Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I have a colour photo which contains a lot of dark colours and some beige and white in between and now I want to convert it into a high contrast black and white using Lightroom or maybe Photoshop. In order to do this, do I just pull the saturation slide all the way to the left and then the contrast slide all the way to the right or is there a preset that will automatically convert it for me??? Thanks so much for helping.

Which version of Photoshop are you using?

Both or either or. There are a pile of presets that are pretty easy to find on the net, I have about a dozen now that offer various flavours of B&W which I just poke through until I find one with the look I want.

Use the b&w presets if you have it and tweak it to your liking. You lose subtleties in a hue and saturation step to convert it.

Just append this to my earlier post .

The presets I have collected allow you to take an image from very muted and flat to very punchy with just about every step in between.

no, if you just pull the saturation bars to zero, the photo will look flat. PS has a b&w adjustment option which you can adjust the color channels separately to improve the look of the b&w.

Also, some people use channel mixer to do this.

+1

What I do is slide each colour channel to zero and then tweak from there depending on the photo. And then usually a levels/curves adjustment. Can be done in either LR or PS.

Ok, thanks a lot, guys. I'm working on it right now but, hell, I can't quite see what I'm doing here because I'm sitting right by a big window and there's all kinds of reflections. I better wait until later tonight

In lightroom leave the saturation slider at zero, go to B&W section and play around with each hue, but you must be in B&W that way you can click the little icon with sorta arrows and circle to point and drag on the different colours in your photo to make them the luminosity you want. Punch can also be added by the clarity slider in basic panel, as well as the tone curve.

Has anyone tried the Nik Software Silver Efex plugins? Scott Bourne and Scott Kelby both claim they're the best for B&W.

I have, they are neat and easy, preset based, but I like my own precise control over each hue

Thanks, good to know.

They're all part of the pixel 'mafia' - bunch of Adobe related people that hype each others' products even when there's free stuff floating around that's just as good.

Download free presets available everywhere - google 'free lightroom presets' and ignore anything Kelby and his gang try to sell you.

Heh "pixel mafia." No matter who promotes it I "buy" nothing. But, thank you for the tip nonetheless. I haven't tried the Nik stuff yet as I'm relatively happy with the other presets I have found. I've got around 10 B&W ones now that I go through until one does mostly what I'm looking for then I poke at it a bit with my own tweaking.

I really love Nik Software stuff for Photoshop use, all they do is get you there faster, much much faster. Very well developed tools. But LR kicks ass

something is still no right with my b&w after i tweaked and tweaked and played around with the channel mixer and etc. ok, i think i better stick with colour instead of b&w.

see what's wrong with it and fix it. The flow of LR is to go back to other panels and do adjustments as you go, don't get stuck on just one. Sometimes just desaturation with saturation slider at 0 works better, I've found this makes for slightly brighter tones, very good for portraits

Give Silver Efex Pro a try, it's a lot more capable than anything else I've seen. The Nik plugins add a fair bit of capability over stock Photoshop, but the real win is in their U-Point selection system which beats building layer masks any day.

I'm using Silver Efex Pro now for all my B&W conversions as well as for toning of B&W scans. The combination of local and global contrast, brightness and Structure (Local contrast enhancement) controls, plus a full set of colour filters, plus fully adjustable film profiles, plus single and split toning, plus vignetting control plus edge burning plus a strong set of presets (both custom and stock) is a major win.

Can you do everything it does without it? yes. But it will take you a lot longer and be less repeatable. Will downloadable presets do what Silver Efex Pro does? Nope. They can do toning and the basic conversion but not the rest, most of which would require layer masking.

I am with you 99% apart from "Will downloadable presets do what Silver Efex Pro does? Nope. " - in LR3 it can in fact be done! But will surely take longer

It's the "longer" part I want to remove. The less time I can spend in post on each photo the better.

Nope, Presets, even in LR3, lack the selection capabilities that Silver Efex Pro has. You pretty much need Layer Masks to duplicate the U-Point selection capabilities of SEP.

Get the Demo for SEP then. Try it out.

mawz you're forgetting the brush

Which is a separate tool, not a preset. And while a great tool it's not as capable as U-Point or a layer mask.

You may be right.
or maybe you don't have the best presets.

With LR/ACR presets I get pretty darn close to where I want. There's free presets for almost any type of b&w conversion...not enough space to list them all.
The local adjustment tool serves my purpose.
Personally if I am doing a shot in b&w conversion I want to spend time on it...therapy perhaps?
But thanks for the info on the Nik software - one day I may try it.
But even IF it is as good as it is claimed I may not bother with it. I kinda like the creative process of tinkering in B&W. One button canned conversion would remove that fun.

But if I were a pro converting a few hundred wedding shots...maybe that would justify the expense.

Just curious, does the Nik plug-in work in photoshop & 16 bit files or is it a LR/ACR plug-in?