“Moderation” — it isn’t in the ukulele player’s vocabulary, so why are you hesitating? You actually believe there are limits to the uke obsession? Puh-shah!! No way! Enjoy a stress-free Valentine’s Day: build your uke-crazed sweetie this heart-shaped ukulele box then fill it with See’s candies, jelly beans, an engagement ring, or Jake Shimabukuro tickets — whatever you do rest assured that ya done good.

Download “Ukulele Valentine Heart Box” template (532kB PDF)

Finished box with lid measures about 6” x 4” x 1.25”. Includes three sheets: box & lid plus truly garish interior pink-n-purple box “lining”.

I printed mine on 80 pound smooth paper and can attest that the resulting carton is a surprisingly sturdy beast — those interior strips really stiffen the structure.

Be forewarned! 45 minutes did I toil assembling this silly box, though I’m admittedly all thumbs when doing paper craft — glue covered thumbs, wrong bits stuck together; that level of ineptitude (rings oddly familiar, same can be said of my uke playing ). Heck, even basics — cutting along lines, folding straight edges — it’s all a challenge. Doodling artwork (Adobe Illustrator) on my new-ish MacBook Air while enjoying a brew at local coffee spots? That I can do.

"Uke Box" Prototype: overall scale and aesthetics check.

Some tips might be useful so here’s what I found helpful:

• Fold & glue the tuning pegs before doing your precise trimming.
• On the lid (the uke’s top) don’t worry about gluing all the way up to the edge, a bit of a lip is fine.
• Start attaching the sides with the headstock piece, beginning at the “V” where the head meets the fretboard.
• Once the fretboard sides are attached (don’t glue the very end bit as there might be some trimming required — I deliberately made the pieces longer than you should need) attach the body’s sides starting at the sharp point at the bottom of the heart shape — folding the sides in half and aligning the “V” to the point.
• Depending upon your paper stock you might need to “feather” the tabs a bit on the round corners of the head stock.
• Attach the lining sides first. The top & bottom lining pieces are larger than you need so dry fit, trim, dry fit, trim — until they fit snugly before gluing in place.

More dramatic lighting you say? Surely! Let me kick in the LED spots.

Oh, and for the record, I take extra pride in the slightly bowed frets and the tuning gears.

Ukulele (Valentine) Heart Box Paper Craft Template by Buz Carter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at pizzabytheslice.com.

Download Zombie Snowflake Papercraft Pattern (87KB PDF)

Instructions below. Also available as an image here Zombie Snowflake Pattern/Template (Flickr set).

Trim your tree with Ben’s Zombie Christmas Ornaments and be sure to try his Zombie Nativity Set. Here’s a few shoots using one of the programmable LED lights (available from ThinkGeek).

Instructions

From printed sheet to final flake. Print on light, but rigid paper — though I had fairly good success with heavy bond. Sharp scissors are, however, crucial.

Start by folding in half. Followed by that first 60-degree bend. Make your folds crisp!!

Properly folding the paper is key, lo, the second 60-degree fold:

Now get to cutting!

Unfolding…

Tah-dah!

Download Papercraft Soprano Ukulele (PDF)

You may also download the big image from my Flickr Stream.

In under ten minutes you can have your very own uke! Great for Christmas tree trimming, package wrapping, or just to collect dust. All ya need is scissors and glue. A skewer or coffee stirrer, glue stick, and X-acto knife are also helpful, but not needed.

Oh, I also have a tumblr exclusively devoted ukuleles.  ”A Beginners Ukulele Resource Kit” is for those just picking up this ‘lil instrument and looking for resources and/or inspiration.

Pictured above, an iPhone wallpaper-sized (320x480px) silhouette from this past fall. For Halloween a scary theme seemed appropriate, thus this H.R.Giger inspired silhouette below:

Between Wikipedia, Flickr, and Google Image Search it’s fairly easy to find critters in profile that’ll enhance any staid Victorian silhouette. Another source: DeviantArt’s Photoshop Custom Shapes gallery!

While Photoshop or Illustrator makes the tracing task quite easy the old school Xacto knife, tracing paper, and black paper method still works.

As for tips — really the only (surprising) mistake people seem to make is in photo selection. Not to state the obvious, but, errr, isn’t it obvious that a silhouette depends on a profile or pose that’s clean? So, backlight the subject, stand them far enough away from a white wall that it won’t bounce too much light back onto the subject, and DON’T LIGHT THE SUBJECT! Seriously. No front-flash, okay? Light the wall (white, ideally) behind them well. And that’s it.

For this one (below) I traced a photo in Illustrator, printed it, then pencil sketched the squid before scanning that sketch and heading back to Illustrator for the final squid tracing and cleaning. Total time? Less than writing about it, say, 20-30 minutes?

This recent spate of stupidity actually started when I noticed how other-worldly (read: messy tangle) my hair was in a photo, which lead to making a self-silhouette portrait, which lead to thinking “wow, that’s a truly creepy thing to do, better muck it up”, and as JB Steve’s and my recent encounter with an enormous preying (praying?) mantis at KC’s Union Station was still fresh in my mind, well, just be glad these critters aren’t the size of house cats, or we’d be in serious trouble. Inspired here’s that result:

One problem: silhouettes of the same person, well, look the same, that is, one is good, two are boring. Retracing is definitely a clear cut diminishing returns exercise, too. So why not spruce them up?

OK, it’s time to eat, so I’ll stop here. Hope you try this with some friends or family… ok, both. Sure. Here’s some more silhouette inspirations:

• Incredible 3D silhouette Installation
• Kara Walker who explores race with large-scale silhouettes
• animal bookshelf dividers
• Junior Society’s Silhouette Round-up: Shadow Dancing

For you DIYers itching to go:

• Silhouette Tips and Instructions

If you want someone to do a legit one for you, there’s actually a lot of Silhouette Artists (Silhouette Paper Cutters maintains an index, by region), here’s a sampling:

• Mike Herbert
• Karl Johnson. Check out his gallery and ready-made goods, really great whimsy
• And naturally the Threadless spin-off Blik Surface Graphics fixes any crap paint job, and they have repositionable ones, too.

Wait! Wait! Before you go mosey over to squid.us, a site devoted to all things squiddy which is something, don’t ya think?

This really is a simple graphic to make though you might not at first agree — especially if you’ve already peeked at the lengthy list of steps below. Let me reassure you that it’s easy and if you’re new to Photoshop you’ll learn… shoot, you’ll learn all this:

1. Patterns! Useful in the basic mode of making shapes, these prove powerful and flexible in realizing photo-realistic effects
2. Bevel and Emboss’ hidden treasures: Contour and Texture.
3. Painting with light. Seems obvious, but this composition "works" by combining 3D lighting to 2D elements.
4. Shadows. Yup, Drop Shadows are key to this, more so than you might think.
5. The utility of making your own Styles and collecting a Texture Library.

Final Image Preview

The steampunk tileable wallpaper I made a year or two ago generated quite a few "how’d you do that" emails so here’s a scaled-down project you can knock out quite easily.

Download Project Files 2.3MB (Patterns and Gear as Photoshop Vector and PNG).

(The image below is 50% size of my actual Photoshop file. For some projects I prefer working at twice my final output resolution, this allows me to work faster, be a bit sloppy, but still have a clean final design. View large final version here.)

Part 1: Getting Document Started

Step 1

Before launching Photoshop let’s gather the required assets beginning with some tessellating (seamlessly repeating) texture patterns. We’ll also use a few Patterns that ship with Photoshop.

There’s plenty of great tutorials on making step-and-repeat (tileable) patterns (try this tutorial over at PSDTUTS) so I’ll not go into how they were made here.

For this project we’ll be making heavily pitted, metallic surfaces so I started with this photo of dirt (below) taken at a nearby baseball diamond.

After applying a few filters and fixing the edges so they disappear when tiled that baseball dirt is now the Photoshop Pattern named "Sand" (below). We’ll be using this one the most.

A softer version of "Sand" named "Rough Brass" (below).

Lastly, "Rotting Leaves" — a messy pattern, handy for dirtying stuff.

These patterns are included in the zipped project file. I’m going to assume that you’ve saved them someplace convenient where you can easily access and use them from within Photoshop. If you haven’t done this yet take a minute to do it, we’ll wait until you get back. (if you need help read this) OK, ready? Cool.

Step 2

Let’s begin by creating our Photoshop file, 1000 by 1000 pixels at 300dpi.

Step 3

Add our background surface. Create a solid by choosing Layer » New Fill Layer » Solid Color…. I’ll name it "Background". As for colors I’m going with a nice orangey-rust, say #270e03.

Step 4

Time to texturize. Let’s add a Pattern Overlay effect (click the effects button () on the Layers window). Choose our Sand pattern. Change the Blend Mode to Screen, knock the Opacity back to about 50%.

Part 2: Styling the Gear

Step 5

Definitely time for a gear. I built several gears, needles, and cogs in Illustrator (yet another tutorial, gang) and posted them on Flickr, here’s the one we’ll be using (PNG with transparency). Open this in Photoshop.

Step 6

Control+click the gear’s icon in the Layer window to load its transparency as our current selection.

Step 7

From the menu choose Layer » New Fill Layer » Pattern…. Give it a name, click OK. Again choose our Sand Pattern.

Step 8

Drag this new layer into our original composition where we just created the background. You should see the gear faintly on your somewhat darker background (below). We’re done importing the gear into our composition so go ahead and close it if you’d like.

Step 9

We’re now going to do all the real work by apply numerous effects to this Gear layer starting with a dark, large Drop Shadow.

Next, an Outer Glow with Multiply as the Blend Mode will sell the 3D effect a bit. I like to use a color other than black for secondary shadows such as this one, so try sampling a color from the composition and knock back it’s saturation just a bit.

I’m adding a Gradient Overlay here to again create a lighting effect. Light paints with color not just brightness (and darkness). So I’m making a black to pale yellow-green (#f9fd80) gradient and setting the Blend Mode to "Soft Light".

Age the piece more by applying our Leafy Pattern Overlay in "Multiply" Blend Mode.

Time for Bevel and Emboss!! First the basics: Chisel Hard with some a strong orange Highlight (#b54000) and deep red-brown Shadow (#380000).

Now let’s set a Bevel and Emboss Contour. This adds a slight lip to our gear. You can make it large — as in a decorative flourish — or quite small as flashing (mistakes made during casting or perhaps a misaligned die).

As you can see we now have a respectable 3D gear laying on Mars. Yay. Let’s keep going.

Step 10

With the Ellipse Tool we’ll add a plate over the center of our gear to attach it to our background. Set the options to "Paths" rather than its default of "Shape Layer". Draw a circle over the middle of the gear — constrain the ellipse tool to a circle by holding the shift key down as you drag.

We have a path, now choose Layer » New Fill Layer » Pattern…. Name it "Hub" and choose our Smooth Gold Pattern.

Note: if the Hub isn’t on the exact center that’s OK, we’ll align the layers a bit later.

Step 11

We’ll apply effects to our Hub very similar to the gear we just did. First, a Drop Shadow.

An Outer Glow, Multiply Blend Mode using a red brown (#3b200c).

A simple Gradient Overlay (just black to white) adds depth to the Hub’s surface.

Roughen the Hub’s surface with a Pattern Overlay using Luminosity Blend Mode and our trusty Sand Pattern

Bevel and Emboss the Hub. This time let’s set the size to 10px or large. You’ll see why, be patient.

Enable Contour and click the "Anti-aliased" option. Then click on the Contour pattern itself we’re going to make a Custom Contour. Let’s make a more decorative rim for the Hub by flattening the saw-tooth wave with some "corner" points.

The flat parts of the contour make the top bits of the rim, the anchor points along the Mapping’s baseline represent the troughs. The rim’s width is determined by what you enter in the Bevel and Emboss Size (that’s why we set it to 10px).

You might want to play with this a bit as some quite pleasing effects can be accomplished this way. Play, by all means, play. That’s what Preview is for.

One final touch to add a 3D texture to your Hub. In 3D graphics programs allow you to add "Bump Map" to a surface so it reflects light like a wood or sandpapery surface. A bump map is just a black and white image, the program uses the image’s luminosity to determine the surface texture, lighter values are peaks, darker ones pits (or valleys). Photoshop will do the same.

Let’s add the trusty Sand Pattern as our Texture with a Depth of 46%. Sweet!

Step 12

We’re ready to add a nut to our gear and hub. For this let’s choose the Polygon Tool (it’s in the Ellipse/Rectangle fly-out menu) and we’ll use it in much the same way we added the hub with the Ellipse Tool. Set the Tool’s options to Paths, set the number of sides to 6, shift-drag over the Hub’s center.

Choose Layer » New Fill Layer » Solid Color... Name the layer (“Nut” might be a good name) . Click OK, and, you’re correct, pop open the nut layer’s effects, we’ll add a few simple effects that’ll take us to this:

Step 13

This nut just needs the basics: a Drop Shadow…

… an Outer Glow for fuzzier shadows and to show the nut "biting" into the Hub’s surface…

…Gradient Overlay highlighting…

…Bevel and Emboss, the most obvious 3D trickery…

…and finally, Contour (Bevel and Emboss) again, playing around I decided this contour profile looked neat.

Step 14

We’ll need a bolt to thread that nut onto so back to the Ellipse Tool with you! Draw your small circle over the nut. Make a new Solid Fill Layer. You know the drill: Choose Layer » New Fill Layer » Solid Color… Name the layer ("Bolt Thread-end" might be a good name) and I’d go with "secondhand bolt brown" (say #38302a).

Step 15

Effects for the bolt. Drop Shadow pays the bills!

A heavier Outer Glow.

Bevel and Emboss using a beige highlight (#beb099) and deep blue shadow (#001d38).

Another handy Photoshop Contour Preset

Applying the Sand Pattern as our Bevel and Emboss Pattern for wear-and-tear.

The Leaf Pattern for our Pattern Overlay introduces another texture into our steampunk machine

Part 3: A Rubber Drive Belt

Step 16

Let’s now suggest other machinery just out of the image’s view port. How about a rubber belt? Let’s start by setting the foreground color swatch to a nearly black rubber color, say #02070c (shown in blue in the image below so the shapes stand out better). Then on to the Rectangle Tool. Draw two long bands across your image.

Step 17

Drop Shadow. Sure, at this point you’re sick of it, but this is the easiest 3D depth tool in the Photoshop toolbox — and thus the most overused. However, if you’ll play with the Distance setting here you’ll see how this effect "moves" the belt closer and further from the gear surface. I set it high enough that there’s actually a gap between the belt and the background.

For a Pattern Overlay try Photoshop’s "Metal Landscape" Pattern at 50% Scale and "Luminosity" Blend Mode (14%) to suggest that powdery-white patina aging rubber often gets.

A more complicated Gradient Overlay with Blend Mode of "Linear Light" (very minimal at 14% Opacity) demonstrates the value of spending just one extra minute to tweak an old, familiar Photoshop tool for fast big bang-for-the-buck.

Bevel and Emboss on a matte surface means we’ll use very little on the highlight, try as your color this blue-gray #4b5152

Our saw-tooth Bevel and Emboss Contour fits well here.

Bevel and Emboss Texture — Reuse Photoshops’ "Metal Landscape" Pattern at 50% Scale to add some pitting and fragility to our belt.

OK, here’s the belt. Looks good.

Part 4: Cross Members

Step 18

The back panel could use a little quick love, let’s inset some other materials there just behind the gear. Start by selecting our "background" layer. Get the Rounded Rectangle Tool, set the radius to about 12px. The color I’m using is a yucky-green #847842 with a Fill opacity of 40% (we’ll actually want a bit of the underlying color/texture to seep through).

Draw a bars, one horizontal, another vertical, across the comp. I’m ending these wide bars just at the comp edge. (in picture below I’ve exaggerated the color, just so, you know, you can see it).

Step 19

We’ll just add a few effects to "weld" these cross members onto our background plate. (no Drop Shadow this time)

Gradient Overlay with Blend Mode "Overlay", adding a bit of color at the ends by adjusting the gradient, moving the stops a bit. This might be a good spot to try your hand at Radial versus Linear gradients.

Bevel and Emboss — it’s "Pillow Emboss" time. Pillow Emboss effect "spills" over the layer and affects the background.

Time to really apply your Contour experience. Add several Corner points.

More Sand Pattern Texture.

Step 20

Alignment. Select the Gear, background cross-bars you just made, the Nut, the Hub, and the Bolt

Choose the Move Tool and then click Align Horizontal Centers and Align Vertical Centers

Part 5: Lighting & Shadows

Step 21

Let’s talk lighting. And since you love Drop Shadow, let’s use a shadow to define a light’s location.

Duplicate the Gear. We want a clean copy, so throw away all of the styles on this new copy by right-clicking the layer and choose "Clear Layer Styles" from the pop-up menu. Now zoom out (control+minus several times). Way out. Drag this new Gear layer until it’s nearly off the canvas, but just in sight at the composition’s top edge.

Set the layer’s "Fill" to 0%. Yup, we don’t need the layer per say, just its shape (Fill works independent of Effects, so you may create layers only for their effects as we’re doing here. The "Opacity" setting works on both Fill and the Effects.)

Add a Drop Shadow, but with an enormous Distance. I’m using a dark blood red-black, #2c0101, you might want to compare "smooth" versus "linear" Contour. Set the size for a fuzzier (and thus further away) shadow.

It’s quite important to uncheck "Layer Knows Out Drop Shadow". This enables us to see the entire shadow, even where it passes behind the object. And since we have an invisible object (Fill of zero), we’d have unexplained gaps if we failed to check this option.

Step 22

Lighting is what’s going to sell this image and sometimes, as we’ve just seen, the best lighting is negative-lighting, aka shadows. Create a new Adjustment Layer: Layers » New Adjustment Layer » Curves... Go ahead with this drastic one, pull the midtones down quite low. Click OK. Now press Control+I to Invert the Curve’s Mask (effectively hiding the effect — you can also fill the layer mask with Black). Now, grab the Brush, make it an enormous soft one, and scribble shadows into the canvas edges.

Here’s what my mask looks like:

Step 23

I’m going to add a vignette effect, essentially repeating step 22 with a less dramatic curve and applying it more judiciously so an oval of light seems to hit the gear.

Here’s the mask I’m applying:

Conclusion

Creating hyper-photo-realistic images is a great and quite forgiving way to learn Photoshop’s many effects. And if it’s not quite believable enough, well, it wasn’t suppose to be in the first place, right?

Sadly, when, in the low days of last Winter, I set out to reduce Pizza’s 404′s to as near to zero as possible I took what I thought was the smart and easy route. Checking the server logs for 404s I created appropriate redirection files for each missing HTML page. This works, and if you’re unable to use rewrite by all means get rid of those 404′s any way you’re able, but using meta refresh tags accomplishes the task in a far too obvious way; the user sees your “we’ve moved” page, if only for a few seconds before the page refreshes and loads the new resource.

Mod rewrite masks all of this, and leaves an appropriate “forwarding address” for search engines.

Apache httpd.conf

The place to begin is in Apache’s httpd.conf file, you need to locate the two places that will allow directory level controls for rules such as this. OK, is this the only way, well, no. But this is my story, of how I slowly did this, so this is a way that works.

Be sure to find both occurrences of AllowOverride. I wasted an hour attempting to resolve why my mod rewrite in .htaccess wasn’t working (you’ll know if it isn’t working when all you get are 404s) before noticing the second place where AllowOverride needed to be set.

AllowOverride All

.htaccess

OK, having told Apache to look for and execute .htaccess files for each directory you’ll need to write ‘em. The r=301 will include redirection message in the http header, making search engines happy. The nc is non-casesensitive.

A Better Example: General Rules

For Charles’ site mod rewrite really shines. He has 80 or 90 files, one per week, that have been moved. (actually I did make the redirection files for all of these — it was part of the conversion program I wrote to strip the files apart and load the content into WordPress – ed) With a few rules we can handle all of these since the file names are the date, and the slug for WordPress will still be the date, though in a different format (note how lame I am at not handling the zero-padded month and day digits. God I suck).

(Note, the line breaks are added here to fit the rules onto my too narrow page)

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See Also

I’ll keep saying it: these pages are for my own use, I forget things so quickly that I need this. Here’s some real pages that helped me:

• Apache Online Docs: mod_rewrite
• corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php
• Part 1 WebMasterWorld, Part 2 WebMasterWorld

First, Brightness & Contrast. This is a very crude, down and dirty adjustment that is, in fact, a dumbed down version of Levels, so quickly wean yourself off this one because it rarely produces happy results. Next: Levels.

Levels is very good, definitely better than Contrast, and for evaluating a scene (that is, informational purposes) it is perhaps the best measure of your success in capturing the shot (I shoot with my camera’s display set to always show the levels histogram (thanks, Paul) — the best way confirm that you’re not clipping off detail). But, in truth, Levels suffers from a couple of significant drawbacks. First, the gamma on Macs and Windows boxes differ by a few tenths (may not sound like much, but a tenth is a lot). Thus levels adjusted on a Mac often are too dark when viewed on Windows, and those adjusted on Windows are almost always too light (flat) on a Mac. Also, Levels gives you three points, which often, no matter how much tweaking you employ, just doesn’t cut it. So what else is there?

The answer: Curves. Curves is to Levels as Levels is to Brightness & Contrast: Curves is a souped-up Levels control. Plus, Curves can accommodate some fairly drastic color-balance issues by adjusting each channel’s Curve independently (for example, photos shot on overcast days or in shadows can easily be fixed by slightly pulling down the blue curve). But the most useful “trick” you can perform with Curves is a simple “S”-shaped curve. This will pop the contrast and the saturation, giving very pleasing rich blacks and crisp whites.

In this snapshot of the Curves dialog box the blue line is the default — output levels are exactly mapped to input levels. The black (rough) line is a moderate S-curve, the red line a rather pronounced curve. The two adjusted curves bump-up brights, and pull-down the darks (output level greater than input, output level less than input respectively). Note that in the middle areas the curve is nearly linear (flat 1:1) so midtones are barely affected.

Here’s an example where an acceptable photo undergoes dramatic changes (some of you won’t like):

An Example: S-Curve Bird of Paradise

Original

Shoot in a hurry or with white-balance set to auto and often your photos have a strange color cast. In this case, the tell-tale blue of mid-day shadows. Also, even though it’s a decent image there could be more separation between background and foreground: we always want pop, no?
�
Adjusting Curves takes just a couple of minutes and the results are stellar. Let’s go…

RGB Curve

LAYER» NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER» CURVES…
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As the name implies an S-Curve looks like an “S”. Just how much you want to apply is entirely up to you. You are throwing away some data: the more pronounced the S the more you’re discarding.
�
A shallow S works well for dynamic images, for flatter images push the boundaries.

RGB Curve’s Effect

As you can see this is really quite a difference. It’s similar visual affect is applying saturation, but not really. Mid-tones are smooth, the blacks draw attention to the highlights.

Blue Curve

The one problem that hasn’t been addressed is the blue-cast due to the subject being within mid-day shadows. Simply pulling down the blues in the highlights and leaving them to gradually increase in shadows is all it takes for a natural look.
�
Color-correction within the curves is quite powerful: adjust for flourescents by playing with the Green curve. Indoors and tungsten light? Hit the Red and a bit of the Green, or even increase the mid-point of the Blue.

Finished

The highlights are bright, but not ringed in blue. Midtones look warmer — the instant result of changing the mix of red-blue.
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Compare this image to the original (click next, then click back to toggle between the two images). You may find this too much, and I wouldn’t disagree — I’d keep tweaking this, it’s a bit aggressively green, but nonetheless this shows the power and perhaps serves as a cautionary tale. Too much is as bad as not enough.
�
Curves is your all purpose color correction and visual pop tool.

Resources for another explanation:

Digital Outback Photo: The Power of the S-Curves

Well, here’s Ted’s method:

RGB to B&W via Lab Color

1. Start with an RGB image.
2. Go under the IMAGE menu under MODE and choose LAB COLOR.
3. Go to the CHANNELS palette-you’ll see 4 channels.
4. Drag the B channel to the TRASH, deleting it.
5. Now delete the channel called ALPHA 2, leaving just ALPHA 1 (which was the original lightness channel)
6. Go under IMAGE menu under MODE and choose GRAYSCALE.
7. Go to the LAYERS palette and click on the BACKGROUND layer. If your grayscale image appears too light, make a copy of the layer and
   change the Blend Mode to MULTIPLY. If it appears too dark, lower your MULTIPLY layer’s OPACITY until you dial in a perfect-looking grayscale
   image.

I’ve tried this on a few pics and the results are quite good. I still advocate adding an s-curve and agree that you need to play with the opacity of Multiply layer.

RGB to B&W via Channel Mixer

OK, my turn. My own B&W conversion story evolved from playing with individual channels and using a single channel’s data for the B&W image (something I read; I did not figure it out myself).
This often yields nice results and I encourage you try it (see steps below), but just as often it yields crap. The concept is sound, but we can improved it.

The solution is to choose the best mix of data from the 3 channels that give you the richest black & white data, and this varies considerable depending upon the nature of your picture. I’ll number the steps because Ted did, but really this is one step.

1. Start with an RGB image.
2. Go under the LAYER menu choose NEW ADJSTMENT LAYER — CHANNEL MIXER.
3. Check the monochrome option at the bottom.
4. Now, using the sliders and with Preview enabled, move the amounts of the red, blue, and green channels you want to add together for your final image. You should remember that the total percentage should be around 100% — if you add 70& red, 80% green, and 50% blue the image will probably be completely blown out.
5. That’s it — except for perhaps adding an s-curve.

Experiment, see what works for you and your images.

RGB to B&W via Single Channel

This method is not recommended except as a learning experience. To begin you need to realize that Photoshop is nothing more than a very good grayscale editor underneath. To prove this look at the channels pallet. What do you see? A grayscale red channel, a grayscale green channel, and a grayscale blue channel. Hell, even masks are just grayscale data.

Knowing this it makes sense that going from a three channel RGB file to one channel grayscale means some compromises, and, generally speaking, PS does a decent job when you change color modes. But also realize that PS is doing some averaging of the three grayscales (Red, Green,
and Blue channels) to get to that one channel. And average may not suit your particular needs.

If you take a peek at, say, the blue channel you’ll most likely be surprised at what you see. The blue channel is very often much noisier than either the red or the green. And it looks rather flat, less dynamic. Conversely, look at the green channel. The
human eye is most sensitive to green (a fact that digital camera makers know well, digi-cams have twice as many green “receptors” as red or blue)
and so the green channel is often packed with clarity the others lack (again, we’re talking averages here, if you’re looking at a picture of red M&Ms, then all bets are off).

What does all this prove? Well, sometimes you just copying one channel, say the green channel, and create a new grayscale document from it yields a good black and white that’s better than averaging RGB via changing the Color Mode to Grayscale. On the other hand, sometimes this is crap. Just try this:

1. Start with an RGB image.
2. In the palettes change from LAYERS to CHANNELS
3. Alt+click on the visibility (eyeball) for each channel to solo that channel’s grayscale image until you find one that you like
4. Control+A to select the entire canvas and control+C to copy the layer
5. Open a new grayscale image (PS will make the image the same size as what you just copied into the clipboard)
6. Paste the image into the new file