Mono Conversion

[Dabhand16]

I'm playing around with mono conversions and have been translating Vincent's excellent Photoshop tutorials into PSP X.

However, I'm hitting a wall on one part of the process. This particular method uses two hue/saturation adjustment layers. The first has the blend mode set on 'colour', the second, normal. The second (top) layer is used to desaturate the master channel to achieve the mono conversion. The other layer uses the hue control to tweak the image tonality. On his tutorial, moving the master hue slider back and forth has a marked effect on the image, but when I replicate this technique in PSP X, it makes no difference to the image at all. I've tried different blend modes, and the individual colour channels, all with the same result. That is, nothing happens.

Can anyone shed any light on why this is happening? (or rather, not happening!)

[Dabhand16]

Since my first post, I have now tried reversing the order of the adjustment layers, that is, the functions/blend modes. Still no effect when trying to use the hue controls to fine tune the greyscale.

I guess I must be doing (or not doing) something really basic, because no matter what, there is no difference in the photograph.

[Kevgermany]

Does your imagfe have a full range of colours? This technique relies on the filtering effects individual colours have on each other.

[Dabhand16]

I've been ploughing through the help screens, and found that the 'colour' blending mode is only available for images with 16 million colours.

I'm now trying to find out what colour depth the image has, but I keep losing count when I get to nine million four hundred thousand odd.

I think this may hold the key. Is there an easy way of finding out the colour depth of an image?

[Kevgermany]

Is there an easy way of finding out the colour depth of an image?

Yes - (2^n)^3 where n is the bit depth - either 8 or 16. If you're working from a 24 or 48bit base, then you need to divide these figures by 3 before applying the formula (which gives you 8 or 16).

If that's not sensible, 8 bit images have 2^8 colours per channel, which is 256 colours, so in combination we have 256^3 or 16,777,216 colours possible. This is the standard that jpegs use and the one referred to in the help.

Elements only works with 8/24bit images or lower, converting ones with higher bit depth ( 16/48 ) down to this value.

[Dabhand16]

Thanks, Kev.

I am using jpegs, so in theory, I ought to have the requisite number of colours. If this is so, I can't work out why the mono conversion Vincent gives on his DVD does not work on PSP X.

ho hum, more head scratching.

Thanks again.

[Kevgermany]

sorry, can't help with PSP...

[Dabhand16]

Tell me about it..........

I think I'll dip into the Corel knowledge base.

I might be some time............


Thanks for the support.