Black and white from digital cameras

[Mike McCormac]

Hi

I've been involved in a number of discussions recently about how to get really good black and white images from digital cameras, and how I treat them in Photoshop. If you're interested, check out the post on my Blog describing how I do it. And I'm always interested to hear how other people do it too...

http://www.mikemccormac.co.uk/wordp...-and-white-pictures-from-your-digital-camera/

Best

Mike

 

[Phoenix]

Hey there

Well what I usually do is to use the greyscale option which discards all of the color information and then just use levels to work out the right amount of exposure for the image because I always find it easier this way because B+W is alot more simple to edit and then I will just have a look at the contrast ect.
Also to be noted is that I always edit my photos and save them as a copy of the original as to not ruin the original shot which I may still use later on,.........

 

[Mike McCormac]

Hey there

Well what I usually do is to use the greyscale option which discards all of the color information and then just use levels to work out the right amount of exposure for the image because I always find it easier this way because B+W is alot more simple to edit and then I will just have a look at the contrast ect.
Also to be noted is that I always edit my photos and save them as a copy of the original as to not ruin the original shot which I may still use later on,.........

As I say in my post, there's a load of ways of getting to mono from your original out of the camera - and they're all good in their own way.

The greyscale option is very easy. The problem is it closes down some options going forward. In my post I talk about warming the picture a bit after making it mono. With greyscale you can't do that.

The other problem with grayscale is it uniformly translates the colours into shades of grey. And whilst that works, it doesn't allow any emphasis of colours.

Using Channel Mixer in the way I suggest enables you to darken the blues a bit and lighten the reds a bit - both of which are very effective things to do. Skies become more dramatic, and the yellow nose of locos isn't quite as prominent.

Subtle I know - but a lot of subtle changes are usually much more effective than a few big changes.

Also - if you make the picture greyscale - you can't let some colour things remain colour. Now I know you'll say this effect can be naff - and it certainly can - but done from time to time its OK. Check out:

http://www.mikemccormac.co.uk/Railway-Pictures-Pages/2008/R_P0815193.php

Best

 

[Phoenix]

Wow cheers for that advice mate very to the point and easy to follow I have just been trying your way and I can definatly tell the difference!!!

 

[507 001]

If you have photoshop CS or elements theres several ways of doing it, i think though that the easiest way is to go to the hue/saturation tool and drag the saturation slider all the way to the left, after that I usually go to the brightness/contrast tool and increase the contrast to about 14/15, this just gives that extra little bit of texture.

in CS you can also use the curves tool to give more contrast in certain areas of an image than others.