Digital BW, The Print

Barry,

Sorry about the title; I do try to change them when necessary, but sometimes
I get carried away with the discussion and forget.

I haven't tried converting to B/W in ACR; I usually do this with channel
mixer in Photoshop, since it gives me the option of choosing my own balance
of the three channels, rather than accept a fixed proportion of R, G, & B.

I've tried interpolating in ACR, NC, and in Irfanview with Lanczos, but have
settled for good old bicubic in PS.

I find that ACR does not seem to handle the noise, aliasing, and moire
problems as well as NC. So I do the minimum necessary in NC (recovery of
highlights in NC is much better than ACR), and then upsample in PS.

Color accuracy, which many say is much better in ACR, is not tops of my
needs. I think NC produces much more accurate color than I am used to
getting from film, but since I am used to changing it to suit my tastes, I
am not seeking the ultimate in accuracy. Noise, aliasing, moire, etc is much
more important, in my view, since it is more difficult to deal with later.

But these are early days, and with more usage, I might change my workflow.

Bob Frost.

----- Original Message -----
From: <tflyfish@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 3:11 PM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] New way to convert RAW to B/W!


> Bob,
> With respect, you have already changed the content of the thread and
> not renamed it. I also have the latest version of NC, but it does
> not allow me to convert my nef (RAW) files directly to a B/W file
> with the saturate slider. If you try it it might just be surprised
> at what the plugin can do.
>
> I have a D1 and the plugin will interpolate the file to a much
> larger size. I know that I can do this with NC as well, but when I
> look at the finished results I am sure that the Adobe plugin is much
> better.