Do any of you know any good tips to optimize black and white photography? Like if the client wanted just black and white photography what advice would come to your mind.
The best description of how to make really great B&W conversion is a chapter in Dan Margulis' book Professional Photoshop called Friend and Foe in Black and White. This is often too much for people, but it's the real deal. Read it and you'll know what's going on and how to make it work for you instead of against you.
The "for dummies method" for portraits is often just to use the green (or rarely the blue) channel as the starting point. Then you can use curves to enhance the contrast and sharpening to bring out the detail.
In between these two extremes, there have been servel thread here. See:
Do any of you know any good tips to optimize black and white photography? Like if the client wanted just black and white photography what advice would come to your mind.
There is a lot to B&W depending on how much work you want to do. An easy route is a Fred Miranda plug-in for Photoshop that helps you in b&w conversions. It has some standard transformations, such as normal, or red filter, green filter, etc. Plus it has a customized channel mixer where you choose a primary channel (R, G or and set a percent for that, then you have a slider to choose the relative balance between the remaining two channels. Very convenient. And there is a third method.
More complex methods abound but this plug-in does a good job for minimal user effort.
Comments
The "for dummies method" for portraits is often just to use the green (or rarely the blue) channel as the starting point. Then you can use curves to enhance the contrast and sharpening to bring out the detail.
In between these two extremes, there have been servel thread here. See:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=14266
as a starting point.
More complex methods abound but this plug-in does a good job for minimal user effort.
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