[Leica] B&W conversion methods

[Ken Carney]

Very nice!  Obviously SEP is working well for you - beautiful tones.

On 5/5/2015 3:46 PM, Jim Nichols wrote:
> 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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>
>
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