Just another option to throw into the mix...

I use LR to perform the B&W conversion as this has more control (channel mixing etc) than DPP. I also looked at Appeture which had similar features but I just didn't get on with it as well.

I read a good book - Digital Black & White Photography by John Beardsworth. He suggested shooting in color and then converting to B&W to give more control. I've never really been happy with B&W from the camera but I can get some reasonable result after some basic tweaking in LR.

Lars, are the plugins for tiffs then and not RAW files?

Shane Canfield wrote:
Lars, are the plugins for tiffs then and not RAW files?

Shane, yes I convert the raw to a tiff in PS before I open it in the plugin

Very good, thanks for the info and SUPER examples! What is your favorite plugin of the many out there...if you care to share that.

I really like the Alien Skin Exposure 2. It's both for B&W and color. But I mostly use it for B&W. A great plugin but it cost about $ 230 so it's very expensive. Fred's is very good also.

Shane Canfield wrote:
Dan, if you change a RAW file to monochrome, and then convert to tiff, and work on that...how does that reduce your options? As far as I know, you can still do all the things you say, but the original conversion was done in a fully lossless environment whereas everything you do after the conversion losses some pixels, even in tiff...albeit far less than a compressed image. Maybe I'm missing something...which is most likely the case, I'm not a photoshop guy.

Once you convert it to monochrome, the filtering effects will NOT work at all. Filtering - at least with color filters - works by controlling how much the various color channels contribute brightness to the final BW image.

Best bet in my view is to use the very powerful BW conversion layer in PS CS3. It has default "standard filters" in a popup menu and you can manually get any other result you want.

Rather than writing that I would apply "filters" to the image in PS, I should have couched the description in terms of this type of layer. Here is one example of how you might use this:

Let's say you have an image that includes a sky with dramatic clouds and a lot of green foliage below.

1. Make a selection that includes the sky and create a BW conversion layer. Use the red filter to convert this area to BW and darken the blue tones in the BW result.

2. Reselect and then invert the selection to include everything BUT the sky. Now apply the green filter to make the green foliage lighter.

(Note that I'm not recommending this as an aesthetic approach - just as an example of what you can do.)

So, my basic workflow goes more or less like this:

1. Shoot in RAW

2. Convert in ACR to and import color 16-bit to PS.

3. Use the BW layer in CS3 to convert to BW.

4. Adjust curves, etc as necessary and dodge/burn.

Dan

Excellent Lars and Dan!

Dan, great info...makes sense that if the color info is stripped out on the conversion, no more color PS filters!@!

Going to have to some more experimenting now. I do like the DPP effect, but it is very limited compared to what you describe...oh boy, it ain't just photography anymore, gotta be a computer wiz too.

Wow, awesome mix of responses!

I would have expected that shooting in RAW and converting would retain more color information for the BW conversion. But an excellent point was brought up regarding getting a BW preview on your LCD for composition.

Hopefully the next few SLR bodies will come with a dedicated Monochrome button, so you can easily switch between the two!

Thanks for the comments and advice!