[Leica] B&W conversion methods

[Ken Carney]

Thanks for commenting and I think you are right, that I went a little 
overboard.  Here is hopefully an improvement:

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/kcarney/_MG_2525BWTX2.jpg.html

Ken

On 5/5/2015 4:15 PM, CJ andS wrote:
> Difficult scene for a B&W conversion. The black adjustment removed most
> detail in people pants and shirts creating walking specters. Looking at the
> color I don't see that there are too many blacks anyway except small
> sections of the lamp post or the back struts of the bench for example.  A
> more subtile conversion without taking personal tastes or artistic
> endeavors into consideration should show tonal difference between the back
> of the bench by the persons behind and the diagonal strut underneath.  I'm
> only imagining that is possible but in a darkroom situation I would be
> trying to get that sort of distinction from the tones.
>
> On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 4:46 PM, Jim Nichols <jhnichols at lighttube.net> 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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>
>