Here's my take -- and admittedly I tend towards less is more in my own B&W conversions; and generally speaking I personally detest the "tone map," artificial contrast look, so YMMV... that said, I did all this off your posted color jpeg in C1 and feel the result would be a bit better off the raw file simply due to more DR. The main thing here is the relatively low red saturation differences in the rock under this particular lighting make creating a natural looking delineation a bit more difficult. Final point is your initial color jpeg image above is somewhat over-sharpened and has visible haloing, and that gets exacerbated with mono conversion and its associated color adjusting.
What I did was levels slider base to 12, top to tip of histo, mid to 3; saturation to 4, contrast to 2, brightness to 2; hdr, lifted shadows to 25; color balance, r to -25, y to +15, c to -20, b to -10; a small clarity bump; added a 1-stop vignette. I normally would have subtly dodged and burned the rock face in PS for a bit more separation, but resisted for simplicity.
Here's my take -- and admittedly I tend towards less is more in my own B&W conversions; and generally speaking I personally detest the "tone map," artificial contrast look, so YMMV... that said, I did all this off your posted color jpeg in C1 and feel the result would be a bit better off the raw file simply due to more DR. The main thing here is the relatively low red saturation differences in the rock under this particular lighting make creating a natural looking delineation a bit more difficult. Final point is your initial color jpeg image above is somewhat over-sharpened and has visible haloing, and that gets exacerbated with mono conversion and its associated color adjusting. What I did was levels slider base to 12, top to tip of histo, mid to 3; saturation to 4, contrast to 2, brightness to 2; hdr, lifted shadows to 25; color balance, r to -25, y to +15, c to -20, b to -10; a small clarity bump; added a 1-stop vignette. I normally would have subtly dodged and burned the rock face in PS for a bit more separation, but resisted for simplicity.
Here's my take -- and admittedly I tend towards less is more in my own B&W conversions; and generally speaking I personally detest the "tone map," artificial contrast look, so YMMV... that said, I did all this off your posted color jpeg in C1 and feel the result would be a bit better off the raw file simply due to more DR. The main thing here is the relatively low red saturation differences in the rock under this particular lighting make creating a natural looking delineation a bit more difficult. Final point is your initial color jpeg image above is somewhat over-sharpened and has visible haloing, and that gets exacerbated with mono conversion and its associated color adjusting.
Dec 21, 2025 at 03:58 PM
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