PPing Colour to Black and White

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Gadget_Daddy

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Name
Pete
Edit My Images
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Hiya,

I love the feel of a good b/w shot and was wondering in anyone could share their pping workflow or point me to a guide

cheers:thumbs:
 
open file in photoshop.
Run it though Silver Efexpro picking with default option looks best.
Save file.

:)
 
Open in ACR
Fiddle with contrast and H/S/L about till it looks right
Open in PS
Fiddle about some more
Save

Or

Do as Chris says above and let Silver Efexpro work it's magic
 
thanks once again for your input not heard of Silver Efexpro till now so will certainly look into it also
 
Gadget_Daddy said:
Hiya,

I love the feel of a good b/w shot and was wondering in anyone could share their pping workflow or point me to a guide

cheers:thumbs:
Click to expand...


I like silver effex pro but I also like using Lightroom for black and white conversion of a RAW. There's a warm tone LR preset that I posted in another thread here that work great especially people shots. You can adjust where skin tones sit in the tonal range by playing with the white balance slider. Then if I want to loose the warm tone I desatuate in photoshop and blend the desaturated layer to taste, or you can turn off the split toning panel in LR instead.
 
ive had a play in lightroom but in all honesty I just dont get it:shake:

Ive got CS5 and dont see the benefit of LR unless im missing the bleeding obvious (Which has happened in the past:D)
 
Gadget_Daddy said:
ive had a play in lightroom but in all honesty I just dont get it:shake:

Ive got CS5 and dont see the benefit of LR unless im missing the bleeding obvious (Which has happened in the past:D)
Click to expand...


I use LR for the bulk of my editing these days and just use CS5 for any portrait type retouching and cloning. I process around 300 shots per wedding and it just saves so much time. Photoshop is fine for a handful if photos but too much work IMO when you start working on larger numbers of RAW files.
 
I tried out sfx pro demo, not really impressed tbh for what it costs. Just seemed like a bunch of presets with some grain control, effect easily reproducible in LR, Aperture or PS.
 
Many people either don't know, or have forgotten about, Image > Calculations.

It provides a more brutal BW image yet also one you can play around with a hell of a lot. I very rarely ever see it mentioned. To me the 'bog standard' BW conversions are often very 'soft'.
 
Gadget_Daddy said:
ive had a play in lightroom but in all honesty I just dont get it:shake:

Ive got CS5 and dont see the benefit of LR unless im missing the bleeding obvious (Which has happened in the past:D)
Click to expand...

In what way? Lr beats Ps hands down for management of your files and collections. Editing is quicker and easier and I do almost 85% of my work in Lr rather than Ps now (maybe more).

For a good B&W, go to the Develop mode, scroll dow to the HSL/Color/B&W area and adjust the image there to get the contrast in the original colours right.

Might sound odd but the colour in the original is important to getting the right B&W image.
 
Gadget_Daddy said:
I love the feel of a good b/w shot and was wondering in anyone could share their pping workflow or point me to a guide QUOTE]

You could also try gradient map in Photoshop as an adjustment layer to see if you like it, you are able to edit the gradient too by double clicking on the gradient box that pops up, just make sure that you have black as your foreground and white as your background, different pics may need different mono conversions so play around with all the suggested ways here.

Joan
Click to expand...
 
E17phil said:
Many people either don't know, or have forgotten about, Image > Calculations.

It provides a more brutal BW image yet also one you can play around with a hell of a lot. I very rarely ever see it mentioned. To me the 'bog standard' BW conversions are often very 'soft'.
Click to expand...

I only just clicked on that this morning for possibly the first time and thought "nice" :thumbs:
 
Similar to calculations, is channel mixer under image>adjustments>channel mixer. There are some custom presets for black and white using the various channels mixed in different ways.

I've always checked out the channels palette and tried each one to get a good overview of the different b&w version achievable from an image. Using channel mixer and/or calculations will give more variations of the individual channels in a similar way to how LR processes under it's black and white palette.
 
Bridge with Adobe camera raw and lightroom do exactly the same job. they use the same software engine and I use both but prefer Bridge with raw as I have used this method for years. its a case of learning the software. Mini Bridge in CS5 is even quicker once you get the hang of it.

The advantage of Lightroom is the web and print interfaces but I find the filtering menu in Bridge far easier to use.
For those that only do small amounts at a time Elements 9 with raw would be a good way to go.

As for Silver fx pro, it is by far the best Mono conversion software I have come accross and has many features that a lot of toggers never use but are worth playing with.
 
Wow I can believe the amount of different ways people are using to convert the pictures I thought I would ask the question and get a few answers that most people agreed with looks like I opened pandoras box..!!!
 
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