B&W Photography

[Rachael Alice]

What are the things which need to be kept in mind which capturing B&W Photography?

[Birdsnapper]

A good tonal range from black to white (without the highlights being blown).

[cuilin]

Originally Posted by Birdsnapper

A good tonal range from black to white (without the highlights being blown).

that pretty much covers it.
what's everyone's favorite method to convert to b&w?
i use lightroom. instead of hitting the b&w button i move the saturation slider all the way down to 0. then i can adjust the white balance and tint sliders to get different tones.

[Birdsnapper]

I generally shoot in RAW and convert and adjust with Affinity Photo - it has a good real-time, full screen converter. I sometimes convert to JPG and use Silver Efex Pro 2 (it's a free download as part of the Nik collection).

[Gidders]

Originally Posted by cuilin

what's everyone's favorite method to convert to b&w?

I mostly use Lightroom as well. I have a number of presets that I've created from studying the "film" presets in Nik Silver Efex to simulate range of B&W films inc Pan F, APX Pro, Ilford Delta, Kodak Tmax (probably my favourite for street photography) FP4, Plus X, HP5, Tri X plus a few of my own cooking which I call Landscape, Portrait & Portrait Contrasty

Originally Posted by Birdsnapper

I sometimes convert to JPG and use Silver Effects Pro (it's a free download as part of the Nik collection).

I still use Silver Efex (usually from Photoshop) but I think you can go straight from RAW without having to create a jpg - you certainly can from Lightroom & it returns a tiff file

[cuilin]

nik is a great plugin for photoshop. i like their color efex filters, haven't used silver efex much because i convert my photos to b&w in lightroom.

[Rachael Alice]

Originally Posted by cuilin

that pretty much covers it.
what's everyone's favorite method to convert to b&w?
i use lightroom. instead of hitting the b&w button i move the saturation slider all the way down to 0. then i can adjust the white balance and tint sliders to get different tones.

I found this convincing.

[Arthur53]

I tend to hit the B&W button in Lightroom and use the sliders. Sometimes use the B&W gradient in Elements.

[Rachael Alice]

Originally Posted by Arthur53

I tend to hit the B&W button in Lightroom and use the sliders. Sometimes use the B&W gradient in Elements.

Thanks for your suggestion

[blackadder]

My editor of choice is DXO Labs, it is vastly improved since it became Lab and gives good mono as well as colour images.
Charles.