Help me embrace B&W from within RAW

I love black and white photos--98% of my images end up in b&w and it is what I spend the majority of my time in post fiddling with.

I know there are so many different conversion options within PS, and I usually use either a Gradient Map or the Channel Mixer on mine. The greyscale option in ACR from what I see is identical to the Black and White Adjustment Layer in PS, so I guess in a way my question is related to both (or perhaps even the simple science of how color translates to grey). I'm confused--I'll admit it. So perhaps a straightforward question might get this thread pushed in the right direction:

If I open a full color RAW in Photoshop and add a Channel Mixer layer (with monochrome ticked of course), sliding the Red slider back and forth, or using the Red Filter preset, has a humungous impact on the image tone overall. Now.....

If I open that same image in Camera RAW and convert to greyscale, sliding the red slider all the way back and forth has little to absolutely no effect! Maybe I'll see a couple of tiny spots on a distant tree change brightness a little, but all-in-all it doesn't seem to do much.

I would like to understand this more so that I can do as much editing as I possibly can in RAW, but honestly this is just perplexing to me at the moment. I know I can just play with all the sliders for a while on each image until I'm satisfied, but I'm the type that needs to know WHY and understand how things are happening. Guide me!

-Randy

I tried experimenting with B&W conversion in Raw a while ago, but felt that it didn't add anything over using Silver Efex in Photoshop, I just export 16-bit tiffs and do the conversion in PS.

Using the ACR convert to grayscale or the black and white adjustment layer in PS is not the same tool as the channel mixer in PS. You get broader changes with less fine control using the channel mixer. When you think about how channel mixer works, it's based on additive color and just alters the entire image based on the RGB values you shift to with the slider. The B&W adjustment layer mimics subtractive color and looks at the values that are within the subset you're adjusting and then alters them as you move the slider.

Was that too clumsy of an explanation or did it make sense?

Personally I take my image as a smart object from Lightroom (or ACR) into Photoshop and use the black and white layer. I still have the ability to make adjustments to the underlying RAW file layer but I keep my black and white adjustments separate. It gives even more control as your editing, though it is extra steps that some don't like to do.

Mavgirl wrote in post #15732862
Was that too clumsy of an explanation or did it make sense?

Made no sense to me whatsoever, but that is ok. I'm just going to keep doing it in Photoshop--I have it engraved in my mind that Camera RAW does every single thing that Photoshop does, except twenty times better; thus I would be "wasting" the resource available to me.

Besides, there's nothing more satisying to me than adding a channel mixer, then a custom-made gradient map, then maybe some luminosity masks to really play around and see what I get! Thanks

RandMan wrote in post #15733003
Made no sense to me whatsoever, but that is ok. I'm just going to keep doing it in Photoshop--I have it engraved in my mind that Camera RAW does every single thing that Photoshop does, except twenty times better; thus I would be "wasting" the resource available to me.

Besides, there's nothing more satisying to me than adding a channel mixer, then a custom-made gradient map, then maybe some luminosity masks to really play around and see what I get! Thanks

Well, I'd say Photoshop does a whole lot that is out of the scope of Camera Raw/Lightroom, although part of the "learning curve" of Raw is to squeeze as much as possible out of your Raw/Raw processor! In fact, so much can be done with Raw that many people are happy enough with it that they stick to a "Raw workflow".

But, it doesn't surprise me that Photoshop cango farther in manipulating your RGB/grayscale images...

RandMan wrote in post #15733003
Made no sense to me whatsoever, but that is ok.

It made sense in my head, but when I read it I didn't know how well it would make sense to someone else.

I've been told so many times that one way is the absolute best ways and that I'm going to end up with artifacting this way or do something else that way. My feelings are that the only best way is whatever way gets you the final image you want.

OP, I think you're overplaying the importance of Raw processing, there are definitely nice things that can be achieved with it, but a 16-bit tiff holds 315% of the data a Raw file has available. Raw is one channel of 14-bit data, tiff is three channels of 15-bit data (with an empty 16th bit).

The key difference is that a Raw file tells the processing software how the image was captured, and so it can be more effective at recovering information at the extremes, and has freely adjust white balance. Everything else can be done in Photoshop just as effectively if you know how.

When I export an image from Raw for B&W, I simply make sure to make the image as flat and neutral as possible, because I get more control over the image during the conversion.

Just remember that for ACR 7.3 there is a bug where jpegs created in ACR using the greyscale option come out corrupted. The workaround is to Open while in ACR and save the image from PS.

There's a thread that was started a couple of weeks ago about this. A bunch of us tried it ourselves and sure enough the bug is there.