Help with B&W conversion

[mswebb]

Two black and whites from a recent road trip (cottage and back). Any suggestions for getting a better black and white conversion.

[Misty-Bug]

I like your second shot. Maybe the bottom right cropped a bit so you don't see the road?

the top one my eye darts. The trees are cut off at the top and the background is over exposed. also the tree coming out of the right distracted me as well. I almost wonder if in that picture the B&W doesn't do it justice? Have you tried playing with your levels on them? B&W can be tough some times.

you can ignore me though as I am only a beginner myself.

[Misty-Bug]

I don't think I made it any better but I was trying to see what would happen if you moved the contrast a bit and brightened the shot a bit. Tough one. Looks like it was a bright day. If you didn't want me to edit just let me know and I will delete.

[mswebb]

Edit away.

I had tried bumping for more contrast but was getting the halo around the tree tops.

Anyone have a good starting point workflow for black and white. I use Photoshop CS2 if that makes it easier. I liked the processing in Lightroom 2 but haven't used it since the beta expired.

[PowerPix]

These are some tough photos to do anything with. Either way I tried to work on one of them. I just played with curves to get something a little brighter and more contrast but still keep most of the detail of the trees.

[inkista]

Can you post the original, so we've got some color data to work with? And how did you do the B&W conversion? Desaturate? Channel mixer? LAB? And were you doing HDR processing or something else to get those halos?

For my tastes, the tonal range is too compressed and too dark. With B&W, for my tastes, you typically want to try and use the full tonal range, and get as much detail and sharpness as you can without blowing out highlights or losing detail in shadows.

[mswebb]

Here is the original.

The colour shows up better than the black and white but I was trying to use the conversion to get a bit more dramatic with a rather bland subject. I know you can't make a bad photo better with Photoshop but you can help it along. This is an old tree along the route to the cottage. It's a bit of a landmark for us but won't be around much longer. Hence the picture.

[inkista]

Ok, here's my try:



I did a lot of little things: switched the color profile to sRGB, cropped a little, cloned out the power lines, added some USM sharpening.

But the main two things I did for the conversion were to use a Channel Mixer adjustment layer to do the B&W conversion, pushing mainly the red (to lighten up the photo overall) and the blue (to lighten up the sky).



And then adding a Curves adjustment layer to bring the overall exposure up.

[mswebb]

Thanks for the process tips. Those techniques definitely yield better results.

I will try to incorporate this process with my next attempts.

Nice job.

[mswebb]

Using the conversion method outlined above, I re-processed the first image. Cropped and cloned to clear out some of the foreground branches; added some blur to fix some focus near the center.



Thanks again for the pointers.