How to convert colour pics to black and white?

[edwinywh]

I have some issues regarding converting colour pics to black and white.
I can convert it to black and white, up the contrast etc, but seems to lose the tonality in the pic. There aren't alot of shades of grey in the pics.

Pls advise... How do I get the tonality when converting colour pics into black and white?

 

[tonyep]

Using the black and white filter in photoshop and adjusting each of the color channel to get the results you desire.

 

[Achim Reh]

Over the last years , I used 2 different basic workflows, my previous one was , creating 2 adjustment layers, then set the saturation to 0 on the upper layer , and play around with the tonal effect on the lower layer to reach the desired result. These where the early days. Now , for many years, my workflow looks like this, first , shoot in raw, adjust raw file in color mode to get a good color picture with a nice contrast and the maximum possible tonal range. Then convert with NIK Silver Efex , finetune with NIK Viveza, run thru NIK Define , and if I want to print, adjust with NIK output sharpener .

 

[Agetan]

Shoot it right and use gradient map and a bit of curve should gives you a better result then using grey scale or de-saturation.

Hope it helps.

Hart

 

[theRBK]

for ideas on colour to B/W conversion, try this thread from way back in 2006 , although since then, I have mainly moved the B/W conversion part of my workflow to the RAW processing stage in Adobe Camera RAW, which has some decent B/W capabilities in its "HSL/Grayscale" tab, and which can more or less duplicate what I could achieve in the technique I described in post #3 of that thread I pointed to at the top of this post

as always, YMMV

 

[daredevil123]

For me, I use LR4. The color channels control part and the highlights/shadows/whites/blacks sliders are more than enough to give good result. Especially the addition of the whites/blacks control in LR4, made it especially easy.

 

[ricohflex]

Nik Software Silver Efex Pro 2

 

[jenfaith]

How much is the Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 software?

 

[digitalphoto]

For me, I use LR4. The color channels control part and the highlights/shadows/whites/blacks sliders are more than enough to give good result. Especially the addition of the whites/blacks control in LR4, made it especially easy.

Agree. It has good result. How many more other effects too....

 

[ricohflex]

How much is the Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 software?

I think it is stated in the URL link article. Click on the Buy Now button on top right.

....................

There is another good software for B+W.

[h=1]Perfect B&W by onOne Software[/h]
http://www.ephotozine.com/article/onone-software-announces-perfect-b-w-21072

 

[Juha Sompinmaki]

Depends on the software you are using. But a common trait with these all is that there is no one-click solution. Each image is a bit different and need to be adjusted accordingly.