Help with B&W conversion using Lightroom?

I took a bunch of headshots for an actor who needs B&W 8x10s for auditions. I've never done B&W before - I'm just a color kinda guy so I'm a little clueless in this area.

Here is the color version (converted from RAW), followed by what Lightroom's "Grayscale Conversion" preset gave me. I notice it dropped the color temp, used some highlight recovery (though there was nothing blown in the original) and raised the black point, cranked up the contrast but made the tone curve flat. It also used a variety of settings in the Grayscale mix. None of these settings are identical in all shots, but similar.

I'm not thrilled with this conversion, but a) I really don't know why, and b) I wouldn't have a clue how to improve it.

If anyone can advise how to better use Lightroom for B&W portraits, I would greatly appreciate it.

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Hi Curtis N,

Have you tried the presets available from http://www.ononesoftwa​re.com/photopresets-wow.php
these are free and will make it easy to see quickly a few different edits in B&W. I was going to post a quick example however I didn't see that image editing was OK so have left it alone.
Alternaively you could play with the grey scale mix in Lightroom. I hope this has been of some help.

Nicholas

Curtis,

Does Lightroom have a channel mixer? If so, try setting it to monochrome with red at 60%, green at 40% and blue at 0%. You may want to adjust the green up or down a bit to suit the skin tones (remember B&W film with green filters?), but make sure you end up wiht 100%.

I've been using a B&W conversion called Black & White - Old 1 that I downloaded from www.lightroompresets.c​om that I really like. It increases exposure, so if your images are already dark they'll get too light. For that reason I made another version of it that doesn't affect the exposure and saved it as another preset. I think all "grayscale" conversions suck.

Moree & CDI, thanks for the links, I'll take a look. Sorry I forgot to turn on my image editing OK option. That's been fixed.

Tony, here's what Lightroom's channel mixer looks like The sliders go from -100 to +100. These are the settings used by the Greyscale conversion preset on the image above. I'll do some playing with it.

Thanks all for the tips!

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Curtis,

I think that the LR default conversion is meant to be fairly benign. But to get decent B&W shots you will need to have aplay with the sliders..... try pushing the green and/or red towards the extremes and see.... imagine the effect like B&W filters on a film camera...

Heres my quick attempt done in lightroom.

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Curtis, check out these presets for B&W as well:

http://inside-lightroom.com/bw.php

I tried my hand at some of my own but found that I can usually get something I like better from these presets.

flashtoby wrote in post #3240464
Heres my quick attempt done in lightroom.

Thanks.

I like it, at least I like it more than my own version, but it does me no good unless you tell me what you did.

EOSAddict wrote in post #3240429
imagine the effect like B&W filters on a film camera...

I can imagine it, I just don't know how to produce it.

If I had ever used B&W filters with film, I might have some idea what they did.

I'll play with the sliders some.