Black & White?

What program do you use to convert an image to Black & White on your PC (not an app for phone or tablet). Do you use the Vibrance & Saturation tools in LR or are there other preferred options? Thank You.

I use Silver Efex Pro 2. It is part of the Nik collection by DXO.

Most often I use Photoshop's B/W adjustment layer.

Generally I use the saturation tools in LR. I often start out with one of the presets, but I rarely use them as is. I'll adjust the various effects until I get the look I want.

I use Lightroom. I apply the standard Monochrome profile and then do a bunch of edits to the Highlights, shadows, blacks, whites contrast etc.

In the past I used the Channels Mixer in Ps, which I kind of liked, but then I moved to Lr 4 and have pretty much used the Monochrome conversion option. This gives you a channel mixer that has more channels than in Ps. Even if I have worked extensively on an image in Ps I will bring it back to Lr for the monochrome conversion. I did try Silver Efex but never really got on well with it. Lots of nice sounding film presets, like FP4, not to mention colour filter choices. Trouble was those always seemed to forget the fact that you have even more options available to you in the darkroom when you are printing the photo. So I found that I really liked using Lr better. It had a whole load of channel mixer presets, which I found were good starting point for creating my own custom ones, Back then there was only one monochrome profile and the channel mixer controls. Now Lr has B&W profiles, and the channel mixer, I haven't done much with those, just use the simple one as a base to put my existing channel mixer settings on to. One thing more to remember is that changing the WB settings of the underlying image will affect the look of the B&W image you get out. One thing that can be a PITA is that if you had to use the HSL tools to get the colour correct, which you might want to do before conversion, you lose all of those adjustments in a monochrome conversion. So you might need to convert the RAW image to a 16 bit PSD or TIFF before conversion.

I did start out with black and white film, and printing my own images in a simple darkroom, back in the mid 70's as a kid with my dad. This does colour my approach to black and white, since I'm usually after something that looks like it was taken on FP4, or HP5, and printed on my favourite Ilford MG IV paper.

Alan

In addition to the excellent SilverEfex, I also use True Grain, now in its second version:

https://grubbasoftware​.com/index.html

This is a pretty impressive application for what it is intended to do and gives you a lot of control over the response of the black and white conversion, based on the controls that govern the emulated film characteristics and film stock size.

Here is a link to the film grain library examples:

https://grubbasoftware​.com/filmlibrary.html

kirk

Sometimes I use Silver Efex, mostly I use Capture One. The color sliders work on black and white, so you can tweak the brightness of different parts of the image using those. Mostly the adjustments I do are done with Clarity, Contrast, and a couple of the exposure options. I think you can do all of these things in LR too.

Some of the content at https://photography-on-the.net …hp?t=1517467&go​to=newpost might be of interest. Much of it is general, not specific to the G15 as the subject states.

These days I use LR pretty much exclusively and these techniques.

https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=dVNBOGzO29o

https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=trlXHfJRpWI

https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=QiEDE_GKcLA

https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=fM64UsSsdj0