B&W from those other cameras

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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Many, many photographic forums are going to be discussing the virtues of the new Leica Monochrom. I thought it might be interesting to pool our thoughts about getting the best black-and-white from cameras with conventional RGB Bayer sensors.

I have a couple of thoughts, but I'll start the thread with the one I think most pertinent. In Photoshop, Lightroom, whatever, I usually set the Clarity slider at a higher value than I would for the same image in color. I can also boost the clarity in add-on programs like Silver Efex Pro. Almost the only time I don't do this is with pictures of my wife. In such photographs, I recommend to all forum members that they experiment with negative clarity. It's preferable to an angry spouse.
 
While my best method is to shoot, Ilford, Kodak or Fuji, here's my preference for images, B&W from color originals (digital or film)... I like to modify the curve by picking a point near black and dragging it down a little. And then pick a point near white and dragging that up a little. I like the contrast it adds.
 
Most often when I shoot digital monochrome I like to do a whole session that way. I really like to have the mind-set. I want to be in that shape-line-texture-tonality mental attitude.

The first thing I do is set the camera's image review to monochrome so if and when I chimp (c'mon we all do it) I'm still seeing monochrome.

The second thing happens after I've finished taking photos. When I start to... ahem... develop them. I use a preset that imports them as basic monochrome images. Yes all of the color data is there but I'm still seeing monochrome on the screen. I still have that reference. They may not be perfect but the images usually remind me of what it was I wanted to accomplish.

Now that I've written this I realize many RFF members probably work this way. Yes, there are times when something in our photos pops up and you say, "I betcha that would look cool in B&W." But I guessing you do a lot of monochrome sessions.

Oh well I wrote it I'll just put it out there. Maybe some noob will discover it.

--Rich
 
Bill Pierce said:
Many, many photographic forums are going to be discussing the virtues of the new Leica Monochrom.
Click to expand...


That's very optimistic. "Leica" is fly-paper for bashing.

That aside, now that I read about the specs, and some of the (rather uninspiring) sample images commissioned from some photographers, this is actually a good idea. Not sure I'm sold on it.

It's still not clear to me if the sensor itself is a "permanent kind of film": the color response cannot be changed like you would by changing films, or lens filters. Green for making red apples dark when against a green background, red filters for making trees darker, etc.


But one thing is perfectly clear: an angry spouse is more often than not a very very bad idea!
 
I was wondering about the same too. Today I have attached the Macro-Elmarit-R 60/2.8 to the Nex-5N and tried a few shots of a visiting customer. Simple shots just to compare how the sharpness out of a 16MP sensor with a CFA, ISO 400 would stand against that of the M9M..

The subject; processed in Lightroom by simple conversion to B&W, no adjustment at all (no attention to tonality, etc.):



7177069214_77fe0092ae_c.jpg


Crops have been sized as the final picture will be equal in size to the sample from DPReview, L10000132 (i.e. not exact 100% crops but a little to the disadvantage of the Sony.)






and the one from the M9M:




I do not believe the above crops would be useful for anything other than a rough sharpness comparison. For those who need to play with the RAW can PM to me.

IMHO, the tests conderning tonality, gradation and other aspects related to IQ out of the CFA layered sensors against the ones out of the M9M for example, should be performed through side-by-side comparisons; as we were doing with the film cameras. Otherwise too many variables can lead to misinterpretations.
 
For my serious work I like to process the files in CS3. Each file is processed in its way with dodging, burning, increasing or decreasing local contrast trying to imitate what was my wet darkroom experience in the old times. For this reason I do not use the LR preset, or maybe I use some of them as starting point. But than again I switch to CS3.
robert
PS: in my blog here and here are a few of my B&W ...from Leica x1 files, if you are curious...
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
It's still not clear to me if the sensor itself is a "permanent kind of film": the color response cannot be changed like you would by changing films, or lens filters. Green for making red apples dark when against a green background, red filters for making trees darker, etc.
Click to expand...

C.Hudson said:
I think you're mistaken on this point, from what I understand.
You will be able to use color filters to modify tonal response, not color response. The green filter makes the red apple look lighter, not redder.
Click to expand...


I did not mean "darker" to mean "redder", I mean "darker" to mean "darker". Green light passes through a green filter, and red light is absorbed by a green filter: lack of light (i.e. red through green filter "goes dark") makes "light" on a negative --given light reception lacking--, which (all things considered) makes for "dark" on a print. Red light passes through a red filter (dark on a negative, light on a print), and green light is absorbed by a red filter. Despite the yes-we-have-no-bananas no-meaning-yes nature of the negative/positive "world", it's actually quite simple.

So, a green filter makes a red apple look darker, and most certainly nowhere near redder (since it's B&W).



A very very quick primer: http://www.photographymad.com/pages/view/using-coloured-filters-in-black-and-white-photography
 
C.Hudson said:
Yes, sure. It's just that you mentioned "the color response cannot be changed like you would by changing films, or lens filters." When in fact it can. Just like mono film.
Click to expand...

Ah! You're making reference to the M9"m". I didn't state it as fact, btw; I stated that it wasn't clear to me whether this was the case.

Is it established as fact that one can set color response in that camera?
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
Ah! You're making reference to the M9"m". I didn't state it as fact, btw; I stated that it wasn't clear to me whether this was the case.

Is it established as fact that one can set color response in that camera?
Click to expand...

I think it's pretty unlikely, that you can change it in camera. But you can definitely use filters on the lenses.
 
Bill Pierce said:
I have a couple of thoughts, but I'll start the thread with the one I think most pertinent. In Photoshop, Lightroom, whatever, I usually set the Clarity slider at a higher value than I would for the same image in color. I can also boost the clarity in add-on programs like Silver Efex Pro. Almost the only time I don't do this is with pictures of my wife. In such photographs, I recommend to all forum members that they experiment with negative clarity. It's preferable to an angry spouse.
Click to expand...


I know Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro are extremely popular for B&W digital conversion (and I do use them), but honestly, all of that is "shorthand". I've noticed that mimicking color filters w/Silver Efex is not exactly what is supposed to be (color light passing/absorbing/response emulation), and Lightroom sometimes gives really awful noise when adjusting a particular color, whereas in Photoshop in RGB, CMYK and even sometimes Lab mode you can have exceptional control over this --if you know your theory and you know what you're doing.

With film you must know your film/developer combinations; your exposure; your temperatures. Using distilled water vs tap water. Cross-contamination issues. Your filters. With digital you must know your source sensor, your 16-bit "vs" 8-bit, your Color Management settings, RGB "vs" CMYK, your "destructive" filtering "vs" "nondestructive" filtering (i.e. applying an old-style filter vs. a "smart filter").

Now, for example, applying certain settings in Lightroom the same way on a RAW image will not give you the same results with a JPEG image, making things even more confusing, and certainly frustrating for those who couldn't think there would be any technical difference.

So, just like with film, in the digital world there isn't "one way" or "one thing".

And this is why digital B&W gets "knocked around" a lot: it certainly takes knowledge, observation and patience. People who were used to the good old days of dropping off the film and getting it printed had heart attacks when they started working with RAW files: the lab operator became you, and the Magic Dust was no longer there.

The Magic Dust is still perceived as being there by those who swear in the omnipotence of B&W film: a lot of the work is already engineered in it. With "digital", you have so many sources, so many different philosophies of engineering that "the One Workflow" is a mirage.

One thing *must* be accepted: digital, as it is, is what it is and isn't film. They're different and if you have the right equipment, the right skills and the right knowledge, you can achieve similar, if not the same look.

Making popcorn with a microwave oven is not the same as making popcorn on a gas stovetop. Even the same popcorn won't be the same if you apply the same times in different microwave ovens! And you *must* use popcorn that was produced for use in microwave ovens if you want good microwave popcorn. Popcorn is popcorn, you may say, but somebody who didn't go "who cares!" actually did their research and applied their knowledge so that people didn't have to think about which popcorn was what and where it needed to be used.

People have to learn that different things are different, or live forever disappointed.



Edit: I meant "Pixie Dust", not "Magic Dust". The idea, notwithstanding the pseudo-obscure IBM marketing reference, remains the same.
 
d__b said:
I meant the new Leica M9 monochrome, which doesn't have a rgb array ;-)
Click to expand...

😀 After all these talks since yesterday I didn't believe that the monochrome would be popular enough to "occupy" a certain place in our discussions like the M9 or M8.. (I started to ignore it as a Leica for us members..😱 )
 
To respond to Bill's question:

Import raw into LR using the appropriate lens correction preset. (and automatically create a set of raw duplicates on an external HD)

Apply a development preset that zeros all the color saturation sliders in the HSL module.

Adjust the color temperature to suit my purpose

Use horizontal and vertical tilt to correct my errors in camera alignment. This step minimizes unintended converging of vertical lines.

I tend not to crop, but when I do, I do it at this step.

Make fine adjustments proceeding down the Development Panel. I will try Bill's tip about the clarity slider soon... sounds interesting.

Make final adjustments to tonality using the Luminance sliders in the HSL Module.

Decide on final black and white points and then fine tune Deveoplment parameters as described above.

Set noise filtering and sharpening as needed.

Occasionally I will use Viveza 2 to make selective changes. This often works better than LR's adjustment brush. If I was highly skilled using the Adjustment Brush, Viveza might not be useful. But I am not skilled at all

I have to use LR plugins (Photomatix for exposure blending, PSE for cloning, and Viveza 2) all the time for clients, so I prefer not to use Silver EF Pro. I hate leaving LR. This is irrational, but it's just too much like work so I rarely use plugins for non-client projects.
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
Green light passes through a green filter, and red light is absorbed by a green filter: lack of light (i.e. red through green filter "goes dark") makes "light" on a negative --given light reception lacking--, which (all things considered) makes for "dark" on a print. Red light passes through a red filter (dark on a negative, light on a print), and green light is absorbed by a red filter. Despite the yes-we-have-no-bananas no-meaning-yes nature of the negative/positive "world", it's actually quite simple.

So, a green filter makes a red apple look darker, and most certainly nowhere near redder (since it's B&W).

A very very quick primer: http://www.photographymad.com/pages/view/using-coloured-filters-in-black-and-white-photography
Click to expand...

I may be totally wrong but my understanding of color filters is very different. A red filter is red because it reflects red light and doesn't let red color through. That's why when I've taken photos of red objects with a red filter those objects appear to be white in B&W photos. Am I missing something?
 
Bill, If you really want to 'smooth over' any rendering issues with a sensitive model, shoot the digital original at a high ISO...like 1600 or so...and then jack up the noise reduction in LR, and then slather-on the negative clarity to taste. The result is like those old heavily retouched-almost-to-the-point-of-being-paintings photos you sometimes see of rich people in the 1920's(or Soviet leaders in the 1960's).
 
My process of converting to B&W is probably different than most people... (maybe?)

Everything done in ACR and photoshop...
I process it as a color file first, getting the color and contrast where I want it, just as I would with any color file.

Then, B&W Adjustment layers... sometimes one or multiple depending on the scene. Apply a little dodging and burning as I deem necessary (if I didn't at the color stage).

Often apply a bit of color toning (very very slight) to warm the grays.

Last step is final contrast tweaks and sharpening.

03_03_weeping.jpg


I only recently downloaded and started playing a bit with Silver Efex Pro. It may change my workflow, but I'm not sure yet 🙂
 
I've worked with digital B/W for some time, and have found that using color filters over the lens to, for instance, darken the sky using a deep red filter, does not produce the same effect as using the same filter with B/W film. To darken the sky effectively I find requires a polarizing filter works better.

I think the reason for the discrepancy in this case is that B/W film is intrinsically sensitive to UV and deep blue wavelengths much more than are digital sensors, whose native sensitivity tends toward the IR end of the spectrum more so.

But other than this specific case, I find that applying filtering on the lens at the time of exposure to provide superior results to filtering the channels in post-production, the reason being that if you normally expose the RAW file in-camera with no filtering on the lens, and then use channel mixer, you'll find any one particular channel to be under-exposed; any channel mixer operation subsequently tends to increase one channel's gain over another, which increases noise levels for that channel and also expands the tonal range from that channel's original bit resolution, resulting in loss of detail and tonal expression, especially in the highlights, because the highlights were not sufficiently sampled due to being exposed too far to the left.

Filtering through the lens, then previewing the histogram in-camera via test shots, and making manual exposure adjustments, permits you to expose to the right the dominant color channel in-camera, resulting in superior results in post-production. The caveat to this method is that you have to already possess an understanding of how you wish to process the image at the time of exposure, the old "previsualization" thing.

Most people's objection to using color filters on the lens instead of channel mixer has more to do I'm convinced with a belief in the convenience of being able to process one raw file in a multiplicity of ways, but the results of using color filters, when done properly with the express intent of output to a specific B/W file, are visually superior, and something you should try out for yourself.

~Joe
 
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