black and white conversions...

[shiato storm]

Hopefully a quickie this...
trying to do a mono convert on an image, has blue sky which I want nice and dark - only thing is I can't seem to get away with it in channel mixer as I end up with nasty halos all over the place.
Any tips how to avoid these?

also how to avoid that 'patchy' look as the gradients between tones breaks apart some times...?

 

[reddeathdrinker]

The short messy answer is:

Convert to B/W with channel mixer, selecting the channels that have the best contrast, select an area on the pic you want to enhance, like the sky, and feather the edge of the selection(I use 150-200 pixels on a full-size image). Make a new curves selection, and tweak the curve to increase the contrast of your selected area.

There's a great video guide on how to do it with this months "Digital Photo" magazine....if you want to post the image, I (and others) would be happy to give it a bash for you....

 

[shiato storm]

cheers I'll give it a go - I'm usually ok just the odd pic comes up with crazy halos about the place between the blue sky and a subject...