gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Thanks for all the comments, folks. Interesting how many of you like #2—must be a lot of lovers of classic black and white landscapes around here!
g2photo: I shoot digital raw files and convert in post. Do I know ahead of time whether the photograph will end up in black and white or color? It depends. Sometimes I'm virtually certain, often I think there is a good chance, but occasionally I'm completely surprised. With both of these I realized at the time that black and white renditions would be possible. In the first case this was because the scene was very low contrast and simply lacked much color. In the second I knew that the striking clouds and deep blue sky could lend themselves to classic BW conversion, with the equivalent of using a yellow or red filter.
In short, the basics of my conversion technique are as follows. I convert the raw file in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). If I'm already sure that I'm heading toward black and white, I may make some radical (and often somewhat ugly) adjustments to the color file here. I open the file as a smart layer in Photoshop. There I simply use the black and white adjustment layer to do the basic conversion, applying a filter as necessary. After that I often do some work with curves, frequently using masks so that I can apply different curves in different areas of the image. Final touch up might use the dodge/burn tool.
I cut my photographic teeth on black and white film, learning to develop and print film many years ago. However, at this point I am no longer interested in working with film, since I can produce even more beautiful prints with modern inkjet printers and papers.
Dan
Edited on Apr 14, 2014 at 07:18 PM · View previous versions
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