Personally - I shoot with B&W film for that B&W look, but I'm jut simple. :-)
I can't offer much on the basic conversion technique - I use the channel mixer but I also take a look at the straight Red / Green / and Blue channels to get an idea of what is there to work with. Some things just have to be done at the time of exposure. The red channel gives you a good idea of what the shot would look like if taken with a red filter. But sometimes you a red filter isn't enough to get a good black sky. Then use a red filter and a polarizer - or in the case of digital, just a polarizer and use the channel mixer. Unfortunately, I get a blank page when I try to load the link below - though I enjoyed your other galleries. But even in you infrared pano (nice shot!) the sky lightens at the far right - obviously because red wavelengths of light were coming through at that particular part of the sky. For the final prepping and toning of monochrome images, I convert the image to a tri-tone or quad-tone in photoshop, and then use the curves tool for each of the toning colors. You can work wonders with highlights and shadow using this technique. Once the image is the way you want it, convert it back to RGB to print. I did some basic adjustments and prints using this technique, but my eyes were really opened by reading Eddie Ephraums's book "Darkroom to Digital: Black & White Photography with Photoshop - The Art of Translation." This is not a 'how to' book but he includes just a few examples of how he used the duo / tri / quad tones to achieve certain effects. Ephraums is a master of the wet darkroom, and wrote on some pretty advanced darkroom techniques. So it was interesting to see how he achieved similar results through pretty aggressive use of the curves in the duo-tone mode. - MCC Toine wrote: > I'm experimenting with several techniques for B&W renderings. I tried > the channel mixer. At the moment I'm experimenting with the adobe > primer: > http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/ps_pro_primers.html > Most exposures give nice results and impressing Epson R2400 prints. > I fail to get the results I used to get with tri-x and orange or red > filters. Most difficult is creating a dramatic sky which was easy > using a red filter: > http://leende.net/galleries/trix.htm > Do I need to tweak my exposure settings, RAW conversion or use orange > and red filters. Would you like to share your B&W conversion secrets? > > Toine > -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mark Cassino Photography Kalamazoo www.markcassino.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
