Digital BW, The Print

Here's another of the many ways to convert color images to B+W - But you have to shoot 
digital in the Raw file mode.

This Russell Brown technique seems very powerful.

Go to the below link and click on "dr. brown's photo styler" It's a Quicktime movie.

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=131

Basically you open a raw image in Photoshop's Camera Raw and use the Calibration sliders 
in the Advanced tab and play with all the sliders until you like the look. You then can save 
multiple settings for future use.

> From: John Vitollo [mailto:jvlist@...]
>
> Here's another of the many ways to convert color images to B+W -
> But you have to shoot
> digital in the Raw file mode.
>
> This Russell Brown technique seems very powerful.
>
> Go to the below link and click on "dr. brown's photo styler" It's
> a Quicktime movie.
>
> http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=131
>
> Basically you open a raw image in Photoshop's Camera Raw and use
> the Calibration sliders
> in the Advanced tab and play with all the sliders until you like
> the look. You then can save
> multiple settings for future use.

I don't see that the color-related ACR sliders allows you to do anything
special that you can't do in Photoshop afterwards. And they share the
limitation of most B&W conversion techniques: you have a limited range of
"gains" that you can apply to the different channels. Most important, you
can't negate a channel, and subtract it from the mix. The latter is often
very useful, for instance in producing a dark sky: try R=150%, G=0%, B=-50%
in the Channel Mixer.

Of course, the Channel Mixer, like the cal sliders in ACR, only lets you
apply linear gains to the entire dynamic range. Tools like Curves let you
negate channels, but furthermore allow you to tweak them over a limited part
of the dynamic range. In another dimension, Hue/Sat allows you to "select" a
narrow band of color using the ribbon, and manipulate it independently of
the rest, which can often be used to darken or lighten individual components
of an image prior to conversion.

The difficulty lies in visualizing what is happening in the B&W domain while
playing with the color controls. I've found that the easiest way to deal
with this is to set up a gray proof setup (I prefer Gray Gamma 2.2), and use
Ctrl+Y to toggle it on and off as you edit the image. This gives you
complete freedom to use all the available RGB controls prior to conversion,
while viewing both the manipulated color image and the final B&W result.
When you like what you've got, you freeze it with Image->Mode->Grayscale.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...