Enhancing foreground-background separation and contrast

…Well in this image, which here we have another, kind of micro landscape…if you will, of two snuggling sea stars as I call them.…When I first saw them sitting in the sand there, I immediately…thought what a great black and white image this is going to be.…because in my mind I'm converting the…colors that we see here into grayscale values.…Obviously we're going to want to ultimately…separate the sea stars from the surrounding…area, we want them to kind of pop off the page a little bit.…And we're going to want to retain a lot of the detail that we see in here.…

Why don't we go ahead and just get started and see what we can do with this image.…Let's go ahead and set our highlights and shadows.…See, we see a pretty good distribution of tonal values all the way from…highlight to shadow, which is always a…good thing when we're creating grayscale images.…Hold down the Options key, Alt in Windows, and we drag this over until we see what…absolutely the lightest portion of the image, for now, is right on the tip here.…