B&W conversions

Burnt

Hi Guys

could you recommend me some good B&W Conversions tutorials?

I have tried John Paul Caponigro method from the adobe website
where you convert channels into layers but it went abit over my head.

digitalbeginner

What software have you got?

Dave

Burnt

Hi Dave

Adobe Photoshop CS 2 & 3, Lightroom and Gimp

digitalbeginner

Burnt wrote: »

Hi Dave

Adobe Photoshop CS 2 & 3, Lightroom and Gimp

Great stuff, CS3 is the one I use for my black and whites as it has a Black and White Adjustment layer that let's you choose from a series of pop up pre-sets (Red Filter, Infra Red etc).

Once you choose the one you like you can then move the colour picker over into the shot (before clicking ok on the BW Adjustement layer). When you click on the part you'd like to change (like grass), then click and drag to the left or right to lighten or darken.

After that I use a Curve's Adjustment layer and choose from 3 of the main presets, Linear Contrast, Medium Contrast and Strong Contrast.

Sometimes I'll add a Vignette (Filter>Distort>Lens Correction) and quite often on Landscapes I'll also add a Gradient Adjustment Layer to help darken the sky as well.

This is then my starting point for a bit of dodging and burning to enhance areas I want to draw attention to. Just like below:

alexandros

digitalbeginner wrote: »

Great stuff, CS3 is the one I use for my black and whites as it has a Black and White Adjustment layer that let's you choose from a series of pop up pre-sets (Red Filter, Infra Red etc).

Once you choose the one you like you can then move the colour picker over into the shot (before clicking ok on the BW Adjustement layer). When you click on the part you'd like to change (like grass), then click and drag to the left or right to lighten or darken.

After that I use a Curve's Adjustment layer and choose from 3 of the main presets, Linear Contrast, Medium Contrast and Strong Contrast.

Sometimes I'll add a Vignette (Filter>Distort>Lens Correction) and quite often on Landscapes I'll also add a Gradient Adjustment Layer to help darken the sky as well.

This is then my starting point for a bit of dodging and burning to enhance areas I want to draw attention to. Just like below:

Good stuff! & that is a great shot!

Burnt

Cheers Dave

Much appreciated, nice shot.

AnCatDubh

Had been meaning to start a thread on this recently so you've saved me a task!

Hmmnnnn..... Having seen the output from Dave's post above i'm about to go pffffffttttt to anything I might type Nice going Dave.

I'm at the basic stage which is why I had a mind to create a thread on the subject. For me the basics are to do your basic black and white conversion - in the Gimp, you've a number of ways of doing it but simply Colours->Desaturate give you three options Lightness, Luminosity, or Average. Keep the preview option checked and click through each to see what gives you a desired effect.

Then, to me - and in fairness I could be 100% incorrect on this - I feel what can be missing in B/W conversions is Contrast and lots of it. Perhaps i'm being overzealous here because again it will depend on the desired effect. In the Gimp go Colours->Brightness/Contrast and add in a good handful of Contrast.

I'm afraid i'm as basic as that at the moment. In the last few days this has raised its head on an email digest that i'm subscribed to - and as you mentioned the channels thing you could take a read of this which I think is reasonably good at describing the task.

The Gimp equivalent of the main points of the link tutorial are;

a) Colours->Components->Channel mixer :: Click Monochrome and adjust the individual Red, Green, and Blue values such that only one having a value of 100 whilst the others remain 0 at any one time. (hope that makes sense)

b) Colours->Components->Decompose :: Click decompose to layers (or NOT) if you'd rather individual images

As regards what channel, I linked the above with a piece from the Gimp's manual which answers the question - Which channel will you modify?

This depends on what you want to do. In principle, the Red channel suits contrast modifications well. The Green channel is well adapted to details changes and the Blue channel to noise, grain changes.

So, the above is probably quite basic and more representative of where i'm at with the whole thing. My advice? Follow Dave's suggestion above But maybe what i've posted will assist you in someway understanding the channel adjustment.

Cheers.