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:
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The "Go-To" Instructional Photography Blog, by Michael Willems
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.
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!