Michael Willems Daily Photography Blog

Grey

Posted in Light, Picture of the day by Michael Willems on November 1, 2009

We ought to all shoot in Black and White sometimes, I keep saying.Reducing all colours it shades of gray can make even mundane subjects interesting. It works well with brick:

MVWS8309

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  1. BKKPhotographer said, on November 1, 2009 at 06:39

    I’m guessing that you shoot in RAW then convert to B&W in Lightroom or Photoshop.

    As we discussed previously Canon cameras have a Monochrome Picture Style that attaches to RAW pictures but gets lost when you import them to a non-Canon post processing tool.

    Do you have any recommendations on good ways to convert to B&W? When I learned Photoshop many years ago our teacher advised us to use the Channel Mixer tool. Since then PS has introduced a B&W tool. And now LR has its own tools. I don’t know how comparable they are with Photoshop.

    If you’re lazy there are downloadable LR Develop Presets that emulate different B&W films. But I have not had much success with them.

    As always – so many choices. What would you advise a beginner? I think it is good to develop your own style, but it’s good to start from some proven principles.

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  2. Michael Willems said, on November 1, 2009 at 10:17

    Spot on.

    - Shoot in RAW
    - Do set your camera to B&W Picture Style – just so you can see a preview of what B&W will look like, while you are shooting
    - Convert in Lightroom

    Lightroom “Greyscale” (under HSL etc) makes it much easier than it was in Photoshop, so I definitely recommend that. Default colour mixing shows the image “the way we’d see it”, but then you can edit to taste. Much easier than PS.

    More on this later!

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