but there's many ways to go about that. My preference is to treat the file as color - correcting the colors and tonal range - but always add a black and white (or channel mixer) adjustment layer to be sure the result is truly monochrome.

[Mhayes]

Mary, this is a B/W and the yellow is from age and water discoloration. Even though it is a B/W keep the photo in RGB mode and I like to first do a Curves Adjustment, usually auto unless a difficult one. Then I like to go the B/W adjustment and go through the drop downs to see which I like best. A lot of times the blue channel has the best option, but not always. One reason when we photo these photos I like to keep the border as that can be used for the white eye dropper.

[Marydh]

Thanks a lot Margie and Jo Ann.  I should be good to go now.🤓

[Marydh]

Well, I've done the black and white.  Please let me know what you see.  It looks so cold to me but I don't know how to put some warmth in it.
Thanks, Mary

[Jo Ann Snover]

I took a break from making stuffing and cranberry sauce for tomorrow - the house smells good right now :)

I think you're reacting (in seeing coldness) to the composition and lighting of the image, not your work on it. It was taken outside on a super-high-contrast day and there's not a lot of pleasing light on the young guy. You can't fix that part.

There are a couple of small things I see to be fixed. I hope this helps explain them:



Your edge of the image has jaggies in it and it should be a line - not straight, but see the next point. I think I also see some splotches in the white border you could get rid of.

If you follow the lines where there isn't damage on the edge of the image, it's not a rectangle. It's not even just skewed. I drew a rectangle selection, skewed it with transform selection and then warped that selection to match the curved edge of the original photo. No idea why it's like that, but I think it's pretty clearly in the original, not part of the damage.

Looking at the little one's face, I noticed that in cleaning up the damage you lost a little of the shading and clipped the mouth just a hair on the left side. I just added  a little shading and a tiny extra on the mouth and I think it looks more like the original boy. It's funny how expressions alter with the tiniest changes in mouth shape.

Other than those small things, I'd say you're done.

[Marydh]

Thanks Jo Ann.  That sounds good.
Enjoy all the yummy food!