Taking portrait photographs is the main pastime of many amateur photographers and it can be very rewarding. A lot of people even venture into converting their digital portraits into black and white. This is where the results can become a little mixed. Luckily there is a little photography post production technique that you might be able to try. Here is one way we manage to get a little bit of extra detail into those black and white portraits.

Step 1) Fire up Photoshop or GIMP and load up your colour portrait. We are using a photo of Joe Biden from the Whitehouse website for this tutorial. Save the image as joe1.jpg

Step 2) Adjust the exposure setting of the image down 2 stops and save the image as joe2.jpg

Step 3) Adjust the exposure setting of the original image up 2 stops and save the image as joe3.jpg

You should now have three images that look something like these:

Step 4) Open up a HDR program. You can get a free trial of most of them or newer versions of Photoshop also have HDR conversion capability. Just do a Google search.

Step 5) Convert your three images into a HDR image and save it as a 16 bit .tif file. You should get something like this:

Step 6) Now open your .tif file up in Photoshop or GIMP and convert it to black and white using whatever method you prefer (we used Image>Adjustments>Black and White in Photoshop). You should get a reasonably decent black and white image of Joe. Something like this:

Step 7) Do and dodging and burning that you see fit and then adjust the levels to your tastes to get the final result. Something like this should be the result:

Now if you compare this to the original shot, then the original shot converted to black and white using traditional methods, we think the steps above produce a much more character filled portrait. (Click on the images to see the larger versions).

So there you have it! It IS possible to give a politician character!