Kevin is very excited about the earthworms. I’m told that I don’t understand! About the earthWORRRMS.

It’s true, I don’t. But I support you Kevin. And if what you need to do to be happy in this world is go out in a thunderstorm without a flashlight at 2:30 in the morning because these are oh man like the coolest biggest earthworms anyone has ever seen and we’re going to be rich! Because of the earthworms! Then I say do it. Follow your crazy insane earthworm dreams and make them come true. Just keep those grody motherfuckers the hell away from me, and wash your hands before you come to bed.

“Mama? I really don’t like this thing you’re doing lately.”

“What’s that.”

“This thing you do a lot, where you like just tell me what to do and you say it like I have to do it.”

“Well, that’s called being a mama. It’s my job sometimes.”

“Well you’ve been doing it a lot lately and I really — I just don’t like that. And this other thing you do where I do something? And you’re all like NICOLAUS NO you can’t do that, NO.”

“Huh.”

“It’s just really really — not cool. Of you.”

He woke up grinning. And already dressed. He couldn’t wait to get to school and show everyone what was on his shirt. Because Nicolaus? Who is kinda fourish? Earned his very first patch yesterday.

Now I know that a four year old can’t join scouts, and my dad finds it a little disturbing that we are dishonoring my brother’s old uniform by encouraging someone to use it to impersonate a Webelo. I’m pretty sure he’ll shake his head at the thought of me awarding the scout patches based on my own bullshit criteria. Not that he doesn’t find the scout obsession endearing — he does — it’s just that he took an oath you see. And from what I can understand “I promise never to let my grandkids to play dress up with my son’s scout uniform” was one of the main parts of that oath.

But the thing is, the work this kid did to help out while I was sick was amazing.

After Kevin went to work, he microwaved a slice of pizza for Graham’s lunch without being asked. Or instructed in the use of the microwave, but whatever.

He took care of Mouse during a seizure, running and getting things that were actually helpful. Normally he runs and gets plastic dinosaurs and sheep and things to line up all around the poor creature. Or gathers books that Mouse might enjoy, presumabely gathered from someone’s Amazon list, “Books to enjoy while you are unconscious, flailing and drooling”.

He helped me clean up every mess all day long.

He helped me do our grocery shopping.

He held doors for me everywhere we went.

He tried to find me medicine any time I whined about my side hurting. He didn’t succeed because the medication was all out of reach of children and scouts, but still. The thought was very sweet.

He made Graham another piece of pizza when Mouse stole the first piece of pizza.

He played nicely with his brother all day.

But most heroic of all was his amazing putting up with my grumpy ass.

It was either a patch or custom ordering a 5-foot trophy.
It’s a little iron-on star. Because the only patches they had that were in the shape of a boy helping a lady who was puking next to a bottle of painkillers were all the sew-on applique’ kind. I’m recovering from a kidney stone (from the Latin Stun, meaning to tear open flesh with something spikey). I really needed it to be an iron-on.

I know it’s tempting to sometimes use those fancy options on your digital camera like sepia or B&W (my mom just cried a little because I called that fancy) — but please don’t. It’s much better to capture your image in full color. That way you gather as much information as possible while you’re taking the photo and then you have many more choices when you decide what to edit out, including colors.

Converting to black and white doesn’t seem like something that would require much practice, does it? There’s a Desaturate option right there in your image menu. But oh ho ho! Don’t worry! I’m here to help you take something that you normally do in a single graceful step and turn it into a whole multi-stepped process that you’ll feel intimidated and frustrated by.

Haha, just kidding. Sort of. But really, I promise not to make this scary or technical and it really will make a huge, dramatic difference in your photos. Swear. Like I tell my son: if doing it my way doesn’t improve things, I’ll buy you a big bag of candy. I’m not only a photoshop expert and a professional prostitute, I’m also an excellent parent.

Here are a couple of examples of the difference these steps can make:
Converted using sad and lame Image>Adjust>Desaturate

Converted like someone gave a crap:

The one on the left converted with care, the one on the right simply desaturated.

Ready? Let’s rock.
******

Step 1. Have a radiant and gorgeous child, then take a picture of him and crop it.
Use my previous tutorial on taking dandy photos. Or, you know, use actual technically accurate information available in books and things. Whatever. Open your photo in Photoshop. Here’s the original we’re going to work on here:

Step 2. Create a duplicate layer.
Name it something useful like “b/w”
Either go to Layer>Duplicate layer or click on the tiny triangle at the top of your layers palette. A list of options will appear, and duplicate layer is one of them. Choose it.

Step 3. Open the Channel Mixer.
Go to Image>Adjust>Channel Mixer.

The Channel Mixer Thingy opens.

I know, you’re all oh my god! What are all these options? Output Channel? Constant? Source!? This is insane, Tiffany, You ARE INSANE.

Breathe. You can ignore most of it. This is the main area you need to worry about right here.

Step 4. Click the box that says “monochrome”.

Step 5. Slide the slider things for Red, Green, and Blue around until your image looks excellent.
You’ll see that the default setting is Red: 100%. Slide it back to 20%, and slide the Green and Blue channels back and forth — watch the changes in your image preview. Generally you want the output from the three channels to equal roughly 100%. Even if you want the image to be very bright, you’ll have more control if you work on that in the curves palette.

When you’re happy with your image, click OK.

This is the step that will require some play and practice. The best setting depends on what colors are in your photo, and what sort of mood you’re going for. Here are a few guidelines…

Pictures of people: Skin has a red undertone to it. So if you convert all of the red to white, people are going to look milky and bizarre:

It can be an interesting effect at times but most of the time you’ll want to have both red and green set to roughly 50%, and leave blue at 0%.

Pictures of blue sky with white clouds: You can get some cool dramatic skies by leaving red at 100%.

Pictures of trees and plants: If you slide the green channel up you can make plants look very delicate and ghostlike. For a more natural look though, stick to the red and blue channels.

Left to right: Full color, plain desaturation, channel mixer with red 100%, channel mixer with a mix of red and blue

But! There’s no formula… every image is different, and it of course depends on what element you’re trying to emphasize. For this picture of Graham, I focused on his eyes more than anything else. Here’s the setting I ended up most happy with:

And here is the result:

Goddamn I love that kid.

Step 6. Open the Color Balance Palette
Wait! Didn’t we just suck all of the color out? On purpose? Yeah, pretty much. But you can give your black and white photos a lot of richness by adding a subtle tint of color to them. A lot of times people won’t even realize that the color is there, but it makes a difference. You can make subtle (or not subtle, depending on how much color you add) shifts in the mood of the photo.

For example, here’s Mr.Graham with a warm tint:

With a subtle cool tint:

And with a not so subtle cool tint:

To get this effect, go to Image>Adjust>Color Balance.

The color balance palette will open.

Step 7. Adjust the color balance of the midtones
As we talked about before (”we” meaning me and my husband I mean; you weren’t there), your photos have shadows (the darkest areas), highlights (the brightest areas), and midtones (everything in between).

It’s just a personal preference, but I usually adjust the midtones first.

Notice that I pulled the top slider to the Red side… I wanted a warm effect, and red is warmer than cyan (greenish-blue). For the same reason, I pulled the Yellow-Blue slider towards the Yellow side.

Don’t click okay yet! You’re not done.

Step 8. Adjust the color balance of shadows.
Staying in the Color Balance palette, click the circle next to the word Shadows. Your sliders will all reset to the middle position, but your work on the midtones isn’t lost.

Something I like to do a lot of times on black and white images is pull the shadows and the midtones in different ways. So if I made the midtones warmer (more red and yellow), I’ll make the shadows cooler (more cyan and blue). And vice versa. It keeps the image looking more like a black and white image, and just seems to have more depth to my eye.

Black and white image with cool shadows and warm midtones

Step 9. Don’t adjust the highlights.
Look, I’m not the boss of you. If you want to play around with the highlights color balance, you do whatever you’re man enough to do. Most of the time I leave them alone because tinted highlights can start looking very unnatural and hypersaturated. I don’t know, it just looks wonky to me… but like a lot of features, can be used to get some neat effects if that’s what you’re going for.

Step 10. Click OK
Seems silly to have a whole step just for that, but there you have it.

And you’re done! Look at you, Mr or Mrs Fancyphotographerpants!

Next time I have time to do one of these: adjusting color balance on color photos. Spring break wooooooooo!

People keep asking how I’m doing and it’s awkward because really, I have no idea. I have drank and drank and have peed impressive volumes into hospital-issued party hats and also into non-hospital issued Winnie the Pooh Take N Toss cups. And I have studied all of the pee trying to find anything that looks like a kidney stone. It would help if I had a better than third grade understanding of what kidneys were and how they worked and what kidney stones looked like. Based on how it feels, I think I’m looking for something spikey, roughly the size and shape of a metal bottlecap. You would think they’d print a photo on the party hat deal, but no.

So I don’t know if Little Elian is still in there or not. Sometimes the pain is blinding. Other times — like right now — it’s gone. Weird. I’m frustrated, but what can you do? Wait and see.

Last night was really bad. I took Zofran and some 8-hour painkiller before bed, but it didn’t kill the pain.

I saw a comedian once who talked about how every once in awhile you come home and find your girlfriend in a puddle of tears saying “I just really need you to hold me!” And the guy thinks, “Ah shit.” Then the girlfriend tells him all the stuff she needs him to say to make her feel better and he’s like, “Ummm. Can we pretend I just said all of that?”

HAHA aren’t girls nutty!

So I did exactly that to Kevin last night. I couldn’t get comfortable and fall asleep because of the stupid pain. As I was tossing and turning he kept making these little annoyed sounds in his sleep. Now, logically duh, he was ASLEEP. But somehow he managed to hurt my feelings by — in my 2am mind — not being nurturing or sympathetic or whatever.

I quietly blubbered like a baby for a long time and then! THEN! It started to hurt my feelings that he could sleep so blissfully while his wife was upset. Do you not HEAR your wife silently crying? Do you NOT EVEN CARE? So finally at 3:00, I woke his ass up and dumped a bunch of emotional garbage on him, forced him to turn and put his goddamned arm around me. Then I felt all better having gotten it all out — whatever the hell it was.

My suspender-forbidding friends assured me that this is normal female behavior, but boy. I was embarrassed this morning. Luckily Kevin says he doesn’t remember much about the conversation other than being very sorry for whatever he had done to cause himself to have to now be awake when he was so. fucking. tired.

He redeemed himself from the magically offending nonoffense by taking care of the boys all morning and afternoon, while I slept the hardest sleep I’ve ever slept. I dreamed thick, crazy dreams about working and trying to drive downtown and Bush being impeached and me eating the most, most wonderful pizza. I woke up hungry.

We drove across the lake to a little Mexican place. For the boys we always order one kids’ meal and an extra plate. The second plate is for Nicolaus; it’s mainly for show. The waitress always comes and tries to put the plate full of food in front of Nicolaus and there’s this messy moment where Nicolaus is refusing to make room and giving the nice woman a look like, “Excuse me, fuck off, I’m trying to play tic tac toe here.” and Graham is meanwhile yowling, “FOOD. FOODFOODFOODFOOOOOOOD.”

“Oh sorry,” I take the plate, “That’s actually for him.” The waitress always takes a second to recover from the confusion of me saying HIM because children with curly hair are always girls, always. Then before she can fully process this perplexing gender pronoun weirdness, Graham horrifies her by shoving an entire tamale in his mouth while reaching his spoon towards the beans with his other hand. He’s an ambi-eater. We’re very proud.

So we ate, and then damn it. The fucking kidney pain returned. Can a full stomach hurt a bruised pee system? Because that’s my scientific theory. Every time I eat, everything hurts for awhile.

Anyway. It hurt and we came home and played out on the front lawn until dark. It was nice, even though oh my god, what in hell is this PAIN. I took tylenol. Then Advil. Nothing worked except waiting… and now it doesn’t hurt again. We put the boys to bed, and now somehow it’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m awake. Like an idiot. An idiot with a sleeping husband. But tonight, I’m not being a crybaby pain in the ass: I forgive him for the terrible, self-centered sleeping thing he is doing right now.