Platinum Photography Effect

Landscape and architectural photos are best suited for this type of effect. Here’s the original image:

There are many B/W conversion methods. We will use one of the most effective techniques – Channel Mixer conversion. It is powerful, and it is fast. We will create new Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer instead of ‘plain’ Channel Mixer so you can always adjust its settings later.

Each channel is a grayscale version of your image. Have a look at the Channels pallete to find out what channels provide you with maximum amount of details in shadows and highlights. Usually red and green channels are most detailed.

Select Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Channel Mixer. Channel Mixer does exactly what it name means – it allows you to mix channels in a proper proportion to get the most detailed image with high contrast. Check “Monochrome” in the Channel Mixer dialog and ‘play’ with amount of red, green and blue channels. Here you can see my settings and B/W image:

We will use another adjustment layer to colorize image. The reason for using adjustment layer instead of simple colorizing is the same as in the previous step – it gives you ability to make changes to image color easily at any time.

Select Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Hue/Saturation. Here are my settings and the result:

Press CTRL-A to select all. Press CTRL-SHIFT-C to copy contents of all visible layers to clipboard. Press CTRL-V to paste it to a new layer.

New layer should be active. Set it’s blending mode to Multiply. Then select Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur. Set Radius value to 3-10 pixels or more depending on the size of the image.

Right now our image is too dark. We will correct that in the following step.

Again we will use adjustment layer to lighten the image. Select Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Levels. Here are my settings:

Again we use adjustment layer to increase contrast. Select Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Curves. Increase contrast to make bright areas shiny. Here are my settings:

The image so far:

I decided to use Graphic Pen filter to add some brushed metal texture.

Press CTRL-A, then CTRL-SHIFT-C and then CTRL-V to create new layer composited from all underlying layers. Press Shift-D to reset Foreground/Background colors to black and white. Select Filter – Sketch – Graphic Pen. I used default settings: Stroke Length 15, Light/Dark Balance 50, Right Diagonal.

Set opacity of the new top layer to 3-5% and blending mode to Lighten.

You may use your own combination of filters to achieve type of effect you want.

Final image: