Hi all! I did not find an introduction area in the forum, so I'll introduce myself here: I am a 34 novice photographer living in Spain, and I registered as the Luminous Landscape has been a reference for me so many times in the last months that I wanted to find out about this forum.
I would like to show you a little but I think useful program I wrote last weekend to allow any non experienced user to easily rip B&W tonings from your favourite authors, and apply them straight into your B&W pictures or calculate a standard Photoshop .acv curve file to do the processing there. I hope you find it useful and I hope to get feedback from you all. I keep this program for free and it can be downloaded from (follow Software - Tone Hacker):
http://www.guillermoluijk.comThe program analyses a toned B&W image and obtains the RGB curves to be applied to a pure B&W picture to obtain the same tone.
This is the GUI:
The steps to achieve a toning are:
1. Use the '...' to load a toned image
2. Press 'Analyse' to analyse it and create the curves
3. Load with '...' the target picture. If it is coloured use now 'Desaturate' to desaturate it.
4. Press 'Tone' for toning.
DONE! it's really fast.
or
3b. You can as well use the option to
export PS curves (.acv format straight readable from PS) and apply the "hacked" toning from inside PS.
The generated files will subsequently be stored on the same folder as the original ones. Saving the histogram and curve plots can be disabled (default).
This is an example of the results to tone a B&W landscape. We found this picture and we liked its tone:
We analyse it with Tone Hacker, and apply the curves to a pure B&W image of ours. The result is this:
Drawbacks of the program:
- At this moment this is a 8-bit files program.
It can read 16-bit files, but they will be internally converted to 8-bit for processing. That means that if the toning is the last part of your whole processing it's fine, but if more manipulation has to be applied to the image after toning, the best way to preserve quality is to export the .acv curves and work with them in PS 16-bit files.
- The graphic library cannot read Greyscale 16-bit TIFF files (I think this type of file is not really a Windows standard). To do it just convert them previously to RGB or to Greyscale 8-bit and repeat the process.
Cheers.