Hands on: Photoshop gains extra magic

Black and White
In past Hands On columns, I’ve looked at various methods for converting colour images to black and white and for tinting mono photos.

By far the best method for converting to mono, and the one used by most professionals, is the Channel Mixer.

Adobe has added a handful of presets for commonly used black and white filter effects – a small, but nonetheless useful, improvement.

The reason Adobe hasn’t gone further with the Channel Mixer is that it has added a dedicated Black and White command to the Image>Adjustments menu. This dialogue box also provides black and white filter presets, but its six sliders – red, green, blue, yellow, magenta and cyan – provide much more control over the influence of original colours on final greyscale tones.

The black and white dialogue box also allows tinting of mono images via hue and saturation sliders. This combination makes it easier than ever to produce mono and tinted images from colour ones. Of course, if you want to produce advanced split-toning effects, you’ll have to refer to those back-issue Hands On columns.

The final thing to say about the new Black and White feature is that, as you’d expect, you can apply it as an adjustment layer, so you can keep all your colour data intact.

Cloning
Another technique I’ve frequently covered in past columns is cloning. Photoshop’s Clone Stamp tool remains unchanged, but a new Clone source palette has been added which allows you to define and switch between up to five separate clone sources. This could prove useful when cloning from multiple layers.

The Clone Source palette also provides an overlay option, which displays the clone source as a tint of the entire offset layer. This is a huge advantage because you can see rather than guess the source before you press the button. It also provides a bit of an insight into how cloning works

– all you’re really doing is selectively painting in an offset layer. You can change the opacity and blend mode of the clone source overlay, (which only changes how the overlay appears – not the result of the cloning) but it works pretty well at the default 25 per cent and normal blend mode settings.

The Clone Source palette displays the offset in pixels and you can overwrite this, which provides a more accurate method of resetting the source than clicking with the brush, though I’m not sure how useful that will be.