Trying to learn black and white conversions

mercphoto

I've been wanting to learn to do a better black and white and decided, for some reason, to try this particular picture. Here is the color version:



I started with the built-in Aperture conversions, going through the various filters as well, seeing how it impacted different parts of the image. Sometimes the car looked great, other times it lost detail. Ditto for the landscape. So I came at what I think was a reasonable compromise, using a 30/30/40 split along the RGB channels, to get what to my eye was a pleasing car but still had some landscape detail.

I'd really like to know if my approach was correct, and what I should do next to take it to the next step. Including if I should capture differently in the first place. Thanks.

craig_d

The thing I don't like about your conversion is that it doesn't really look any different from the original except for being colorless. The tonal value relationships are all very similar, they're just relationships between grays instead of greens and reds. If that's your goal, fine, but I think B&W has its own character and should be used to bring out something that is obscured in color or doesn't work in color. I don't see that happening here.

In your original image, you basically have two colors: the background (grass and trees) is green and the car is red. The car stands out well because the red is glaringly different from the green. You lose that with your B&W conversion and I don't think you gain anything. This is not a shot I would have converted to B&W.

Qarik

BW to me usually means higher contrast since you don't have color to delineate your image.

run_kmc

Two things:

If I don't love the color in a particular shot, I'm very quick to go monochrome with it. I like the red on top of the green in this shot, so this wouldn't have been one I would have converted to monochrome, but I think it's not a bad candidate.

Secondly, feel free to push contrast way more than you could with a color image. Personally, I would have either brought the green way down and pumped the red up, or done the opposite for some contrast. Ilford has some stuff on their website regarding thinking in black & white. I think a good deal of it is film related, but you should find some quality information there.

Richard

I think your approach is sound--use channel mixing and tweak to taste. I like the Photoshop B&W adjustment layer as in addition to RGB it has magenta, yellow and cyan sliders, which are sometimes convenient. In this shot, for example, you can adjust the roof of the car with magenta and the sides with red. More or less. The other advantage PS has is that for difficult images, you can use multiple masked B&W layers to apply different channel mixes to different parts of the image. So if you have a portrait of someone with a stormy sky as a background, you can emphasize the green channel in the face on one layer and the red channel for the sky on another. I generally don't worry too much about global contrast at the conversion step and concentrate more on getting detail where I want it. I usually use curves in one of the overlay modes later to goose the contrast.

mercphoto

Thanks for the advice, all good things to think about. Some shots just don't lend itself to black and white and it seems I did pick one that might not be a good candidate. Over on APN I got some advice for a different channel mix that added quite a bit of contrast to the image (30/-10/80) that did help, and also some advice to use a strong S-curve afterwards. At least part of my problem is trying to figure out exactly what "feel" I'm expecting to get after I'm done.

run_kmc

I don't know if Photoshop has this option, but the Gimp has the ability to break a color image down into three monochrome layers, red, green, and blue. Seeing the different channels like that help me visualize what I wanted.

pathfinder

Bill, B&W conversion techniques and philosophy have been discussed here extensively over the last 5 years or more. Most of the most interesting and informative discussions can be found in the first link at the top of the page for this forum - here - http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=114917

Start with this tutorial by rutt - understanding that color plays NO role in B&W tones is fundamental and rutt displays it well here - http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1134301

I personally feel B&W images with a complete even range of tones, without deep shadows or bright highlights, are less interesting. I prefer dynamic B&W images with deep, dark, mysterious shadows, and high contrast mid tones and highlights.

One of the techniques Marc Muench uses in processing his images is a quick view of the jpg as it passes into PS from Adobe Raw Converter in each of the red, green, and blue channels to see where the contrast lies in the image. For CS3 and earlier, ctrl-1, ctrl-2, and ctrl-3 did this very quickly. For CS4 I think you need to use ctrl-3. ctrl-4 and 5 now. Marc does this quick run through for each of his images - it gives you a quick view of the contrast and whether the image might work as B&W, or gives you a channel to use to improve the contrast in your color image as well, by Overlay Blending or Luminosity Blending.

craig_d

pathfinder wrote: »

Start with this tutorial by rutt - understanding that color plays NO role in B&W tones is fundamental and rutt displays it well here - http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1134301

That's a good overview. The idea that a B&W image should somehow be "the same as" the original color image (albeit without colors) is fallacious, and has no correlation in traditional B&W photography. Photographic emulsions were originally sensitive only to blue (which is why the sky in many 19th century photos is completely whited out), and later became "orthochromatic" by being sensitive to green as well, then "panchromatic" when sensitivity to red was added. Even today, the sensitivity of B&W film to different colors of light doesn't really correspond to the human eye's response.

I personally feel B&W images with a complete even range of tones, without deep shadows or bright highlights, are less interesting. I prefer dynamic B&W images with deep, dark, mysterious shadows, and high contrast mid tones and highlights.

I agree. I usually bump up the contrast pretty drastically in my B&W conversions.

One of the techniques Marc Muench uses in processing his images is a quick view of the jpg as it passes into PS from Adobe Raw Converter in each of the red, green, and blue channels to see where the contrast lies in the image. For CS3 and earlier, ctrl-1, ctrl-2, and ctrl-3 did this very quickly. For CS4 I think you need to use ctrl-3. ctrl-4 and 5 now. Marc does this quick run through for each of his images - it gives you a quick view of the contrast and whether the image might work as B&W, or gives you a channel to use to improve the contrast in your color image as well, by Overlay Blending or Luminosity Blending.

As run_kmc notes above, in the GIMP (a free PS clone) there is a menu command to generate separate images (or, optionally, layers of one image) containing the channels of an image rendered in grayscale (using any of a variety of models: RGB, HSV, LAB, CMYK, YCbCr, etc.). This can be very informative to look at, and additionally, if you like, you can merge the three images into three layers of one image and play with them in all sorts of creative ways. I'm sure there must be a way to do this in PS as well.

pathfinder

There are 10 channels in Photoshop RGB, CMYK, and LAB too - each of these can be seen in PS, but not without moving the image from one color space to another, and there are, potentially, consequences to the image when moving from some color spaces to another. ( More in and out of CMYK than LAB but something to consider ) But I do agree that each of these channels can be used to see and create B&W conversions. In my own link on B&W conversion I demonstrate D Margulis technique to use the K channel in a B&W conversion.

The discussion of orthochromatic and panchromatic films is worthwhile, as stated, B&W films do not see the world like our eyes. That is why red, yellow and blue filters were used for shooting B&W film.

Today, we are freed from the restraints and limitations of B&W film, and can create B&W images that are vastly superior to those shot with film in the past - ( I know there will be film aficionados out there who disagree with this statement. ) We can choose, in image processing, how and where we want our contrast to reside, and we can shoot without grain at ISOs PJs could only dream at a mere thirty years ago. B&W film at ISO 800 or 1600 looks pretty crude compared to B&W images shot digitally at ISO 1600 or 3200.

Svennie

In the BW version, you've lost the nice color contrast between red and green. You can make the car stand out by making the green lighter and the red darker, almost like it is a black car:

pathfinder

Much better!

mercphoto

Svennie wrote: »

In the BW version, you've lost the nice color contrast between red and green. You can make the car stand out by making the green lighter and the red darker, almost like it is a black car:

I can understand why you went that way, but its not what I would be willing to do. Consider an added twist to this equation: I'm wanting to sell these conversions to the participants of the track day that I photograph. Nobody is going to buy a picture of their red Corvette that makes it look like a black Corvette. I can understand wanting more contrast between the car and the background, but making a radical change to the car's color I think is the wrong approach.

Svennie

mercphoto wrote: »

I can understand why you went that way, but its not what I would be willing to do. Consider an added twist to this equation: I'm wanting to sell these conversions to the participants of the track day that I photograph. Nobody is going to buy a picture of their red Corvette that makes it look like a black Corvette. I can understand wanting more contrast between the car and the background, but making a radical change to the car's color I think is the wrong approach.

Ah, I see! In that case I would agree with craig_d and keep it in color.

mercphoto

Svennie wrote: »

Ah, I see! In that case I would agree with craig_d and keep it in color.

I'm inclined to agree as well. I do have a small variety of pit shots that I think would do well as B&W conversions and I will try one tonight. But the track shots, unfortunately, not so well as B&W.

mercphoto

Wondering if this type of shot is more suitable, and if these conversions have any merit.

rsquared

Yes, and yes!

I'm far from an expert, so take my answer to liking the conversions with a grain of salt, but I have to say I love the second shot in B&W. The decreasing tone from one car to the next down the line makes for a very cool shot. Now if only the cars lined up just a little more evenly...