Photoshop plugins & filters - Monochrome

Photo shop plug ins & filters - Monochrome

Monochrome Conversion

Many different filters are included in the "Monochrome" plug-in (I am placing it in quotation marks because it does much more than mere color-to-monochrome conversion). This is because luminosity of an image, or anything we look at, is the most important factor in human vision. It is luminosity that determines the visual shape of an object. That is why, for example, we can still distinguish shapes of objects in the dark. As long as there is some light available, we can see the shape of objects even if we cannot determine their colors. That is also what makes "black-and-white" photography and TV possible. The images are not truly black and white, rather they are shades of gray, i.e., luminosity.

First of all, you will find four monochrome filters. Why would you want them? After all, doesn"t all image editing software come with the ability to convert images to monochrome?

Maybe so, but there"s monochrome, and there"s monochrome. At least one popular program only allows you to convert the entire image to grayscale. It will reduce it to the 8-bit grayscale mode. But what if you only want to convert a selection to monochrome, like this:

Original picture:

Monochrome filter aplied on the selection:

You need a plug-in... And here it is.

But, wait, there is more! Compare these two images:

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Can you see a difference? I hope so, although I am not counting on it because web browsers are often not good enough at showing subtle differences.

The image on the left uses traditional method of monochrome conversion developed at the time color TV was invented. It is now considered inexact because the phosphors in TV screens (and computer monitors) are different today than they were back then. Yet, it is the most commonly used monochrome conversion in computer graphics, probably because it is easy to implement in integer math.

The image on the right uses a slightly different method, or rather different luminosity factors for the red, green, and blue channels. These factors were defined by the CIE for the use with HDTV.

Both images are limited to 256 levels of gray, which is nice if you want to use the GIF file format.

For anything else, you want more levels. Take a look at these two images:

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Again, the one on the left uses traditional luminosity factors, the one on the right, CIE factors. More importantly, they were converted using Rich Franzen's pseudoGrey algorithm, which produces up to 1,786 levels of gray.

Here are all four again, so you can compare them: Traditional on the left, CIE on the right; 8-bit in the top line, 12-bit in the bottom line.

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The Red Prince Pixie Dust collection then comes with four filters for monochrome conversion. However, they are combined into one plug-in, simply named Monochrome....

Custom Monochrome Conversion

In addition to the CIE and NTSC monochrome conversion methods, Pixie Dust Pro lets you select your own conversion factors. That means you can determine the weight of each channel for monochrome conversion. It can be any number, integer or decimal, positive, negative or zero.

The values are self-scaling. That means that if, for example, you choose red = 0, green = -24, and blue = 11, the conversion will ignore the red channel altogether, and put -24 parts of green and 11 parts of blue into each channel. Here's what that looks like:

Please note that whatever factors you choose, they may not add up to 0. However, if they do, Pixie Dust Pro will simply choose some default factors instead.

Saturation

The Pro version has a very flexible saturation filter in the monochrome plug-in. It lets you set its value anywhere between -2.00 and +2.00.

If you set it to 0, you will simply get a monochrome image. If to 1.00, no change will happen. Values between 0 and 1 result in decreased saturation. Values above 1 increase it, and values below 0 negate it.

The free version contains these two, instead:

Increase Saturation

This filter increases the saturation of an image by a factor of 2. See below an original image, and one processed through this filter.

Original picture:

As you can see, the original does need some saturation boost, but perhaps not as much as the filter offers. No problem. I created a duplicate layer, used the filter on that layer, and set its opacity to 50%. Of course, it is much easier done in the Pro version by simply setting saturation to 1.50 (i.e., 150%). Here's the result:

Quite a yummy dish of tofu!

But you can do more than just boost saturation with this filter. With the right picture you can produce some dramatic effects that go beyond everyday photography. For example, I took a picture of Lake Julia before sunrise:

Then I increased its saturation by the factor of 2. I did not do it just once, but three times. The result looks more like an impressionist painting than a photograph:

Negate Saturation

This one uses the same Pixie Dust filter, but with the factor of -1. As a result, the hue of the image is reversed, as in a negative, but with the luminosity of the original. To make the distinction clear, take a look at these two images:

The one on the left (or top if your browser cannot fit both next to each other) has been processed by the Negate Saturation filter. The one on the right is a regular negative created with my Flop All filter described elsewhere on this web site.

Again, with the right picture, you can produce some interesting visual effects. For example, the above picture of Lake Julia before sunrise set to the saturation of -2.0 looks quite dreamy:

Contour

Contour, surprisingly, is not that common in software, although it is produced by many hardware sfx generators. Indeed, a common misconception is that Posterize shows the contours in an image. In reality, the Posterize effect simply reduces the number of values in the red, green, and blue channels. But contours within an image depend on the luminosity of individual pixels. My Contour filter does just that, it reduces the number of levels of luminosity within an image, while preserving its hue and saturation.

The Contour filter, like all filters in the monochrome collection, allows the choice between CIE and NTSC modes. You can choose the level of contourization as well (2-256 levels). Naturally, the higher the number of levels, the less pronounced, and more subtle, the effect becomes.

Finally, the Monochrome... plug-in contains two duotone effects.

Gold Leaf

This filter produces a golden duotone effect (still in RGB mode):

Its effect is quite interesting when applied to embossed images.

Darkroom

Years ago I spent a lot of time in a darkroom, processing black-and-white film and making prints. I had a red light on, and always tried to see as much of the picture as possible.

This filter turns an image into what it would have looked like on black-and-white paper under that red light.

Other Duotones

Pixie Dust Pro lets you create a duotone based on any color, just like this:

Should you get the FREE version, or the Pro version?

Do you want to test Pixie Dust Photoshop plug-ins and get high-quality filters for free?
These plug-ins are simple to use as they do not take advantage of the full flexibility of the library: Most work on all three channels using the same configuration. And they work with opacity set to 100%. They are ideally suited for the hobbyist, a person who needs to fix his images quickly and does not want to be bothered by too many options. These plug-ins are free. You can use them for your own personal work or pleasure. They never expire, and they will not pop up any messages trying to get you to register them
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If you want complete control over what happens to your images, PRO version is for you. If you are a photographer, graphic artist, master of special effects, or if you have need for scientific imaging, or forensic analysis of images, you should consider the professional version.
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