how to process it?

[back alley]

thought i'd expand the nature of this section to how to process it and not just how to shoot it...

i'm wondering how folks process their digital files from colour to b&w...and then what do you do to your b&w files to get to your finished image?

my technique is very very simple and i'm wondering if my finished image is underwhelming because of that?

before & after pics would be nice...

 

[bmattock]

Color:

8th Annual University of Michigan Ballroom Dance Competition by Wigwam Jones, on Flickr

B&W conversion:

Arunas Bizokas & Katusha Demidova by Wigwam Jones, on Flickr

I prefer the desaturated (B&W) version. I did it in The GIMP (Linux freeware photo editor) and toned it using one of the built-in photos. It was not a lengthy or difficult process.

I don't do it very often. Sometimes I find I prefer the original over the B&W conversion and sometimes vice-versa. Sometimes others don't share my choice. But that's OK.

 

[Mcary]

Personally I don't have a set way to process/convert digital images to B&W and as a lot depends on what type of image I'm working on as things that may make a for nice B&W landscape can make for a poor B&W portrait.
For the type of landscape shot shown below I'll generally follow the process listed below in LR 5

1. Set Highlight and white slider as far to the right without clipping highlights or pull them down to the left if I did clip the highlights
2. Covert image to B&W
3. Set WB to Daylight (will also try other WB presets to see if one looks better
4. Set the shadow slider to +100 and Black slider to -70 to -100 Than adjust each as needed.
5. Adjust exposure/contrast and clarity as needed
** On pretty much every landscape B&W I utilize and graduated filter on the sky portion of the image
usually setting are
Hightlights-100
Shadow+100
Exposure depends on the image but usually somewhere between -.5 and -1.25

 

[VictorM.]

Gene has some interesting ideas in this multi-part series:

https://genewilburn.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/the-craft-of-digital-black-and-white-photography-pt-1/

 

[AlexBG]

my technique is very very simple and i'm wondering if my finished image is underwhelming because of that?.

What is your technique?

I have a tri-x preset that I downloaded from somewhere. All I do is WB select and then preset.

 

[back alley]

i pretty much do what gene explains above...but without the layers.

 

[Keith]

I quite often select the red high contrast filter in LR as a starting point. It can be a little extreme but it's easy to wind it back a little and over all it will generally give me a look I'm after. I usually add a bit of grain and some vignetting.

 

[icebear]

Ever since I have the MM, all color to bw conversions I tried are just not cutting it. They look like a color picture with the color missing but not like a bw picture. At least when I have the shots on my monitor (NEC271W)at full resolution. Small size web posts might be hard to discern.