Colour to B&W - some thoughts

TheMightyZog

Hi, I think making a B&W photo is the hardest thing to do - loosing colour and just having shape and tone to tell a story.

I've written some notes on this task and would like to know if you reckon the ideas would help.

http://www.broadhurst-family.co.uk/lefteye/MainPages/Tutorial_B&W.htm

OneEyedJack

i just use the channel mixer. If i want to make an area more contrasty, i duplicate the layer, switch the mode to darken or color burn, then add a layer mask and erase away the parts i dont want contrasted..then of course use the opacity slider to adjust accordingly

swintonphoto

The channel mixer is the greatest B&W digital tool. It rocks!

arodney

swintonphoto wrote:

The channel mixer is the greatest B&W digital tool. It rocks!

Actually, if you have Lightroom, give the HSL controls a try using the TAT tool to hover over the image in B&W to select colors to tone. Far more powerful and easier than anything you'll find in Photoshop (although I still think Russell Brown's dual Hue/Sat technique is very good and controllable).

pathfinder

There have been countless threads on B&W conversion here on dgrin.

There are some in the Stickies at the top of this Forum.

Here is a reposting of mine that I posted last fall+++++++++++

Among the links in the Sticky at the top of the Finishing School Forum is a post by Andy, with dozens of links, many of which are directly concerned with B&W conversions - here

The book review and discussion thread about Dan Margulis's Professional Photoshop Fifth Edition is here and much of it relates to B&W conversion.

In particular, my review of Chapter 7 "Keeping the Color in B&W" concerns B&W conversion in greater detail.

If you do a search here on dgrin for "B&W conversion" you will get over a dozen pages of links.

Here's one that concerns Greg Gorman's B&W conversion which is very nice for some portraiture work as well. I like it a great deal.

Why give a person a fish, if you can teach them to fish for themsleves
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Richard

I have had pretty decent results using the B&W adjustment layer in CS3. It's a channel mixer with six colors. Clicking in the image shows which channel predominates in that part of the image. Using multiple layers with masks you can do different mixes for different areas of the image, which may be convenient for treating, say, the sky differently. The presets give a pretty good starting point and you can fine tune from there. You can also save your own custom presets. You can also tint at the same time, though I generally prefer to do this in a separate step.

pathfinder

I like the B&W conversion panel in CS3 also, Richard. It is a nice way to make a quick mask from a gray scale image also.

Richard

pathfinder wrote:

I like the B&W conversion panel in CS3 also, Richard. It is a nice way to make a quick mask from a gray scale image also.

Neat idea...that never occurred to me. So you would do the mix then use apply image to copy it to a mask, right?

Richard

Richard wrote:

So you would do the mix then use apply image to copy it to a mask, right?

That doesn't work, as there are no pixels in an adjustment layer. But you can just merge up to a new layer and copy that to a mask, then delete it.

pathfinder

Yes,
I make a copy of the background layer, convert it to B&W with the conversion panel in CS3, and then blend that with one of the blending modes like Luminosity. The B&W can also be saved as an alpha channel as well.

glennchan

Some more ideas:

You can maximize detail by minimizing contrast in Channel Blend and adding contrast via curves (see my blog post for pictures).

You can also creatively add some color tints to black and white images, e.g. sepia toning. Photo.net has a tutorial on this, and you can also check out the work in The Spirit by looking at the trailers on the apple website.

colourbox

Richard wrote:

I have had pretty decent results using the B&W adjustment layer in CS3. It's a channel mixer with six colors.

I like to think of the B&W adjustment layer as "the Channel Mixer but with color ranges a black-and-white photographer can actually relate to."