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Photocopy

This process mimics a poor-quality photocopy, reducing an image to black and white areas only. It can be very dramatic on suitable images.

Original image

• Start with a greyscale image. This is Mr Montgomerie (Lee's dad) in Lusaka, waiting for the total solar eclipse in June 2001; it was scanned from a colour print taken by Chris with a Canon AE-1 camera and a Tamron 500mm lens, and converted to greyscale and cropped in Photodesk.
• Open the Image Processing window, click on Math and select Quantise from the menu.
• Click on the Detail icon, and ensure Preview is selected.
• If the Strength slider is at 100% you'll see a very dark preview pane. Slowly reduce the strength until you get the required effect. Above 50% the image is pure B&W, below that you start getting shades of grey; the lower you go, the more shades. To get the effect below I used 72%.
• Use Magic Wand:Whole Image when you're happy, or apply as usual (varying the tool's Opacity gives extra control).

Quantised at 72%

Notes

• This works best on fairly high-contrast images, such as the sunlit face used here.
• For further drama, try Image processing:Emboss on the quantised image using a texture containing a series of closely-spaced horizontal lines.
• You can achieve a similar effect using the Image processing:Equalise window, by dragging the upper dotted lines so they meet at various points.