Digital BW, The Print

David:

I read and appreciated your article on Lr4. I have been using Lr4 since the beta came out though I had not used Lr earlier so I am not familiar with Lr3. I have the production release of Lr4 now. 

I agree with your observations that you can really wring out the lights and darks with the 2012 process but I have observed two situations where things come apart:

- I shot a number of seascapes in very hazy lighting. When I went to convert these to black and white I needed to significantly decrease the blue luminance to gain contrast. If you push this too far, you get a grainy effect, especially in clouds, that looks like streaking rain. I suspect this is due to the lack of red and green in the images. The cure is to back off a bit, though at the loss of contrast. 

- I also observed situations, in similar but not so blue images as noted above, where I got very grainy noise in the darks area of clouds, even though I was shooting low ISO. This 'noise' disappered when I went to 100% viewing but showed up in a print. It seems almost to be more of a display issue than an immage issue. I'm not sure exactly what is happening. 

Overall, though, a great product.