Converting to B/W

Back when we took B/W photos using B/W film photographers used colored filters to change the look of their final image, Red filters made a blue sky render as nearly black. Today, in a digital world, we always work in color and convert to B/W in our editing tool. There are a variety of ways to convert to B/W from simply desaturating the image, using third party conversion tools or using editor specific conversion tools. Many of the third party tools include virtual color filters so that you can recreate the look of an image captured on B/W film with the use of a colored filter.

Here is an example. This is a full color capture of my girl Mika in an autumn setting.

Autumn Mika by Tom Beach, on Flickr

This is a marvelous image to experiment with as the background is quite vivid yellow and orange.

By applying a virtual yellow filter we can lighten the background while having a minimal effect on the subject.

My favorite third party conversion tool is NIK "Silver Efex Pro". This tool includes a variety of common color filters, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red.

Autumn Mika in B/W by Tom Beach, on Flickr

This really helps Mika stand out from the background. You can achieve a similar effect with the Adobe black & white conversion tool by lightening the yellows and leaving the other sliders a mid point or dropping them a bit. Both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have the black & white conversion tool. If you use Photoshop and ever play with B/W this should be high on your list of favorite tools.

Hopefully some of you will find this of interest...