My very simple B&W conversion technique
rutt
Registered Users Posts: 6,511 Major grins
I used to be very high and mighty about B&W because I know how to make good color. But I've been taking a class at Harvard, Documentary Photography, and my professor just loves B&W. He lives in the world of Nachtwey, Davidson, &etc. So I've had to sharpen my B&W skills and rethink my ideas about what looks good in B&W vs color. I used to think that color was best unless there was a reason for B&W. Now I'm trying out the opposite approach: take to B&W unless there is a compelling reason for color. Once the course is over, I'll reevaluate.
Anyway, I've tried various B&W conversion techniques, including Gorman. Going to try Nik, but haven't gotten to it yet. But I'm liking a very simple technique:
The justification: green is very often best for faces and faces are very often central to my images. But skies and water are often too light in the green and have better details in the red. Sometimes this leaves the blues too dark or loses contrast between blues and greens.
This doesn't give the look of any film or filter. I don't think there could be a film or filter that worked this way; darken and lighten layers aren't really analog things. But I could be wrong about this.
I've created an action set you can download here. This includes the action Rutt which sets up the basis for the above, as well as the Gorman action, and BD which implements my professor's basic idea. I'm going to give Nik a try, but haven't gotten there yet.
Feedback?
Anyway, I've tried various B&W conversion techniques, including Gorman. Going to try Nik, but haven't gotten to it yet. But I'm liking a very simple technique:
- Make 3 layers, stacked from top to bottom: "blue", "red", "green."
- Copy the blue, red, and green channels into the eponymous layer.
- Set the blending options for the layers: "blue" -> lighten, "red" -> darken, "green" -> normal
- Try adjusting opacity first of the "blue" layer and then of the "red" layer. Often the "blue" layer doesn't help and the right opacity is 0. The same may be true of "red."
The justification: green is very often best for faces and faces are very often central to my images. But skies and water are often too light in the green and have better details in the red. Sometimes this leaves the blues too dark or loses contrast between blues and greens.
This doesn't give the look of any film or filter. I don't think there could be a film or filter that worked this way; darken and lighten layers aren't really analog things. But I could be wrong about this.
I've created an action set you can download here. This includes the action Rutt which sets up the basis for the above, as well as the Gorman action, and BD which implements my professor's basic idea. I'm going to give Nik a try, but haven't gotten there yet.
Feedback?
If not now, when?
0
Comments
(PS "Gorman"... as in... Greg Gorman?)
The very same.
P.S. Unlike some of the other B&W conversion actions out there, mine only does the conversion and nothing else. No curves or sharpening or blurring &etc. So there is more work to do once it's over, usually curves and sharpening. Depending on your camera and light conditions, the red channel may yield very noisy skies. This poses a dilemma because the red channel also has the best skies (cloud contrast in particular.) Often a huge surface blur (radius > 20, threshold 2 or 3) will fix this without really hurting the clouds, but I'm still experimenting. These surface blurs take a very long time for large images at 16 bits, but are much faster at 8 bits.
PS I like this flag much better
:hide
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
It was aimed at you. Do you think the whole image is stronger?
I like this flag better, but the image suffers ( in my very humble opinion ) from the position allowed the shooter - too low and too far to the subjects right.
Again the cord intrudes. I would love to have seen her from farther to your right and higher, so that one could see more of the fire in her eyes, which I cannot see in this image.
I don't care for the edge of the bullhorn or whatever intruding on the flag at the upper border either - nit, and I might have cloned it out as an artist, but not as a pj.
The B&W conversion is excellent, but I take that as a given from you, John. I would expect nothing less. I mean that quite sincerely, I have learned a great deal from you.
As I said about the other flag, it is in the picture, so I feel it must be important to the image, or you would have left it out.
I do get her anger, that is for certain.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
Nice technique. However, I think your justification of the technique recognizes that its utility will depend on the image. I took a number of shots recently in New Mexico at Tent Rocks National Monument. Lots of typical New Mexico dull reds and greens. For whatever reason, the detail in the rocks was invariably in the blue channel, with the red channel washed out everywhere but in the skies. I found that to get the best contrast, I had to do the following in every shot:
- Blend blue into red in darken mode, 100% (gets the detail in the rocks, and keeps the detail in the sky)
- Blend the new red into the green, darken or normal mode, some %
I tried your technique on one of these, and I didn't think the detail in the reddish rocks (which was what I was after) was as good. I can post, if you're interested.
I'm curious, though, it sounds like the green channel might be a pretty good start for these dull reds. The details in the green might come though pretty well in the red channel. Am I wrong?
Here are the channels from a section of the image:
You're right that the green channel isn't a bad place to start, but the blue is better, particularly in the highlights. There is a problem, though, if trees are important in the image (as in this one), as the blue tends to plug them. So I compromised on the blend, going into LAB and limiting the blend to where A is positive. For other images, trees weren't so important, so I could skip this.
So I replace the R with the B (darken mode) and use the resulting R to improve the G slightly. As you mentioned in your initial post, this is just the start - curves, shadow/highlight, some color boost round it out.
In my experience (not enormous), it's rare that the blue channel gives you what you want, but it does happen. And it happened consistently in this location (no surprise on the consistency).
fresh photography for the modern family
Original:
Green Channel:
Rutt's method with only the green layer visible (equivalent to applying the green channel to the image):
fresh photography for the modern family
fresh photography for the modern family
Note that this is only a problem with how the channels display. It has no impact on the final image.
Perhaps I didn't read Professional Photoshop close enough (that is probably a safe bet), but for anyone trying to use all 10 channels to the fullest, it seems to me that it is quite important to make this change, and should be explicitly mentioned somewhere.
fresh photography for the modern family
I'm really out of my depth on this one. But if you Edit->Color Settings->Gray and select Custom Gamma from the pull down, you can see the gamma of the default grayscale color space. In my case it was 1.74 and I'll bet it's that way for must (Apple?) users. If you choose Gamma 2.2 instead, it will match the gamma of sRGB and you won't get the same shift when you look at the channels.
Yeah, I was wondering about the L channel vs however LAB is rendered. Does it have a gamma? It must. What about CMYK? Just thinking about that makes my head hurt.
The good news, though, is that in some important sense it doesn't really matter. Nothing changes except how photoshop displays the image...
I'd love to ignore this issue, but people just keep bringing it up. I say I don't know and B.D. tells me I'm an elitist because PS is so much more expensive than PS and it's so easy and all. I'm starting to feel like Martha Coakley.
So, how about it, LR fans, how to get a green channel conversion in LR/ACR? Forget the darkening, lightening with the other two channels for now. How about the most basic thing? I found the channel mixer but just turning green up all the way and the others down all the way doesn't get the expected result...
Please give me something to link the PJ folks to.
I don't think LR can do that kind of channel editing you want it to.
I think Lightzone can do it if it has a luminosity blend (don't remember) and you search the internet for the older B&W channel mixer tool.
I suspect Bibble 5 will be able to do it shortly with some of the 3rd party plugins coming out.
Thanks.
Of all the tools I no longer use, I miss LightZone the most. :cry
I'm thinking that it might be possible to do some channel blending with some of the homegrown 3rd party plugins for Bibble 5 (as a former B4 user, I have a free license.) Will try and see.
One can do a green channel extraction using the basic b&w plugin in Bibble 5. I <i>thought</> that one of the other plugins (texa) could do Luminosity blends, but I couldn't get it to work. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/ne_nau.gif" border="0" alt="" >
Why did you stop using it?
Because there were just a few too many things that I couldn't do with it and ended up round-tripping into Photoshop. (Noise reduction, healing, lens correction, etc.) Made my workflow too complicated. But I thought it had some very simple yet flexible and powerful tools. I hope that Lightcrafts gets their collective butts in gear and comes out with a version 4, but they've been in maintenance mode for a little too long, I fear.
i'll add that to the next version