colour to b&w

urban_muppet

urban_muppet

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looking for a good stand alone colour to black and white converter program.....if there is such a thing ?
 
What pp software do you have at the moment??
Dave
 
nikonuser said:
What pp software do you have at the moment??
Dave
Click to expand...

lightroom 3.3, elements 11, adobe cc, cs6 and others

cant really get on with any of them anymore, since my brain hemorrhage i'm a bit thick ! most of my stuff is going black and white so looking to simplify things if i can
 
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I find that Black Silk is pretty good for tiff / jpg images, very easy to use, plus it's completely free.
Alternatively there's FastStone Image Viewer (also free), adjust colours - drop the saturation and then play around with the RGB, contrast, brightness and gamma sliders

Both should simplify things, and it costs nothing to try them.

You could also have a look at LightZone, it's a complete editing package revived through open source, available for Windows atm, but shouldn't be long before it becomes available for Mac and Linux as well. Use the black and white styles and the zone mapper and you're set.
 
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Well, what about a B+W action in CS6 where you just go into actions and 'click' then, if you want, you can alter contrast, brightness, blackness etc.
I particularly like the Gorman B+W Action here
http://www.atncentral.com/bw_conv.html

dave
 
I would have thought that Lightroom must have some B&W "presets" that give "one click" conversions from colour to B&W.

I use rawtherapee (a sort of "poor man's lightroom" as it's totally free) and this has 4 really good B&W presets which I use most of the time.
 
Hmmm, starting to think I should work on getting my defective brain in gear and seriously having a go thanks for all the suggestions guys
 
maybe wrong here, but can you not set your dslr to shoot in mono only??

Just a thought

Les :thumbs:
 
urban_muppet said:
lightroom 3.3, elements 11, adobe cc, cs6 and others
Click to expand...

Then you already have everything you need. Why does it have to be stand alone?

Lez325 said:
maybe wrong here, but can you not set your dslr to shoot in mono only??
Click to expand...


Really crap way of doing it... no control over where tones will fall.
 
What follows assumes that Lightroom 3 has more or less the same controls as Lightroom 4/5 which is what I use.
In Lightroom 4 in the develop module in the Basic panel on the right you will see Black and White. Click on this and it will remove the colour. You can now use the sliders to adjust the image to what you want. On the left hand side, under presets you will see some black and white presets, high contrast, low contrast etc. These can be a good starting point for adjustment in the basic panel. Once you have made the initial conversion you can 'adjust to taste' with the sliders.

In the HSL/Colour/Black and White panel select black and white This allows you to adjust the tones of various colours within the black and white image which gives you more control over the adjustments.
There is a very good Lightroom plug-in, 'Silver efex' which gives you more options but lightroom on it's own does a pretty good job.

Much better to shoot in colour and then convert using good software because it allows you access to the ful tonal range of the colours in the image. The only alternative to this would be to buy a Leica Monochrom.
 
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