How can the $99 second cousin to the most powerful and best image editing software beat it hands down? By doing something far easier and better -

Here’s what I mean. I love this picture of my daughter Kate:

Black and White Conversion original

It captures her in that pensive moment that epitomizes her growing into a teenager. But its not that great a photo – the color’s dull, the water’s an icky green. I wanted to change the mood and make it a black and white. The usual way to do this is by going in Photoshop and using Image-Adjustments-Hue and Saturation and lower the saturation to 0. This gives me:

Black and White Conversion - desaturate

Notice it’s kind of dull and looses some of that nice light showing on her face. Now I could play around with the curves in Photoshop and get it better. But in Elements you have a whole tool devoted to B&W conversions that gives you a variety of choices. Go to Enhance-Convert to Black and White. You get this box:

Convert to Black and White Dialog Box

Look at all the choices! The styles gives you the basic look and then you can fine tune it using the intensity and color adjustments. Try it and see! Here’s a few variations on our picture:

Black and White converstion - results

This great tool is available in Elements 5.0 and 6.0, and a more sophisticated version is available in Photoshop CS3.

Keep scrapping!

Stan – the DaddyKitty