B&W Conversion: LR3 vs. PS CS5(B&W Adjustment) vs Silver Efex Pro

[simdoc1]

While I haven't made a scientific comparison of these methods (and I'm not sure I would know how to do so), it always seems to me that when I do a B&W conversion in Lightroom that I get more noise (or grain) than when I use either a B&W Adjustment Layer or Silver Efex Pro inside of Photoshop. This seems like the opposite of what I would expect since, in Lightroom, I am working with the RAW file which I thought would give me the most latitude. I've looked at a number of tutorials here on LuLa, on Lynda, and elsewhere but I don't seem to have learned the magic touch. I'd love to hear whether others have a similar experience or whether this is simply a misperception or a misapplication of the software on my part. Thanks, and Happy New Year!

Jeff

[Mark D Segal]

While I haven't made a scientific comparison of these methods (and I'm not sure I would know how to do so), it always seems to me that when I do a B&W conversion in Lightroom that I get more noise (or grain) than when I use either a B&W Adjustment Layer or Silver Efex Pro inside of Photoshop. This seems like the opposite of what I would expect since, in Lightroom, I am working with the RAW file which I thought would give me the most latitude. I've looked at a number of tutorials here on LuLa, on Lynda, and elsewhere but I don't seem to have learned the magic touch. I'd love to hear whether others have a similar experience or whether this is simply a misperception or a misapplication of the software on my part. Thanks, and Happy New Year!

Jeff

Digital files from digital cameras don't have grain. They do contain noise. What does the noise look like in the original you started with? What does the noise pattern look like in both the original and the B&W conversion? Can you post some examples we can look at? Is it possible that other luminosity settings you've made before the conversion accentuate the appearance of noise? Normal practice is to make the image look as good as you can before conversion, then do the conversion and make any further adjustments indicated by the appearance of the B&W version. I've used all these methods - LR, PSCS5, SEFEX Pro and not seen such issues.

[simdoc1]

I am pretty careful to get the image in good shape before I do the conversion. I am shooting with a Nikon D3s (so only 12 megapixels) and this is mostly a problem in landscapes. The base noise in the image seems pretty minimal and regular and the noise I see - especially when the blues are pushed in LR to create a darker sky - have a worm-like appearance. I tried to create a comparison that I could post but the methodologies are so different (8 hues in LR/6 colors in PS/no equivalent in SEP) that the images are never identical and I am always comparing apples to oranges to roast beef. This image at least demonstrates what I am seeing. It is a crop of a larger image which is the default LR3 conversion (no other adjustments) with the blue slider pushed from +17 to -54.

If others aren't having this problem, it is probably me overdoing it but I thought I would ask.

Jeff

[Mark D Segal]

I don't think what you are showing is the result of the B&W conversion. The conversion perhaps is making something already there look more obvious, but from that to say what it is I don't know. It looks very much to me like accentuated luminance noise that could be the result of sharpening the sky, as well as much increased contrast. That said, normally one would expect such effects to be more obvious going from a darker to a lighter sky, so I'm not confident I've nailed what's going on here. What ISO was the in-camera exposure?

[digitaldog]

You may want to check out this video on the various possibilities for conversions:http://mulita.com/blog/?p=1244

[picturesfromthelow]

Jeff,
I also make extensive use of the grayscale mix panel when converting an image in B&W in Lightroom and in my experience I find that the blue slider quite often causes this type of noise issue in the blue regions of the image. I found that I can push the other sliders to much more extremes, the blue one is definitely the most problematic. I also noted that the same panel in Silver Efex behaves a little bit differently: not only the sliders address different tonal ranges compared to their counterparts in Lightroom but I also find that the blue slider in Silver Efex is less prone to show the noise that you find when using its counterpart in Lighrroom's grayscale mix.
Since I currently mainly use Lightroom my solution, when I want to darken the sky, is to make gentle use of the blue slider then use graduated filters or local adjustment brush with negative exposure values.

Saluti,
Luca

[John MacLean]

I recently got the entire NIK suite for LR3, mainly because I wanted SEP2. I wasn't pleased with the general look of the LR3 conversions, nor did I want a time consuming PS workflow.

I also find the blue channel noise to be problematic in both LR3 and SEP2. I started doing SEP2 conversions by taking a final adjusted color DNG and opening from that. But I found that it was quite drastic once I started applying the adjustments in SEP2. So now I create a Virtual Copy, turn off all tonal and sharpening, and leave only Lens Corrections/Crop/Rotation on. I open that into SEP2 and work from there. It seems to give me more headroom for my settings, but I still see issues with blue noise in skies. I'm going to try experimenting with Dfine 2.0 and see if that can help the post SEP2 TIFs.

Here's what I've come up with so far: Color to B&W album.

[leuallen]

I have found that if I darken/saturate the blues too much in LR and get a grainy effect that I can sometimes mitigate the problem by revisiting the Details panel and crank up the color noise reduction. Sometimes I have seen spectacular results, other times not so.

Larry

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

My working hypothesis is that it is not the noise that is visible, but the LR less-than-precise preview. Also, the apparent "noise" looks much better when viewed at 100%.

It is worth noting that the blue channel is the noisiest of the three.

[John R Smith]

As has been noted elsewhere, the blue channel seems to be the noisiest not because it is inherently so, but because in normal photography it tends to be the channel with least exposure (have a look at your colour histograms). So when you darken it in a B/W conversion, you are also darkening the noise, which makes it more prominent - especially in the skies. The answer to this is simple - just don't do it unless you really need to use a red filter effect for B/W. Use, as recommended above, the grad filter or a local adjustment brush to darken your skies instead.

John

[simdoc1]

Thanks for the help (and for the confirmation that at least I am not crazy). I agree  that some of it is the way LR displays the image but it also seems as though I am simply pushing the blue channel to hard.

Jeff

[bretedge]

I've used LR 3 to convert images to black and white and while it works, I don't find the results to be as good as those I get from Nik SEP 2.  The controls in SEP 2 are incredibly powerful yet easy to master.  One word of caution: adding too much structure can result in unwanted noise in the sky.  It's easy to correct by selecting the sky and reducing the structure.

I wrote a tutorial on my blog detailing how I use Nik SEP 2 and Color Efex Pro 3 to produce stunning black and white images: Nik Software Silver Efex Pro 2 Tutorial.  Some of you may find it useful, especially if you're relatively new to monochrome conversions.

[Alan Klein]

Well, we're all in agreement that blue doesn't darken well in LR3 without noise using the blue slider in B/W.  What I've been trying to do is saturate using the blue slider while it;'s still in color mode first.  Then switch to B/W.  Problem is, all color adjustments go away once you switch the mode to B/W so you start from the original.

Do you also get the same results?

SO I tried saturating the color mode first in LR3.  Then saving the file as a blue saturated sky in TIFF.  Then opening it up and working on the B/W mode in LR3 from there.  I seem to be getting something different, but I''m not sure what.  Have any of you tried this or want to try it to see and report your results?  I haven't tried adjusting luminance and etc first but maybe some of these others might help.