I’ve discovered that taking B & W pics isn’t a matter of going into photoshop (well, I use The Gimp) and desaturating.
I don’t want to set my camera to B & W…I want to take in color and then convert. But when I do…the pics just don’t look right. I’m not even sure what the problem is. They just don’t look like the high quality black and white pics I’m used to seeing others take. I think contrast is a major issue.
What should I be doing? Is it more on the camera end or the editing end? I did a search, and one site recommended shooting in RAW color when the conversion to black and white will happen later. But most sites focus on when to take black and white, not how.
I shoot B&W on a 35mm SLR (a Canon Rebel S from the mid-1990s), so I don’t know much about post-digital shoot editing. However, once piece of advice I can give, if you want to increase contrast, is to look into getting an orange or red filter for your lense(s). Orange filters turn washed-out, bright skies a darker grey, for example, and red filters turn them almost black. I shot some B&W shots in the extremely high-light Death Valley, for example, and even with my orange filter the results were amazing when I expected them to be “meh” from borderline overexposure.
Orange and red filters run about $25-30 new, but some better camera shops sell used ones that are still perfectly good to use for less than that. I’d start with an orange filter and work your way up to a red if you like the results.
If your image editing app has the option, do a YIQ color separation. A plain ol’ RGB to grayscale generally give a somewhat muddy and flat picture. YIQ is the separation scheme used in NTSC video - The Y image will be the brightness or luminance channel, and the I and Q images can be dumped as they are the color information.
Something else to keep in your bag of tricks - if you’re getting into the world of histogram equalizing and twiddling on color images, do a YIQ sep, then do the histogram work on the Y image, leaving the I and Q untouched. Once it looks good in gray, put the three separations back together. RGB histograms can sometimes snarf up colors and yield colors outside of the proper color space.
Adobe Lightroom has some terrific tools for tweaking B&W. Ideally, what’s coming out of your calmera shoiuld be a RAW file which can then be edited non-destructively.
There’s also a program called Lightzone which is based on Ansel Adam’s “zoning” darkroom technique - it achieves simialr results to Lightroom in a different way and I would recommend downloading the trial version. (www.lightcrafts.com/products/)
The other thing to keep in mind is subject matter and composition. When I was in photo school, I shot almost entirely in BW. Whenever I did shoot in color, I discovered that the best color photographs were worthless when printed BW: they were all, ultimately, mostly about color. But my BW pics were about texture, light, composition. I found that I observed the world around me in a completely different way when I was shooting BW. Of course, I’m just talking about myself, but I offer my experience in case it might be helpful.
Don’t worry about shooting in RAW. I happen to do so, but there’s plenty of professionals who still shoot JPEG. If you know how to expose properly, you don’t really need RAW except for extremely high contrast situations where JPEGs will destroy your highlights or completely block up your shadows, depending on how you expose. With RAW you can eke out about an extra stop and a half of highlight detail you might not be able to with JPEG. Oh, and it helps in white balancing,too.
Anyhow, back to B&W. The most flexible way of doing it is with the channel mixer. The easiest way of doing it is to convert to LAB, and using the “L” channel (lightness) as your black and white channel. Duotoning can also add a lot of depth and tone to your black and white conversion.
If I REALLY want to work a black and white picture, what I generally will do is start with a decent channel mixer grayscaling of the image. (There’s tutorials out there that will help you. Google for them, it’s a bit involved to explain and helps when you have a visual aid.) I will then make two copies of this base image. One copy I will use curves to bring out the highlight detail. Another copy I will use to bring out the shadow detail. I will then mask both layers completely and paint on the appropriate mask where I want to bring in shadow or highlight detail.
I’m disappointed that black-and-white film has gotten so expensive because the manufacturers like Kodak are getting out of film in general. Digital black-and-white just isn’t the same no matter what kind of photoshopping you do.
Interestingly, Kodak started producing B&W single use cameras, which I don’t remember being on the market 3 or 4 years ago. Makes me wonder if you could just bust into one of those and cannibalize the roll of T-Max…except that it’s still more expensive
Don’t most disposable cameras start with the film outside of the can and wind it in as you shoot?
Also, I’d bet real money that the film is actually their “CN” stock - it’s color film with just the one layer and has the usual orange color so it works in automated C-41 processors without needing any special attention.
Is there any market for old T-Max? I’ve got a couple bulk loaders in a box somewhere, but the stock is a few years out of date.
The CN film (C-41 process B&W) is actually quite amazing and anyone who likes to still shoot film should give it a shot. I loved Kodak’s T400CN–had the sensitivity of 400ISO film with the grain that looked like (to me, at any rate) of 100 TMax. It’s especially easy to push, too. I’ve pushed up to 1600ISO and the grain held up well. (semi-edit: I just looked it up, and apparently T400CN doesn’t have grain in the conventional sense. The emulsion is formed of dye clouds instead of silver–you learn something new every day).
At any rate, this is either good news or bad news to you. Some people love the characteristic grain of a film like Tri-X (400 ISO). I like T400CN for low light shooting (back when I shot film).
Another thing about B&W and computers–if you know what you’re doing, you can get a pretty damned good and well-toned image that will print beautifully from you computer. Some people even send their files to labs to be “lightprinted” on actual black and white photo paper. The file is actually exposed by light onto the paper, and the paper is developed in the conventional manner.
There’s also some really cool film stock simulators out there, the best one I’ve sampled being Alien Skin Exposure. It does a pretty good job of both color and black and white films, as well as having some of the best cross-processing simulations. The Alien Skin website has demos available online, if you’re interested.
edit: I guess T400CN has been discontinued in favor of BW400CN. The latter is also a C-41 process B&W film, but I’ve never personally used it.
