[Leica] B&W conversion methods

[Jim Nichols]

Ken,

Nice job, but you are doing a much more sophisticated job than what I am 
attempting.  I have abandoned Adobe, so the plug-in approach doesn't 
work for me.  I open a RAW image in Picture Window Pro, make adjustments 
and end up with a reduced-size TIFF file.  I take these to Focus Magic 
and/or Neat Image, as need be, saving the image as a TIFF or JPEG as the 
mood suits me.  I then take that to Silver Efex Pro 2 and use its tools 
to change to B&W.

Recent image:  Original TIFF 
http://www.gallery.leica-users.org/v/OldNick/P5054571.tif.html

Final Converted Image: 
http://www.gallery.leica-users.org/v/OldNick/More+Rhody+Blooms.JPG.html

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA

On 5/5/2015 3:30 PM, Ken Carney wrote:
> In looking over some recent threads on critiques and b&w printing, I 
> thought it might be worth while to have some discussion on converting 
> files to b&w.  I'll post my approach, and maybe others can suggest 
> improvements and describe other approaches.  Here are the files in 
> color and as converted to b&W:
>
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/kcarney/_MG_2525-Edit-Edit-Edit.jpg.html
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/kcarney/_MG_2525BWTX.jpg.html
>
> I opened the file in Nik Silver Efex Pro, but could have used 
> Photoshop or Lightroom b&w tools.  I have Nik, Alien Skin, Topaz and 
> DxO packages but don't care for them for adjustments. For example in 
> SEP the tones affected by the sliders are pretty broad. Instead, I 
> used Photoshop masks as sold by Tony Kuyper (thanks again to Bob 
> Adler).  My camera has a range of about six stops, somewhere between 
> slide and negative film, or in Zone System terms say Zones 2 through 
> most of 8 as I measured it.  In this image I thought the brights 
> needed some contrast so I selected a Zone 8 mask and used an 
> adjustment curve to pump up the brights a little.   There is some 
> spillover, but the curve mainly only affected the brights in Zone 8.  
> Then I did the same thing with masks for Zone 2 and 3 to get the 
> blacks down to taste. Finally I added a little grain (TriX) with 
> TrueGrain.  This software uses drum-scanned film stock for the grain, 
> as opposed to digital interpretations of grain.
>
> So there you have it.  Because of the flexibility of using Photoshop 
> targeted masks and adjustment curves, it took about five minutes.
>
> Ken
>
>
>
>
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