gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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MayaTlab wrote:
The points that are giving the hardest time is getting the highlights right - I believe the trick with B&W is to make them look quite soft, at least softer than mid tone and shadow transitions, which I like slightly grittier, and also trying to give the picture a rather dense look in the mid tones without sinking the shadows. I believe that i'm sort of starting to envisioning the plausibility of getting somewhere near there.
I'm not sure this will make a lot of sense as a description using words rather than pictures, but here goes.
One "problem" with digital capture is that it fails abruptly at the bright end of the luminosity scale, where film failed more gradually, with the response rolling off rather than cutting off. (There is a difference in how positive and negative film media worked here, but I'll leave that out for now.)
This issue has several parts. First, overexposing highlights can lose virtually all detail in bright areas. So, as most folks probably already know, generally be very careful to not blow out highlights. (Exceptions are possible for creative purposes and with very small specular highlights.) A take-away is that it can be better to slightly underexpose if you are especially concerned about nice looking bright tone areas.
Second, a problem with digital can be that the differences among slightly different near-white areas of the image can be very small. The result is that even when bright areas are not blown out they can seem to be flat and devoid of detail. Underexposing a bit can help here, but there are also things you can do in post to improve the quality of highlight textures. Some ideas are:
1. Use the "highlights" slider in ACR or LR to lower the brightest tones a bit. This actually sort of "flattens out" the brighter tones, separating their levels a bit. (Sometimes, oddly, you can lower the highlights slider and then increase "brightness" and end up with something that can be a bit better. You may also be able to use the "white" slider, but be cautious about this.
2. In Photoshop there is a really useful trick you can use with a curve layer. Create the layer and set the type to "multiply." The image will become very dark. You may want to change the curve a bit, but often it works "as is." If you do change it, lock down the near white tones by clicking on the diagonal line perhaps 10-15% of the way down from maximum white. Then click on the point for black and raise it. A lot. Maybe all the way. Now delete the automatic mask on this layer and replace it with a new "hide all" mask. You image will now look just like it did before you added the curve layer. In bright areas of the image, use a white paintbrush to paint in on the mask and darken the not-quite-pure-white areas to reveal a bit more detail.
3. Do try different photoshop "filters" when you do your black and white conversion. I wait until the image is in Photoshop to do the conversion, which I do by adding a black and white adjustment layer. Once you do this you will see a dialog that includes a number of basic filter types, plus the ability to manually tweak things. Depending on the coloration of your highlight areas, one of the color filters (yellow, red, green, blue) may improve the tonalities there.
Always work with your converted raw file as a smart layer in Photoshop and essentially all of your editing can be non-destructive... which is a Very Good Thing.
Good luck!
Dan
Edited on May 31, 2014 at 11:36 PM · View previous versions
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