Wonderful images ~! Superbly caught --
Thanks - I particularly appreciate that coming from an "old school" Black and White film guy. I never learned it, but I really get the craft that used to be needed to make such images.
I won't post any more images on this thread but will put up a Flickr link when I am done with this particular series. This is the first time I have tried to do a mass conversion of a series of photos into B&W and I'm enjoying the learning process and the results. In the past when I made B&W photos I was thinking B&W right from capture, mainly portraits and the odd abstract. This is the first time I have taken a series of shots intended for colour rendition and taken them over to B&W without having prior vision of what the result would be like.
As a confirmed autodidact I thought I would share some of the things I am learning as I go along:
- Some images don't work in B&W. A scene which looks very colourful to the eye, with yellow dried grass, green foliage, maybe a few animals, turns out to be all slightly different shades of orange when converted to B&W. If there is not enough luminance or focus contrast in the scene then it is basically impossible to create contrast through the colour channels in that kind of scene without making all kinds of dreadful artefacts.
- For the images which do work, they can take a lot more contrast than the colour versions, indeed they need it. I don't mean amping up the contrast slider alone, you need to be more aggressive with black point, white point, highlights and shadows, and the clarity slider.
- Using the blue channel to darken the sky works but is dangerous. Go too far and you make halos. Best to be used in conjunction with a grad filter.
- Not only do all human racial groups have the same skin colour (basically orange, just different luminosities and saturations) but it turns out that we share the same skin colour with Monkeys and Elephants. I find that very cool.
- Split toning. Oh yes. I personally like Highlights 20, Shadows 240, with saturation set around 10 on both and the balance seasoned to taste but veering towards warm. Subtle and almost imperceptible, but it lifts an image.
- Grain. Wow. Deals with noise in the shadows by making the whole image a bit noisy, and gives the image a more organic look. Take out colour and skin (especially young people) can look too smooth and "digital". Same goes for open sky. Add a sprinkle of grain and everything looks just right. Personally I like to set it at 20 and leave the other sliders on default. No doubt I shall find other settings which work well on specific images.
- Vignettes. I always apply lens corrections as my first PP adjustment, which removes any vignetting. But every single image I have worked on in this series needs a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) vignette, so I have to put it back in the Effects panes, which I find kind of funny.
Anyway, that's my take on B&W post processing so far. As you can tell I'm enjoying the journey.
Regards
Ed
ps A note of thanks to Jeremy (Kikashi). He made a comment on some other thread (not mine) about a B&W picture of a Leopard, along the lines of why bother to render such a beautifully coloured animal in B&W. And so I thought to myself why not, lets have a go and see what happens.
