Preserved Topic: Colour 2 B&W play thing

I did a big version of one of my play things. I play with this quite a bit for making brushes, but sometimes I use it for grunge things and similar. Can be used to B&W a colour photo (sound familiar?). This is the big version and covers the major variations that I use.

Lot's of adjustment layers. In the PSD, they are set to rather arbitrary settings. Each case is different, so tweak tweak tweak. You know, play with the settings and turn various ones on and off for different things.

There is also a pure white layer called "paint me". It's set to Colour Dodge, also fun to change. This layer is a lot of fun to play with. I use Airbrush set to 20% to paint directly on it with black and white. I also use various gradient tools, sometimes set to Multiply.

Prepping the background can be a bit tricky. I left it alone in the PSD so you can see a minor foible. As it is, some colour bleeds through to the top. This is easily fixed with Levels -- all you have to do is bring Output Levels up a notch to 1. No big deal. Might also be a good idea to give the background a slight blur.

Play with it as is, or try it for yourself on a different photo. All you have to do is load the PSD and drag the set to the other photo. All of the layers in the set will move right along with it. Might have to fill "paint me" with white. This is a PS 6 thing, so I'm not sure about PS 5.x.

I usually use this to make my own brushes. Drop the set onto a photo and play with it. Once I get something that I want to make a brush, select the area and Edit > Define Brush. A single photo can yield a bunch of decent brushes. Sometimes I ctrl + a, ctrl + shift + c, then drop it onto another photo and change blending mode to multiply.

That's the real short of it. One of these days I'm going to do a big thing about tweaking it.

playwithme.psd ~27kk

any chance of you zipping that puppy WJ? pretty please?

You are still on 5.5, right? I'll strip the set out and upload that later. We'll see if that works for you.

have 6 and 5.5.

I think its more of the DL thingy me jig my end... have had this before with DL'ing raw psd's, usually works if they are zipped though?

could it be a mac versus pc thing?

w0rks nice in PS 5.5...tHx for that.

cu
~Xdreamer.ch~
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to stupid for transparent sigs

Hmmm...

Trying a different route. I didn't strip the set, instead I recorded an action and added some photos to play with. The action set is called "warjournal" and the action to run is called "play with me". Load action, load photo, run action. I don't know why I didn't do an action earlier. Much easier, especially with modality and on/off.

Let me know how it goes.

play.fiddle.learn

playwithme.zip ~192k