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Matching black and white headshots in Publisher


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I have a scenario in which a number of headshots of individuals by different photographers and of varying quality “as photos” – some originally colour, some black and white –  have to be placed in an Affinity Publisher document, all to be printed as black and white (within a full-colour design). My concern is the range of tonal properties and subtle differences in greys that result.

What's the most efficient/reliable method for ensuring that the placed photos are as well-matched as possible?

In particular, is this work that should be done in Affinity Photo or other photo editor before placing in Publisher, or is it better to make conversions and/or adjustments in Publisher?  
What adjustment tools are best suited for achieving a good visual match? (I realise there are many ways to create a black and white photo from a colour one.)
And are there any underlying settings or anything else I should be aware of that would help ensure a good match?

 

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17 hours ago, frindley said:

I have a scenario in which a number of headshots of individuals by different photographers and of varying quality “as photos” – some originally colour, some black and white –  have to be placed in an Affinity Publisher document, all to be printed as black and white (within a full-colour design). My concern is the range of tonal properties and subtle differences in greys that result.

What's the most efficient/reliable method for ensuring that the placed photos are as well-matched as possible?

In particular, is this work that should be done in Affinity Photo or other photo editor before placing in Publisher, or is it better to make conversions and/or adjustments in Publisher?  
What adjustment tools are best suited for achieving a good visual match? (I realise there are many ways to create a black and white photo from a colour one.)
And are there any underlying settings or anything else I should be aware of that would help ensure a good match?

 

Hi,

personally not an expert with Publisher, never the less, i would always tend to use Photo to match the headshots for the following reasons:

  • For me it is much easier to work with photos in RGB, instead of CMYK which is often used in Publisher documents.
  • You may use "new stack" in Photo to put several images into one stack. This allows to find a suitable set of adjustments (like B&W filter, curves, ...) and really quickly test them on selected images by simply activating single layers of the stack.
  • Option to use macros / batch job to process huge numbers of photos
  • The info panel, histogram, and scope are essential tools (in addition to your eye) to evaluate if you achieved a match.

It really depends on the source photos and in what ways they differ, and your personal expectations.

I just had a similar issue: Using ~200 scans of handwritten letters (light blue ink on paper of white to light yellow color). The client wanted to get rid of the paper background. I needed half an hour to setup 2-3 filters to get rid of the unwanted background. Record a macro, and start a batch job. It the took 3 test runs until i got proper results for every single images with just a single global set of parameters. Final batch job took almost 1 second, exported as PNG (to use alpha / transparency), and the client was more than happy.

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9 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

You may use "new stack" in Photo to put several images into one stack. This allows to find a suitable set of adjustments (like B&W filter, curves, ...) and really quickly test them on selected images by simply activating single layers of the stack.

Thank you! I'm a complete novice with Photo (I've been using Pixelmator Pro and even my skills in that app are rudimentary) so I hadn't realised the possibilities of editing multiple images in a stack. Will try this out.

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We add to do this for ±200 portraits. Those were made in different years and in color, and we needed them to have the same grey background, same color profile and same cropping (each head should look the same size), since slight difference happened after few years of producing this document.

The images were processed independently of the layout app, to select the person, add the backgroung, save with the profile by the photograph.

In a second flow I cropped each one (we kept the bigger ones for other needs), to get similar size portrait, so I would only have to import them in a similar image frame in each page.

I just hope you've got nice black & white pics, since it'll be harder to add details in gray if one of them is too contrasted, and you want all of them to fell/look from the same shooting session.

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