Thursday, June 23, 2005

Focal Black and White Effect

I had someone ask me how I created this pic, so here I will explain. It involved using Picasa's simple (some tell me that is relative, but you'll see how simple in my example) and freely downloadable software. After having loaded Picasa and scanned for pics, simply find the one you want to work with and double click it.


It should bring up the picture in the editor (you can also bring it up by clicking once on the one you want and hitting CTL-3 or clicking once and selecting Picture from the menu, then View and Edit.


Once here simply click the effects tab.


Next select the Focal B&W effect.


Once you have done this you can click and drag the green + (shown inside the red circle), or simply click inside the picture and the + will jump to that location. You can use the controls to the left to control the size and sharpness. Once you have it how you want it, simply click Apply. If you have a handy blogger site and the free Hello software you can then click hello and upload it to your blog. You can also order prints, e-mail, etc.. I might also mention that you can use more than one effect on a picture.


A couple of examples of the Focal B&W.




This one has Saturation, Film Grain, Sharpen, and Soft Focus applied.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks easy to do. thanks for the tutorial.

Bonj said...

It really is and you are welcome. I was happy to do it.

Anonymous said...

how did you get it so perfect on the first example?

Anonymous said...

I have picasa, but I cannot make the focal point so perfect like you can. Only in a circle. How did you cut out the flower's petals?
rachel
RKSahagun@yahoo.com

Bonj said...

I am only able to do it in a circle with the Picasa tool as well. Of course, you can move the center of the circle and control the size of the circle. I think the reason that it blends well regarding the petals in this specific picture though is because the petals of the flower are white. As a result I can bring the circle in further and regardless if the petals are in the black and white area or the color area, they will still show as white. This would be more difficult for a flower that has colored petals with spacing between the petals.

For something like that you might have to result to a more full fledged photo editor like Corel PhotoDraw, Adobe PhotoShop. Of course, there are free alternatives to those as well, such as GIMP and Paint.NET that one could utilize if not wanting to have to purchase something, but the editing would be more involved with one of these tools.