Digital BW, The Print

On 15 Sep 2004 at 3:10, jamie gannon wrote:

> 
> Are there best practices suggested for converting color images to bw using the tools 
> available in the Camera Raw UI? I have been working this way and like the immediacy of it. 
> But I wonder if it's the most appropriate method for best results? I first desaturate 
> completely, then toy with the rest of the sliders to achieve a favorable histogram and 
> visual look... I am curious about the list's thoughts about the sharpness tool as well as 
> luminance, etc. Once satisfied I open as rgb and immediately convert to grayscale and 
> preview in my softpreview setting that closely matches my printer (epson 3000, MIS FS 
> quads, QTR, Mac). Any thoughts?
> 

I find it easier to convert from raw to TIFF or PSD in the raw stage, then save it, 
then start playing with it, to give me something to get back to, in case I want to do 
something else with it later on.

B&W film for example is not linear in it's colour rendering, so a flat desaturate will 
give a different result, if you like the look of a certain B&W film, that is in current 
production, look on the manufacturers website, and see if you can find the technical 
specifications, your looking for the spectrogram or spectral sensitivity, this is a 
graph, with wavelengths and shows how sensitive it is to different wavelengths, it's 
never flat, it goes up and down, looking often like a half fallen souffle.   This does 
show though, if you like a certain films rendering, by intentionally changing the 
colours before you desaturate, you can get a more film like rendering.  You might 
like the effect of a flat desaturate.

I often will pull out a colour, such as reducing the green and blue to get the same 
effect as a red filter.  The same effect with green as the dominant colour, gives a 
pleasing effect for caucasian skin tones, almost a soft focus effect.  Then 
desaturate to remove the colour.  After that, I tend to convert back to rgb, and look 
at toning, sometimes an overall effect using colour changes, other times, I might 
apply curves, to get a different effect.  

W