[Leica] Film/Digital - digital B&W conversions in PSCS3

[lists at mcclary.net (Harrison McClary)]

If anyone is interested I have been playing around with Photoshop CS3 
beta and converting my color to B&W.  I have developed something that I 
think works very well and gives a slight grain and sorta a film like 
feel, I think.  I know there are plug ins one can buy for this...but I 
am too cheap to pay 200 bucks on something that I can do myself. LOL

Here is what I have been doing, let me know if it works for you:

First I adjust the image so it looks like I like it in color, all 
shadows where I want them, contast like I like it everything.

I then go to FILTER-TEXTURE-GRAIN
  I set it to: Intensity 10
                  Contrast 62
                  Grain type: Regular

I then go to: IMAGE-ADJUSTMENTS-BLACK & WHITE  and run that at the 
default setting.

Usually this gives me a B&W that I like quite a lot.  I developed this 
using Canon 5D files, but it seems ok on 1DII files also.  If your 
camera is lower resolution you will probably need to dial back the grain 
intensity some.

I find that doing the grain thing with those settings pretty much cures 
the "flat" look that comes from a greyscale conversion, and it seems to 
really give nice conversions. I made an action so all I do is hit shift 
F1 and I have an image converted.

Here is one shot I did like this:

http://www.pbase.com/2plus2/image/76231441

-- 
Harrison McClary
Harrison McClary Photography
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