The idea of converting concert pictures to black and white to hide their flaws, which came up in a post earlier today, is pretty nifty — but what if you don’t fancy getting to grips with the complexities of Photoshop or GIMP? Fortunately, there’s a basic black and white converter built into Picasa, a friendlier if less subtle tool. To access it, double-click on the image you want to edit, select Effects then B&W. As the example above demonstrates, going monochrome isn’t going to do much for issues like camera shake or generally low image quality (the shot in question is a hasty catch on a BlackBerry), but it can add a certain atmosphere. (By the way, if you can identify the performer, you’re even more tragic than me!)
John
March 3, 2009 at 6:14 PM
Even better is the “Filtered B&W”, which let’s you pick the hue that the grayscale conversion is based on. This helps you extract the best possible tonal range from the image.
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March 3, 2009 at 11:22 PM
Just proves an awful photo will always look awful – in fact it looks so bad in black and white (wait, that’s just a really flat and badly done range of grimy greys) that I gotta wonder how exactly you are hoping to promote the idea, flawed tho it is.
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