BW conversion - anybody care to try?

divamum

I do quite a lot of bw shots - I like it, and usually have a lot of fun playing with conversions. I have a handful of LR presets which I really like as starting points, I'm quite happy to play with sliders and I generally can come up with something I like.

Not this time. Anybody have any ideas about - or care to have a crack at - the shot below? I've tried all of my usual LR presets (and I have a lot of BW LR presets), I've tried manually converting it in LR, running it through a couple of PS actions (including Rutt's and the Greg Gorman one), a TRA bw action, desaturating in LR, bw in LR, bw in Picasa (which, amazingly, is sometimes a pretty good "instant" bw) etc etc. They all turn nasty although I haven't yet figured out why - lower contrast is too dark; higher contrast blows out the nose/forehead/chin mask (even if I turn the base exposure down first). Adjusting yellows, oranges and reds brings out skin blotches or makes her hair too dark. Etc etc etc.

Have at it, friends - and if you come up with something that works please, please, please tell me what you did!!!!

jjbong

This is pretty open-ended. What are you trying to achieve? It may be that the usual B&W conversion methods may not satisfy because the problems are elsewhere. I took a quick look at this, and I'm guessing that the skin blemishes are a lot of the problem. If this is the case, then unless you get rid of them using another technique, you won't be happy with any B&W conversion.

It would be helpful if you could articulate in a bit of detail the problems you're seeing with your conversion attempts.

John Bongiovanni

divamum

Those aren't blemishes, actually - they're moles, and the decision was made to leave them in.

Basically, if it's low-contrast, I think it's rather washed out; if it's high contrast, the skin blows out. If the blue shirt is left dark, her eyes are too dark; if I lighten them, then the shirt gets pixel-y. If I mess with the yellows, her hair either gets too dark, or washes out. And so on. I just can't seem to find a set of compromises that give a clean conversion

Here's one of the conversions I did in the course of this afternoon's umpteenzillion attempts, but I'm not happy with it. It looks alright on this lower-contrast monitor, but on the other one it's just rather blotchy (both are calibrated). Sigh.

RogersDA

In Lightroom:
- dropped exposure by 1/4 stop
- darks dropped -6
- shadows dropped -17
Edit in Sliver EFex Pro
- Soft Skin preset applied
- Contrast changed to -8%
- Structure changed to -7%


This one - same as above but changed brightness in Silver Efex Pro to +8%


This one is Silver Efex Pro Neutral with brightness +7%, Contrast -7%

Flyinggina

Well I gave it a try. Here are two versions done with CS4.



Then this one where I darkened the bg to help keep the attention on her eyes and face. Even if you didn't want to darken the bg so much, I think I would try to tone down the brightness of the upper arm just a tad.



I used layers>adjustment layer>gradient for the basic conversion. This works amazingly well in a lot of circumstances.

Then I used layers>adjustment layer>selective color to make fine adjustments the amount of black in the white, neutral and black channels.

I also applied just a touch of skin smoothing to even out the tones a little. I think the b&w looks fine without that, but better with.

Virginia

jjbong

I did the typical Dan Margulis thing for getting the contrast right on a color photo (his insight is that this is exactly what you would do to get a good B&W from a color shot):



I did this is PS3 using the following:

1. Duplicating the base layer (luminosity mode)
2. Curving the green and red channels to bring out the contrast in the hair and in the face (the curves were a little non-standard, and if you're interested, I'll send them to you)
3. Converting to greyscale

But I really liked the dramatic effect of flyinginna's second image, so here's a blend of mine and hers:



I think I did a bit better on bringing out the detail of the hair, and she does an incredible job of making the image dramatic. So to my eye the mix of the two is pretty good.

As you see, there's lot you can do here.

divamum

Wow - you guys are amazing!!

Some great work here. Sadly, I don't have NikFx, so I can't reproduce any of those. The CS ones, however... I had TOTALLY forgotten about the gradient method, too (about the only one I didn't try - DUH!!). I'll be playing around with some of your techniques in the morning when my eyes have recovered from today's 7hrs of editing..... :bash

My only lingering nit is how to keep the hair bright. She's a true honey blonde - if anything, the colour shot emphasises the dark rather than light elements of her hair - and when the rest of the image is "drama-ed" in BW the hair seems to edge towards brunette. But... if I do it in CS3 and layer it, I can probably fix that one way or another. It's keeping the contrast in the face without blowing it to a white blob that's the real challenge.

Virginia, did you brighten up her eyes as well? The original shot has already had a fair bit of skin smoothing etc - interesting that y'all felt you needed to go further again with that. Definitely an interesting exercise in seeing how other eyes perceive the same material...

ETA: RogersDA, what is "structure" and in what program?

RogersDA

divamum wrote: »

ETA: RogersDA, what is "structure" and in what program?

Read here for a quick review:
http://www.creativepro.com/article/review-silver-efex-pro

"Structure is like the Clarity slider in Photoshop Camera Raw. It increases lots of micro-contrast details in the image to make fine details stand out"

BinaryFx

divamum wrote: »

I've tried all of my usual LR presets

Sometimes presets will only take you so far, each image brings new challenges.

If you are having issues making a good black and white from colour - the problem may be that the colour image is too "good"!

What do I mean?

Often, the "best" black and white conversions look awful as colour images...it is all about translating that colour into tone, which often means having a crappy colour image with very weird colours (as the hue will be lost).

In Lightroom, this could entail setting really strange white balance, or using fill light, clarity or setting lower or negative exposure values so that you can substantially lighten the image with curves. So, set-up a virtual copy and go to town, doing things that would make the image look bad in colour, making it great in black and white!


Regards,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

Flyinggina

divamum wrote: »

Virginia, did you brighten up her eyes as well? The original shot has already had a fair bit of skin smoothing etc - interesting that y'all felt you needed to go further again with that. Definitely an interesting exercise in seeing how other eyes perceive the same material...

No, I didn't do anything to her eyes. What I did do was smooth her skin slightly, which may have had the effect of emphasizing her eyes which are nice and sharp.

The only reason I added just a bit of skin smoothing was to counter the effect on her skin of converting to black and white. The picture looks fine without it too.

Yes, I think that using layers will let you lighten/brighten her hair.

Very pretty girl btw and lovely portrait!

Virginia

divamum

BinaryFx wrote: »

In Lightroom, this could entail setting really strange white balance, or using fill light, clarity or setting lower or negative exposure values so that you can substantially lighten the image with curves. So, set-up a virtual copy and go to town, doing things that would make the image look bad in colour, making it great in black and white!

TINGTINGTINGTINGTING - we have a winnner!

WHITE BALANCE ADJUSTMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(sorry I'm excited here).

Working on a different image for this gal - different outfit, different lighting, different colours, different everything - but was still struggling with it (are blondes particularly challenging? Seems I'm having WAY more trouble with this set than any I've ever done). WHITE BALANCE has enabled me to find something that gives me clean blacks and grays.

Why didn't I know this already?!?!?!!?!??! :bash ivar

ETA: To illustrate the point (since I suspect I'm not the first one not to have realised this )

divamum

Virginia and RogersDA, thanks for the further responses (sorry, I got so excited by the concept of "white balance" in BW that I neglected to say thank you! Where are my manners?!) RogersDA, I don't have Nik which would explain why that was foreign lingo to me. Thanks for clarifying (you should pardon the pun

RogersDA

Typically when editing in Lightroom I will choose a before/after split view. Then I use the white balance brush. The eye can be tricked quite easily - and various tints in the original image can go unnoticed.

In this example all I did was use the white balance tool and selected a point in the inner corner of her right eye. immediately the slight greenish tint is removed from the skin and hair.

divamum

And yet, when I've been working on it (calibrated monitors) it's seemed awfully yellow/magenta, so I cooled it down by choice. On your example above, to me, it's gone too pink. I'm still working on "numbers theory" for that, so if I'm simply wrong, fair enough! I too use the white of the eye to try and find my WB - it's not foolproof, but I've found it's often a good starting point. I really need to get a grey card/WB card at some point, though - I suspect it will save me oodles of time since I often find myself in mixed lighting conditions....

Btw, here's the BW I came up with today. It's not 100% there yet and I'll be continuing to work on it, but I greatly prefer it to the ones I did yesterday because at least there's some detail that remains and I don't lose all the midtones .... because I'm tinkering with *colour* instead of brightness/exposure. I'll be continuing to play with it, but this gives me an entirely new set of parameters and I'm already hugely preferring the results.

THANK YOU all for such terrific suggestions..... and a great discussion!

RogersDA

divamum wrote: »

On your example above, to me, it's gone too pink.

It's meant to be just a first step example. Though it does not appear to be too pink on my monitor. Certainly the reds/pinks are more obvious.

*Now wondering what others think.*scratchscratch

BradfordBenn

I have so much to learn. Way cool for sharing

BinaryFx

divamum wrote: »

And yet, when I've been working on it (calibrated monitors) it's seemed awfully yellow/magenta, so I cooled it down by choice. On your example above, to me, it's gone too pink. I'm still working on "numbers theory" for that, so if I'm simply wrong, fair enough!

If your monitor is profiled, but the image looks cool or warm...and when you use the info palette on the RGB file, if the numbers are all R=G=B such as 64r64g64b or 235r235g235b (or say 26L 0A 0B in Lab with zero in the AB channels)...then your monitor profiling or your perception is wrong. If the file is grayscale mode and it looks cool or warm, then your monitor profiling or your perception is wrong.

The numbers in the file do not lie (except for when they lie)! Sometimes one cares more about the numbers. Othertimes one cares more about how a human perceives the numbers (we all know of optical illusions that defy the numbers - www.purveslab.net/seeforyourself/).

Btw, here's the BW I came up with today. It's not 100% there yet and I'll be continuing to work on it, but I greatly prefer it to the ones I did yesterday because at least there's some detail that remains...

I would beware the "hotspot" in the upper arm on the left hand side, it is reading around 1% gray, I would go for a minimum of 3-5% without knowing how the output behaves.

Moving on...to off topic territory:

Your image is a good case in point of something that bugs me about Lightroom exported images. When I open them in Photoshop, I get an error message that the image profile is wrong...it seems that Lighroom is doing something stupid - it is assigning an sRGB profile to a Grayscale mode image!? I extracted the profile using a ColorSync Applescript, the profile is sRGB however your image opens as Grayscale mode. This is not the first time that I have seen this, so others get the same result as you do, I don't know if this is down to human error or not (I blame Adobe, however I could be wrong).


Sincerely,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

divamum

If your monitor is profiled, but the image looks cool or warm...and when you use the info palette on the RGB file, if the numbers are all R=G=B such as 64r64g64b or 235r235g235b (or say 26L 0A 0B in Lab with zero in the AB channels)...then your monitor profiling or your perception is wrong. If the file is grayscale mode and it looks cool or warm, then your monitor profiling or your perception is wrong.

Emphases mine - can you explain that? I've never seen anything other than black or white read at exactly the same values in rgb (when I'm in colour). Am I missing somsething? As I've said, I'm still a n00b on the numbers side of things, so speak slowly using small words ...... :oogle :giggle

My greyscale doesn't have a tint that I can *see* (as opposed to numbers). I actually check files on two different monitors - both calibrated with a Huey - and, the colour on them is reasonably consistent between them. What is challenging is that the contrast levels are quite different (one's a laptop, the other a Dell 2209wa), but I've sort of learned how to balance between the differences there.

BinaryFx

Ah, perhaps you were talking of the colour shot having a "tint" before making the B&W then! My bad.

Sincerely,


Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

SimpsonBrothers

done with Microsoft Office Picture Manager all I have at work.

divamum

BinaryFx wrote: »

Ah, perhaps you were talking of the colour shot having a "tint" before making the B&W then! My bad.

Yes, exactly - when I was processing it for colour

Simpson, that's a surprisingly good conversion from "meh" software! Strangely, I've found that the Picasa bw filter sometimes comes up with surprisingly good results, too - if there's a shot I can't get to work via my usual methods, I'll often run it through that just to see what happens... and hve been pleasantly surprised on a few occasions!

But adding white balance into the mix in LR is just a major, MAJOR "lightbulb moment" for me - I can get such wonderfully different results using this

SimpsonBrothers

divamum wrote: »

Simpson, that's a surprisingly good conversion from "meh" software!

Thanks, I was laughing when I was doing it.
Just turned down the midtone and brightness and contrast +1