leegf said:
Lament, touche
Yes, computer monitor, specifically LCD. I can confirm that it's calibrated properly, so it's not a monitor calibration issue.
I'm comparing them to film-camera images scanned by a humble Minolta Scan Dual film scanner of previous generations, and viewed on a computer monitor. But I also used a Nikon D80 for a very short while, and while I wasn't exactly happy with the D80's black-and-white images also, I don't remember them being quite as flat as the R-D1's.
Okay, I hope the sample images people have been providing have helped convince you that an R-D 1 can produce b&w files with dramatic tones. (The sample files look great on my LCD monitor.) Now, let's see what we can do to get YOUR files to look that way...
1) As someone else said, you'll get better conversions if you shoot raw files. That's simply because the raw format retains the full original bit depth (tonal range) recorded by the sensor, while JPEG format throws away some bits and knocks down your image to 256 gray levels. (You can still get good results with JPEGs, but exposure is
much more critical, and there's less you can do to "save" sub-optimal images in post-processing.)
2) Just as a starting point (even though you may have done this already) I'm going to suggest looking at histograms of your images to get a clue as to why they don't look as rich as you'd like. You probably already know this, but an image histogram is a graph that shows
how many pixels there are of each value, from darkest to lightest. Looking at the histogram (check your image-editing software manual if you don't know how to display it) can tell you a lot about how the tones are distributed in your photos, and how you might want to change that distribution to get the effect you want.
As an example, here's a picture of mine which I feel should have a pretty good tonal range, from the near-white of the girl's dress to the near-black of her hair, with lots of gray tones in between:
As I said, it
should have a good range of tones -- but the image I see on my monitor looks a little flat. I've put the histogram (this is a Photoshop one) in the same frame so you can see it. Looking at the histogram, you can see that most of the pixels are concentrated in the darker areas (toward the left side of the horizontal axis) and that there are relatively few pixels in the highlight areas (toward the right side of the axis.)
In other words, even though there's a wide range of tones (which you can see by the broad distribution of "peaks" across the histogram) they're shifted toward the dark end, which makes the picture look a bit muddy.
So, I'm going to do two things, both with Photoshop's Levels control: I'm going to move the white point toward the left, so that the lightest pixels are shifted more toward white; and I'm going to move the midpoint (gamma) control toward the left, so that the middle tones also are shifted toward white. Once I've done that, if I've made the blackest tones too gray, I'll move the black level control toward the right a bit, until I've got a good base of blacks.
(By doing this, I'll actually be cutting off, or
clipping, some of the lightest and darkest tones; instead of being rendered as very light or very dark gray, they'll be rendered as pure white or pure black. You might think that would be just what you
don't want to do to get a full-range picture... but again, remember this is a bit like working with slide film: sometimes you have to choose to let some highlights go white or some shadows go black, in order to get a picture that has "sparkle" and depth.)
So, here's the result after I've made this one adjustment:
I think it looks quite a bit snappier and perkier, and it also looks more like the way I remember the scene.
Dirty trick: Actually I did one more thing to the image as well -- I applied just a bit of the Smart Sharpen filter to give a bit of crispness to fine details. Psychologically, we tend to interpret more-finely-detailed scenes as snappier and more contrasty, and less-detailed ones as muddier and flatter... so sharpening details a bit can enhance the sense of tonality, especially for low-res images viewed on a computer monitor.
So, did any of that help? Maybe you should post an image or two that you think
should have come out better than they did, so we can try to help identify what's going wrong...
